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Nasio Juan-David - The Book of Love and Pain
Nasio Juan-David - The Book of Love and Pain
The
Book
of
Love
and
Pain
Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan
Translated by David Pettigrew
and Franois Raffoul
SUNY series in
Psychoanalysis and Culture
Henry Sussman, editor
THE BOOK OF
LOVE AND PAIN
Thinking at the Limit
with Freud and Lacan
JUAN-DAVID NASIO
Translated by
David Pettigrew and Franois Raffoul
Published by
Contents
Translators Acknowledgments
vii
Translators Introduction
Threshold
13
19
Archipelago of Pain
41
49
Lessons on Pain
77
123
131
Notes
137
Index
141
Translators Acknowledgments
The translators would like to thank James Peltz, Editor of SUNY Press for his
support of this project from the earliest stages. Dr. J. Philip Smith, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dr. DonnaJean Fredeen, Dean of the School
of Arts and Sciences at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) provided crucial support that sustained our work. Additional support was
received in the form of a Connecticut State University Research Grant. We
are also grateful to Joseph Solodow, Professor of Foreign Language, and
Camille Serchuk, Associate Professor of Art at SCSU, for their assistance
with a number of translation questions while the work was in progress. Important assistance in the completion of the manuscript came from Andrea
Conque, and Troy Mellon, at Louisiana State University as well as James
Ryan in Berkeley, California. Many thanks as well to Meri Aserri. We are particularly grateful for the support of the French Ministry of Culture-Centre
National de Livre. Finally, we thank Dr. J.-D. Nasio for his support and advice
throughout the translation of the book.
vii
Translators Introduction
The issue for the psychoanalyst remains that of welcoming this pain,
and attempting despite everything to give a meaning to what has none. To be
eased, pain must be taken as an expression of something else, made into a
symbol. This is for Nasio the role of the psychoanalyst: [t]o attribute a symbolic value to a pain that is in itself pure real, brutal emotion, hostile and foreign (LP, 13). As we can see, this text engages the limit-character of human
suffering and therefore the limits of the ability of the analyst to take on the
pain and undergo the process required to alleviate it.
Nonetheless, Nasio would apply and concentrate psychoanalytical theory and practice to provide an access to pain. Hence, he attempts to characterize psychical pain, in its most general and preliminary sense, as a sudden
and unexpected separation from an object with which we have had an intimate bond. The bond has been so intricate that it has constituted our very
selves. Therefore the loss of the object threatens the self, disrupts the rhythm
of life and requires the painful work of mourning and self-reconstruction.
Nasio undertakes a wide-ranging treatmentperhaps the first of its kindof
those subtle and numerous connections, the diverse forms of separation that
are all manifestations of psychical pain.
Nasio shows that psychical pain is intertwined with love, insofar as pain is
pain of separation. Pain is always pain of love, the affect that results from the brutal rupture of a bond that connects me to the person or to the thing that I love (LP,
19). He writes, All these kinds of pain are in different degrees pain of brutal
amputation from a love-object, one with which we were so intensely and permanently bonded that it regulated the harmony of our psyche. There is pain only
against the background of love (LP, 14, our emphasis). As a result of this brutal
rupture, a series of other pains follow, and the author addresses each of them in
the main sections of the text, including: the pain of mourning, the pain of reac-
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
tion, the pain of jouissance, unconscious pain, pain as an object of the drive,
pain as a form of sexuality, pain as a sadomasochistic fantasy, pain and the
scream, and the pain of silence. As it describes all these pains, The Book of Love
and Pain constitutes a model of a phenomenological treatment of pain.
In addition, Nasio addresses the psychical implications of corporeal pain,
exploring in a bold manner the psychical role in the activation of corporeal
pain. The author discusses, in this respect, the three moments of corporeal pain:
the wound, the trauma, and the reaction, treating of the rapid transformation of
the pain of the injury to a mental representation of that very injury. Nasio
emphasizes that the memory of this representation of corporeal pain is engraved
in the depths of the unconscious, an unconscious memory that is destined to
return, transfigured as a psychosomatic lesion. It is precisely this transformation
from the corporeal to the psychical that Nasio elaborates, noting that the
unconscious pain will return and the subject will experience an inexplicable
pain that is without discernable organic cause. He or she will suffer without
knowing that the present pain is the active memory of a past pain (LP, 57).
Dr. Nasios careful approach to psychical and corporeal pain is informed,
to be sure, by the legacy of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In
the course of the text, he makes use, for example, of Freuds neurological conception of pain from The Project for a Scientific Psychology and undertakes
a reelaboration of the Lacanian categories of the symbolic, imaginary, and the
real in relation to pain. Yet The Book of Love and Pain is intended to be neither a strictly Freudian nor a Lacanian treatise. In fact, as Nasio remarks, analytic literature is extremely limited on this topic. Freud and Lacan themselves
only rarely treated the theme of pain and never devoted an exclusive study to
it (LP, 14). This book, then, is to a large extent an innovative and original
grappling with pain at its very limit. The text never simply proposes the simple or formulaic healing of such pain. Even though psychoanalysis offers the
promise of healing, it remains at a threshold that can only be approached, a
path that can only be taken, that cannot be predicted, or otherwise preordained. Accordingly, Nasio does not shy away from those aspects of pain that
resist reason, that lead psychoanalytic theory into paradox, and even aporia.
As Nasio identifies pain as the phenomenon of the limit (as the experience
of the threshold, as the imprecise limit between the body and the psyche,
as limit between the ego and the other, as limit between the harmony and
disharmony of the psyche, etc.), his encounter with pain uncovers a series of
paradoxes that leave theoretical reason suspended between seemingly incompatible alternatives. Nasio is struck, in general terms, by the insurmountable paradox of a love that both constitutes us and yet renders us vulnerable. He writes that while being a constitutive condition of human nature,
love remains the incontrovertible premise of our suffering (LP, 20).
Under the general context of this constitutive paradox of love, numerous other paradoxes are encountered in analytic experience. Two examples
bear mention here.
For example, while stating at the outset that the prototypical pain is the
pain of separation, Nasio asserts that such a pain is made more intense, as it
were, by a second pain, which consists in reinvesting the image of the lost
loved one. The ego, in this first paradoxical situation, continues to love the
one who has been lost more than ever before, magnifying the image of the
loved one beyond all reasonable proportions, thus inducing an overexcitation
and an exhaustion of the ego: [T]his effigy draws all the energy of the ego
and submits it to a violent aspiration that leaves it exhausted and incapable
of interest in the external world (LP, 21). To be clear, the paradox is that the
pain does not lie in the loss but in the fact that we love the one who has been
lost as never before. Here is what I take to be significant. Pain is not due to a
detachment but to an overinvestment (LP, 119). It is an overinvestment of an
object within, because it is no longer without. This would be Nasios original contribution, that the pain of mourning is not the pain of separation but
the pain of bond, that the pain is not that of an absence, but of an excessive
presence. Therefore, pain is the affect that manifests the exhaustion of an ego
completely occupied with desperately cherishing the image of the loved one who has
been lost (LP, 22). The true cause of this pain is not the loss of the loved person, but the all-consuming maintenance of his or her image, indeed, our complex fantasy of the person. One needs to recognize in psychical pain a twofold
dimension, in the sense that the ego reacts to the trauma of the loss in two
ways: on the one hand, there is what Nasio calls a disinvestment, an emptying out of energy brought about by the loss of the other; on the other hand,
there is an overinvestment, a sort of polarization of psychic energy on a single psychical image, that precisely of the lost other. Both events, the sudden
emptying out and the extreme concentration, are what is painful. The work
required is to re-harmonize the unbalance, or split, between the two phenomena. As Nasio explains, Mourning is nothing other than a very slow
redistribution of the psychical energy which was, until then, concentrated on
a single dominant representation which was foreign to the ego (LP, 23).
A second paradox presented by Nasios work is found in the extent to
which the loved one is desired not because he or she allows our love to flour-
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
ish but because of the way the fantasy of the loved one guarantees a limit to
my love. For Nasio, while the fantasy of the loved one is carried by the force
of desire, it nonetheless functions to stem and subdue that very desire.
Nasio explains that fantasy is protective because it shields us from the danger of an unlimited turbulence of desire or its equivalent, the chaos of the
drive (LP, 29). In this way, the fantasy of the loved one contributes in a protective manner to the homeostasis of the unconscious system, a principle that
was central to Freuds corpus from his earliest to his latest writings.
Further, Nasio specifies that his conception of such a protective status of
the fantasy of the loved one is a reinterpretation of both the Freudian concept of repression and the Lacanian concept of the signifier of the Name-ofthe-Father. In the first case, repression would be protective in that it prevents
the overflow of the libidinal drive; in the second case, the signifier of the
Name-of-the-Father would ensure the consistency or the rhythm of the system of signifiers. For Nasio, in the end, the fantasy of the loved one protects
me from turmoil by limiting my jouissance. He writes:
He or she protects me and leaves me unsatisfied. The symbolic loved one is,
in the end, a figure of repression and the most exemplary figure of the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father. (LP, 33)
These paradoxes of pain are precisely the challenge facing the analyst and
the patient in the analytic relation. As Nasios text undertakes a wide-ranging
taxonomy of the pain of separation, it also unveils the contradictions of pain and
the obstacles to its treatment. Indeed, one has the impression that the only path
the analyst must take is that of the paradox, or that the only step is one where
there is no path, with no way out. In this respect, Dr. Nasio introduces the following remarkable image: With his patient consumed by pain, the analyst acts
like a dancer who, before the stumbling of his partner, keeps her from falling
and, without losing a beat, helps the couple regain their rhythm (LP, 13).
limit are found throughout the text, particularly in his suggestion that one
should add pain to the list of the objects of the drive, and conceive of its detachment from the body as a separation brought about by the phallic signifier
(LP, 81). Through this logic, Nasio considers the conditions that allow us to
think and verify that pain is phallic, that is, that pain is an object that can be
consumed and that satisfies an essentially sexual desire. He elaborates this
insight in the lesson on sadomasochistic pain, where pain becomes the object
of the sadomasochistic drive.
Two other examples of his innovative thoughtin particular in relation
to Lacanbear mention here: local foreclosure and the position of semblance
(le semblant).
Local foreclosure
With local foreclosure the intensity of the love for the lost loved one leads to
a hallucination. The mourner rebels against the reality of the lack and refuses
to accept the definitive death of the loved one. Nasio asserts that this denial
borders on madness but tempers pain. The mourner believes he or she can
bring the deceased back to life. For the mourner, then, the hallucination conjures a new reality:
Through these hallucinations the mourner experiences the return of the
deceased with an unshakable certainty and transforms his or her sorrow with
a delirious conviction. We understand that the supremacy of love over
knowledge leads to the creation of a new realitya hallucinated reality
where the lost one returns in the form of a phantom. (LP, 24)
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION
With such a remark, Dr. Nasio remains, in our view, faithful to the intention
that gives particular value to his writings, that of fashioning a synthesis
between theory and practice in order always and only to take on the suffering of his patients. In so doing, Nasio also reveals pain as that limit with
which human beings are confronted and on the basis of which existence itself
unfolds in its paradoxical movement.
DAVID PETTIGREW AND FRANOIS RAFFOUL
Paris, January 2002
Clmence3 was thirty-eight years old. She suffered from infertility and was
struggling to become pregnant. I saw her in analysis for three years. My memory is still fresh of the day when she told me that she was finally pregnant.
She exclaimed, We have succeeded! I had the feeling that I was sharing the
joy with a group of close friends who had worked together with Clmence so
that she could become pregnant. I also thought of her husband who was so
involved, as well as her gynecologista fertility specialist.
During the months that followed, our psychoanalytic sessions were
devoted, for the most part, to living through and speaking about the intense
period when a woman adjusts to becoming a mother. The day of delivery
arrived and Clmence brought a beautiful baby into the world. That very day,
she telephoned me filled with joy, to announce the birth of a son named Laurent. I was very happy and I congratulated her warmly. Three days later I was
surprised to receive a second telephone call of an entirely different nature. In
a nearly inaudible voice, she told me: I have lost my baby. He died this
morning in the nursery. No one knows why. Upon hearing these horrible
words I was stupefied and could only say, This is impossible! This is absurd!
For some time Clmence did not contact me. Her absence did not surprise me, because I am familiar with the experiences of those who are plunged
into such mourning, who are utterly crushed by the impact of a violent loss
and absolutely refuse contact with those who, before the event, were linked
to the one who has departed. I had even imagined that my patient was going
to interrupt her analysis because I was inevitably associated with her struggle
to become fertile, with the success of her pregnancy, with the happiness of
the birth and now with the atrocious pain of a brutal and incomprehensible
loss. She was probably going to decide not to continue her analytic work with
10
11
she was truly able to begin her work of mourning, a work marked by a particular session that I would like to recall here.
Clmence could not stand to hear the consoling words that in such circumstances are so naturally expressed by friends. Do not concern yourself!
Think of getting pregnant again. You still have time. Have another baby and
you will see, you will forget! These awkward words were unbearable for her
and they were driving her crazy. I understood the vehemence of her reaction
because these seemingly comforting sentences were in fact a call to forgetan
incitement to lose her dead child a second time. This was an incitement to
lose the child once more, no longer in reality but in the heart. As if
rebelling, Clmence cried to the world: I have lost my child and I know that
he will not come back. I know he is no longer living but he continues to live
in me. And you want me to forget him! You want him to disappear a second
time! To ask Clmence to forget her dead son by replacing him with another
before completing the mourning process could only do violence to her. It was
to ask her to no longer cherish the image of the baby that had disappeared,
thus to deprive her of the only means of healing the wound. Finally, it was to
ask her to renounce the preservation of her psychical equilibrium. The image
of the lost person must not be effaced, on the contrary it must prevail until the
moment whenthanks to mourningthe mourner succeeds in causing the
love for the deceased and the love for a new loved one to coexist. When this
coexistence of the old and the new is established in the unconscious we can
be certain that what is most important in the process of mourning is underway.
I no longer had all these theoretical considerations in mind when, in the
course of a session that took place some eight months after his death, I intervened in a way that turned out to be decisive. Clmence lay on the couch and
spoke to me in the tone of someone who had just rediscovered a zest for life. I
was listening and concentrating intensely when, at the moment of an intervention, I stated the following words, almost without knowing it: If a second child
is born, I mean Laurents brother or sister. . . . Even before I was able to complete my sentence the patient interrupted me and, surprised, exclaimed: This is
the first time I heard of Laurents brother or sister! I feel like an enormous weight
has been lifted. A thought came to me that I shared immediately with my
patient: Wherever Laurent is at this moment I am sure he will be happy to
know that one day you will give him a little brother or sister. I was astonished
to have expressed spontaneously in so few words the basic aspect of my conception of mourning according to which the pain is diminished if the mourner
finally admits that the love for the new living person will never abolish the love
for the one who has disappeared. So for Clmence the future child will perhaps
never take the place of his older brother who is deceased. He will have his own
place, the one reserved for him by his desire, the desire of his parents, and his
destiny. And, simultaneously, Laurent will remain the irreplaceable first infant.
Threshold
I decided to begin this book with a fragment of a cureI should say with a
fragment of a life that brings two persons together: one who suffers and the
other who assumes the suffering. One, a mother overwhelmed by the cruel
loss of her first child whom she desired so much and who was lost so brutally,
and the other, a psychoanalyst who tries to give a meaning to a pain that, in
itself, has none. In itself, pain has no value and no signification. It is simply
there, made of flesh or of stone. Nevertheless, to ease it, we must understand
it as an expression of something else, detaching it from the real by transforming it into a symbol. To attribute a symbolic value to pain that is in itself
the pure real, a brutal, hostile, and foreign emotion, remains in the end the
only therapeutic gesture that renders it bearable. Also, the psychoanalyst is
an intermediary who takes on the inassimilable pain of his or her patient and
transforms it into a pain that is symbolized.
But what is entailed in this process of giving meaning to pain and rendering it symbolic? It does not entail a forced interpretation of its cause, nor
does it serve to console the patient, and even less to encourage him or her to
undergo its hardship as a formative experience to strengthen ones character.
No, to give meaning to the pain of the other means for the psychoanalyst to
be attuned with it, to try to resonate with it, and in such a state to wait for
the time and the words to erode it. With his patient consumed by pain, the
analyst acts like a dancer who, before the stumbling of his partner, keeps her
from falling and, without losing a beat, helps the couple regain their rhythm.
To give a meaning to an unfathomable pain is, in the end, to provide a place
for it within the transference, where it can be shouted, cried, and used up by
the sheer accumulation of tears and words.
I would like, in these pages, to share what I have learned with you,
namely, that mental pain is not necessarily pathological, that it punctuates
our lives as we mature by way of successive pains. For the psychoanalyst it
appears clearlythanks to the remarkable magnifying glass of transference
that pain at the core of our being is the incontestable sign of the experience
of adversity. When pain occurs, we are no doubt in the process of crossing a
13
14
threshold, of undergoing a decisive experience. What experience? The experience of separation from an object, as it leaves us suddenly and definitively,
shatters us and causes us to reconstruct ourselves. Psychical pain is the pain
of separation when the separation is an uprooting and a loss of an object with
which we are so intimately bondeda person we love, a material thing, a
value, or the integrity of our bodythat the bond is constitutive of ourselves.
This shows the extent to which the unconscious is the subtle thread that
links the diverse and painful separations that punctuate our existence.
We are going to approach pain by considering the example of an affliction that affects us when we are struck by the death of a loved one. The
mourning of a loved one is indeed the most illustrative experience for understanding the nature and the mechanisms of mental pain. However, it would
be mistaken to believe that psychical pain is a feeling that is provoked exclusively by the loss of a loved one. It could also be the pain of abandonment, as
when a loved one suddenly withdraws his or her love, of humiliation when we
are deeply wounded in our pride, and pain of mutilation when we lose a part
of our body. All these kinds of pain are, to different degrees, pains of brutal
amputation from a love-object, one to which we were so intensely and permanently bonded that it regulated the harmony of our psyche. There is pain
only against the background of love.
Psychical pain is an obscure feeling, difficult to define, and, when barely
grasped, it eludes reason. Its uncertain nature thus compels us to find the
most precise theory possible that explains the mechanism that causes it.
There is a challenge in attempting to grasp an affect that eludes thought. We
have noticed that analytic literature is extremely limited on this topic. Freud
and Lacan themselves only rarely treated the theme of pain and never
devoted an exclusive study to it.
I will thus attempt to introduce you to a metapsychology of pain. A
metapsychology is the only satisfying theoretical approach to explain the formative mechanism of psychical pain in detail.
Before beginning, I would like to make some preliminary remarks and
state that painwhether psychical or physicalis always a phenomenon of
the limit. Throughout these pages you will constantly see pain emerge at the
limit, whether it is the imprecise limit between the body and the psyche,
between the ego and the other, or above all between the regulated functioning of the psyche and its breakdown.
Another initial remark concerns the vocabulary that I will use in order
to distinguish psychical and corporeal pain. This distinction, although necessary for the clarity of my discourse, is not rigorously founded. From the psychoanalytic point of view, there is no difference between psychical and physical pain. The reason is that pain is a mixed phenomenon, emerging at the
limit between the body and the psyche. When we will consider corporeal
THRESHOLD
15
pain, for example, one will notice that, apart from its strictly neurobiological
mechanisms, it is explained essentially by a psychical disturbance. Furthermore, the model of corporeal pain sketched by Freud at the beginning of his
workwhich we will reconsider laterhas surprisingly guided our conception of psychical pain.
Another terminological clarification concerns the difference between
the terms suffering and pain. Classically, these terms are distinguished in the
following manner: whereas pain refers to a local sensation caused by an
injury, suffering designates a general psychical and corporeal disturbance that
is provoked by a generally violent excitation. If pain is a sensation that is
quite determined and delimited, suffering remains on the contrary a vaguely
defined emotion. But this schematic distinction becomes useless as soon as
we rigorously clarify the formation of physical pain as well as the psychical
factor implicated therein. This is what we have tried to do by exploring the
suffering ego with the tools of Freudian metapsychology. Now the term suffering will turn out to be too vague for the reader, while pain, on the contrary,
will seem precise and rigorous. Therefore, I have chosen to privilege the word
pain and give it the status of a psychoanalytic concept.
We would make one final preliminary comment. In order to situate our
approach better, I would like to propose a comprehensive vision of pain by
dividing it into three main categories. Above all, pain is an affect, the ultimate affect, the last defense against madness and death. It is like a final struggle that attests to life and to our power to regain ourselves. One does not die
from pain. As long as there is pain, we also have the available forces to fight
against it and continue living. It is this notion of pain-affect that we will
study in the first chapters.
The second category involves pain considered as a symptom, that is, as
the exterior and sensible manifestation of an unconscious and repressed
drive. Take the exemplary case of a pain in the body that reveals the existence of an unconscious suffering. I am referring to persistent hysterical
migraines, fluctuating according to affective situations, and without identifiable causes. We will say that the migraine is a symptom, that is, a painful sensation that translates a repressed disturbance in the unconscious. In this
group I include all the pains qualified by current medicine as psychogenic.
If one consults one of the numerous recent medical publications devoted to
pain, one finds inevitably a contributiongenerally very shorton psychogenic pain. What does psychogenic mean? It designates the various
corporeal pains without an identifiable organic cause and to which one may
attribute, failing any better alternative, a psychical origin.
The third and final psychoanalytic category of pain refers to perversion.
This is pain as an object and aim of perverse, sadomasochistic sexual pleasure.
This theme is developed in two sections of the Lessons on Pain.
16
THRESHOLD
17
as the ego, turned inward, perceived the regular fluctuations of the libidinal
drives, it could feel both pleasurable and unpleasurable sensations. When the
ego perceives within itself the disturbance of the uncontrollable tensions, it
is pain that it feels. Although unpleasure and pain belong to the same category of unpleasant feelings, we can distinguish them clearly and affirm:
unpleasure is not pain. While unpleasure expresses self-perception by the ego
of an elevated but modulated tension, pain expresses the self-perception of an
uncontrolled tension in a deeply distressed psyche. Unpleasure thus remains
a sensation that reflects in consciousness an increase of the tension of the
drive, an augmentation subject to the laws of the pleasure principle. On the
other hand, pain testifies to a profound deregulation of psychical life that
escapes the pleasure principle.
Therefore, in the course of the pages that follow, we will see pain as an
affect provoked not so much by the loss of the loved onehere I am thinking of psychical painbut the egos self-perception of the internal turmoil
unleashed by that loss. Strictly speaking, pain is not pain of loss, but of the
chaos of drives in turmoil. In a word, painful feelings do not reflect the regular oscillations of the drives but a madness of the libidinal cadence.
*We write love, but the object to which we are attached and whose sudden loss produces pain is an object that is hated and a source of anguish as much as it is an object
of love.
19
20
21
his or her unexpected disappearance is so painful for us? With what knot is
the loving bond woven such that its rupture is experienced as a loss? What is
a loss? What is the pain of love?
22
Phantom
limb
In-drawing
hole
Emptying
of the ego
Phantom
loved one
FIGURE 1
Explication of the Phenomenon of the Phantom Limb
and the Phantom Loved One
The psychical image of an amputated arm has been so overinvested that it is eventually projected outside the ego and perceived by the subject as a hallucinated arm. Its
expulsion leaves an in-drawing hole in the psyche through which the energy of the
ego rushes until it is completely empty. We think that this mechanism of the expulsion of the image of the lost object and its reappearance in the real explains the hallucination of the phantom limb. This mechanism, which is nothing other than foreclosure, would also explain the disorder of some mourners who hallucinate the
deceased and see him or her as if still alive. We call this phenomenon the hallucination of the phantom loved one. In both cases the lost objectthe amputated arm or the
deceasedcontinues to live in reality for the ego.
takes the clinical form of a paralyzing inhibition, the pain of the overinvestment is both gripping and oppressive. We will propose a new definition of psychical pain as the affect that manifests the exhaustion of an ego completely occupied with desperately cherishing the image of the lost loved one. The despondency and
the love are based in a pure pain.
We note that the representation of the person who has disappeared is so
strongly charged with affectso overidealizedthat, in the end, it not only
devours a part of the ego, but also becomes foreign to the rest of the ego, that
is, incompatible with those other representations that had been disinvested.
23
If we think now of the mourning that follows the death of a loved one we will
see that the process of mourning follows a movement that is inverse to that
of the defensive reaction of the ego. While that reaction consists in an overinvestment of the said representation the work of mourning is a progressive
disinvestment of that representation. To undergo mourning means in fact to
disinvest, little by little, from the saturated representation of the loved one
who has been lost in order to render it once again compatible with the whole
of the network of egoic representations. Mourning is nothing other than a
very slow redistribution of the psychical energy that was, until then, concentrated on a single dominant representation that was foreign to the ego.
We understand henceforth that if the work of disinvestment that must
follow the death of the other is not accomplished, and if the ego remains
frozen in a coagulated representation, mourning perpetuates itself in a
chronic state that paralyzes the life of the mourner for several years, indeed
for his or her entire existence. I am thinking of a particular analysand who,
having lost her mother at an early age and having suffered from an incomplete mourning, confided to me: A part of her is desperately alive in me and
a part of me is forever dead with her. These words, with a cruel lucidity,
reveal a person who is split and uprooted by a past and elusive pain. Let us
think here of the distorted faces and strangely tormented bodies that inhabit
the canvas of the painter of pain, Francis Bacon.
What causes pain is not to lose the loved one but to continue to
love him or her more strongly than ever, even though we know that
he or she is irremediably lost
We have, then, an ego that is disassociated between two states: one part concentrated and contracted in a pointthat of the image of the departed other
with which it identifies almost totallyand the other part impoverished and
emptied. One recalls Clmence seized by the haunting images of her dead
baby and emptied of all her substance. However, there is another disassociation that is still more painful, another reason for the pain of loving. The ego
is split between its limitless love for the effigy of the lost object and the lucid
recognition of the real absence of that object. The splitting is no longer situated between contraction and emptying but between contractionthat is to
say, an excessive love for an imageand an acute recognition of the irremediable character of that loss. The ego loves the object that continues to live
in the psyche; it loves it as it has never loved it and at the same time it knows
that this object will never come back. What causes pain is not the loss of the
person we love, but the fact that we continue to love more strongly than ever
someone whom we know to be irremediably lost. Love and knowledge are at
24
odds. The ego remains split between a love that keeps the loved one alive and
the knowledge of an incontestable absence. This rift between the living presence of the other in the ego and its real absence is a cleavage so unbearable
that we often want to reduce it not by moderating the love but by denying
the absence while rebelling against the reality of the lack and refusing to
accept the definitive death of the loved one.
Such a rebellion against fate, such a denial of the loss is sometimes so
tenacious that the mourner borders on madness. The refusal to admit the irremediable character of the loss or, what amounts to the same thing, to admit
the incontestable character of the absence in reality, borders on madness but
tempers pain. When these moments of rebellion ease, pain reappears as
vividly as before. Faced with the sudden death of a loved one it frequently
happens that the mourner seeks for things and places associated with the
deceased and, at times, against all reason, imagines that he or she is able to
bring them back to life and find them again. I am thinking of a patient who
heard the steps of her dead husband climbing the stairs. Or even of a mother
who saw her recently deceased son very clearly at his desk. Through these
hallucinations the mourner experiences the return of the deceased with an
unshakable certainty and transforms his or her sorrow with a delirious conviction. We understand that the supremacy of love over knowledge leads to
the creation of a new realitya hallucinated realitywhere the lost one
returns in the form of a phantom.
25
The loved one for whom I mourn is the one who satisfies me
partially, renders my insatisfaction tolerable and recenters my desire
To know who the significant other is, his or her essential role in the unconscious, and the pain that his or her disappearance causes, we must return for
a moment to the ordinary functioning of the psychical system. We will consider it now from a particular perspective. We know that the system is ruled
by the pleasure/unpleasure principle that establishes the premise according to
which the psyche is constantly subjected to a tension that it seeks to discharge without ever doing so completely. While the permanent state of tension is called unpleasure, the incomplete and partial discharge of tension is
called pleasure, that is, partial pleasure. In its normal functioning, the psyche remains fundamentally subjected to unpleasure, that is, to an unpleasant
tension, since there is never a complete discharge. Let us alter our vocabulary
26
now and instead of using the words tension and unpleasure we will use the word
desire. Because what is desire, if not that very unpleasant tension in motion,
entirely oriented toward an ideal goal, that of reaching absolute pleasure, that
is, total discharge? Thus, we will say that the ordinary situation of the unconscious system is defined by the tolerable state of insatisfaction of a desire4 that
is never totally realized. However, to state that psychical tension remains
always present, indeed distressful, that unpleasure dominates or that our
desires remain unsatisfied, in no way expresses a pessimistic vision of humanity. On the contrary, this statement amounts to declaring that throughout our
existence we will fortunately be in a state of lack. I say fortunately, because
this lack, this always futural gap that steers desire, is synonymous with life.
If we were to represent that part of insatisfaction that draws desire spatially, we would not imagine it as a section of a straight road that we would
still have to take toward a mythical goal of a total jouissance. On the contrary,
insatisfaction is not the incomplete part of the trajectory of desire toward
absolute satisfaction. It is otherwise that I ask you to represent it. I suggest
that you imagine it in the form of a hole, a hole at the heart of our being and
around which our desire would revolve. The gap ahead is not in front of us
but in us. The trajectory of desire does not describe a straight line heading
toward the horizon but a spiral turning around a central void that draws and
animates the circular movement of desire. Consequently, to declare that our
desires are not satisfied means, in spatial terms, that they follow the centrifugal movement of energy that circumscribes an irreducible lack.
We see now that the lack is not only a void that pulls in desire. It is also
an organizing pole of desire. Without lackwithout this drawing core that is
insatisfactionthe circular dynamic of desire would spiral out of control and
there would be nothing left but pain. We can put it in a different way. If the
insatisfaction is present, but bearable, desire remains active and the psychic
system remains stable. If, on the contrary, the satisfaction is excessive, or if
the insatisfaction has no limit, desire loses its axis and pain surges. We find
again here the hypothesis that permeates our text. Namely, that pain
expresses the turbulence of the drives in the domain of the Id.
A certain degree of insatisfaction is thus vital for us in order to conserve
our psychical stability. But how is this essential lack preserved? Further, if
the lack is necessary how is it to be maintained within sustainable limits? It
is exactly here that our partner comes into playthe person we love
because he or she plays the role of the unsatisfactory object of my desire and
thereby of the organizing pole of desire. It is as if the hole of the insatisfaction within was occupied by the loved one without; as if the lack was finally
a vacant place successively occupied by the special persons or external
things that we hold to be irreplaceable and for whom we would mourn if
they were to perish.
27
28
These lines from Montaigne are from a very beautiful text on friendship written shortly after the death of his dear friend, La Botie. Among the many
friendships that he had, he singles out one that was unique and that linked
him in an indissociable way to his companion. It was a friendship so powerful that all the edges of their differences were blurred in a universal blend.
Hence, trying to respond to the question of the reasons for such an exceptional love for a special and recently deceased friend, Montaigne writes this
striking sentence full of beauty and reserve: If one presses me to say why I
loved him I feel that it can only be expressed by responding: Because it was
him; because it was me. Love thus remains an impenetrable mystery, that
one should not try to explain, but simply acknowledge.
Another writer adopts a similar reserve faced with the enigma of the
attachment to the special other. Indeed, in Mourning and Melancholia,
Freud speaks of love when speaking of death. He notes that the mourner
ignores the intrinsic value of the deceased loved one. The mourner knows
whom he has lost but not what he has lost by losing his loved one (cf. SE
XIV, 245). Thanks to the impersonal what, Freud emphasizes how the
person that we love the most is first a psychical agency, and how this
agency is different from the concrete person. The loved one is certainly a
person, but it is first and foremost that unconscious part of ourselves that
is ignored and that will collapse if the person dies. More recently, faced
with the mystery of this amorous bond, Lacan invented his objet a; for it
is precisely with the expression of objet a that he symbolized the mystery
without resolving it. The a is, in the final analysis, only a name to designate what we ignore, namely, the ungraspable presence of the loved one in
us, that thing that we lose when the loved one disappears from the external reality.
This is the decisive question, a question as unresolved as it is unavoidable. In what does this what that is lost consist when we lose the other?
What is it that unites two persons such that one suffers so profoundly at the
sudden demise of the other? Our problem now is not one of pain but one of
love. It is love that interests us now because it is by delineating its nature
more clearly that we will arrive at a new psychoanalytic definition of pain.
Who, then, is the one that I love and believe to be unique and irreplaceable? It is a complex being composed both of the living and actual person who is in front of me and of its double within me.
29
30
The loved one exists in two ways: on the one hand, he or she is outside
us, as an individual living in the world, and on the other hand, he or she is
inside us as a fantasized presenceimaginary, symbolic, and realthat regulates the imperious flux of desire and structures the order of the unconscious.
Of these two presencesliving and fantasizedit is the second that dominates since our behavior, most of our judgments, and all the feelings we experience with respect to the loved one, are rigorously determined by the fantasy.
We only grasp the reality of the one we love through the transforming lens of
the fantasy.6 We only see, hear, feel, or touch him or her while enveloped in
the veil woven from the images born out of the complex fusion between his
or her image and our own image. It is a veil that is also woven from the
unconscious, symbolic representations that strictly delimit the context of our
bond of love.
31
I, myself and my body, for his or her fantasy? Certainly, the metaphor of the
ivy is quite evocative, since the ivy is a living plant that not only climbs and
creeps up the wall, but fastens its crampons in very particular places of the
wall, in its cracks and crevices. Similarly, my attachments to the loved one
who has become my fantasized object is a jointure that does not just happen
anywhere, but quite precisely in the erogenous orifices of the body: places
where he or she irradiates his or her desire and excites me without actually
satisfying me. And, reciprocally, it is in my body at the places of emission of
my own desire that his or her fantasy will attach itself. You will agree then
that my own fantasy forms a bond that is all the more powerful if, in turn, I
am the living person on whom his or her fantasy is constructed, if I become
the regulator of his or her insatisfaction. In other words, my fantasy will be a
knot that is much tighter if I am for the other what he or she is for me: the
fantasized loved one.
Consequently, we must realize that when we love we always love a hybrid
entity that is constituted both by the external person that we encounter outside and by his or her unconscious and fantasized presence within us. Reciprocally, we are for him or her the same mixed being made of flesh and unconsciousness. This is why we speak of fantasy. It is to better understand that I
will only suffer from the disappearance of the one who has been for me what
I have been for him or her: the fantasized loved one.
Now, it is important that we clearly separate the three modes of the fantasized presence of the loved one in order to better define the unknown
what that we lose when its person is lost.
32
same energetic column, a vital and impersonal axis that belongs to neither
one of the partners. It is also difficult because this unique force has no symbol or representation that can signify it. This is the meaning of the Lacanian
concept of the real. The real is the unrepresentable, the energy that assures
both the psychic consistency of each partner and their common bond of love.
In short, if we must summarize what the real other is in one word, we would
say that it is the imperious and unknown force that gives consistency to our
bond and to our unconscious. The real other is not therefore the external person of the other, but the part of a pure, impersonal energy that animates its
person. That part, which is also, since we are connected, my own impersonal
part, our shared real. However, for the real other to exist with the real force
that belongs to neither partner, it is necessary for the bodies of each partner
to be living and quivering with desire.
33
exciting one another. Thus, the cadence of his or her desire is harmonized
with my own cadence and each of the variations of his or her tension corresponds as an echo to each of mine. Sometimes the encounter is soft and gradual, at other times violent and immediate.
However, if it is true that the erogenous exchanges can be harmonious,
then the satisfactions that result from them always remain distinct, partial,
and discordant for each of the partners. Our exchanges accord but there is
discord in our satisfactions. They diverge because they occur at different
moments and uneven intensities. There is an accord in the excitation and
disharmony in the satisfaction.
One can see that the loved one is not simply the person in front of me,
nor a force, an excitation, or an object of insatisfaction; he or she is all of those
things at once condensed in the living rhythm of our bond of love. When he
or she is no longer there, when the radiance of his or her living and desiring
being is no longer there, and my desire is deprived of the excitations that he
or she could awaken so well, I certainly lose an infinity of riches but I lose,
more importantly, the framework of my desire, that is to say, its rhythm.
Thus, the symbolic presence of the loved one within my unconscious is
expressed by the cadence according to which the rhythm of my desire is regulated. In a word, the symbolic other is a rhythm or a measure or even the psychical metronome that sets the tempo of my cadence of desire.
This manner we have of conceiving the symbolic status of the loved one
is a reinterpretation of the Freudian concept of repression, considered as the
barrier that prevents the overflow of libidinal drive. It is also a reinterpretation
of the Lacanian concept of the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father, considered
as the limit that enframes and gives consistency to the symbolic system.
Whether Freudian repression or the Lacanian signifier of the Name-of-theFather, it is always a matter of that which channels the forces of desire and organizes a system. Now precisely, the loved one, defined as a psychical metronome,
fulfills this symbolic function of constraining desire to follow the rhythm of our
bond. We will also say that the loved one, master of the measure imposed on
my desire, protects me from turmoil by limiting my jouissance.
He or she protects me and leaves me unsatisfied. The symbolic loved one
is, in the end, a figure of repression and the most exemplary figure of the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father.
34
35
body), demand (neurosis), and desire of the other. Now, what are these ideals
that are situated at the intersection of the symbolic and the imaginary? Here
are the principal ones:
My loved one must be unique and irreplaceable;
He or she must remain invariable, that is to say, must never change unless
we ourselves change him or her;
He or she must survive, unaltered, the passion of our devouring love or our
destructive hatred;
He or she must depend on our love, allow us to possess him or her, and
always be available to satisfy our whims;
But if he or she also remains submissive, he or she must however be able to
maintain his or her autonomy in order to avoid bothering me.
These ideals, comparable to those that guide the relation of the child with
its transitional object, characterize the neurosis of the lover and give us our
sense of his or her limits. Such excessive expectations can only intensify the
gap between the satisfaction desire dreams of and its effective insatisfaction.
This long detour was necessary in order to respond to our question about
the presence of the loved one in the unconscious and to understand that
which we really lose when he or she disappears. The loved one is above all a
fantasy that inhabits us, regulates the intensity of our desire (insatisfaction),
and structures us. It is not only a person, but a fantasy constructed with his or
her image, a mirror of our images (imaginary), affected by the force of desire
(real), structured by the rhythm of this force (symbolic), and supported by his
or her living body (also real), source of the excitation of our desire and the
object of our imaginary projections.
However, it is certainly necessary to understand that the fantasy is not
only the representation of what the loved one is within us, but also that
which bonds us inextricably to his or her living self. It is not only an intrasubjective formation but also intersubjective. Let us put this in a different
way. The loved one is a part of us that we refer to as an unconscious fantasy;
but this part is not confined to the interior of our individuality, it extends
into the space of the in-between (entre-deux) and attaches us intimately to his
or her person. Reciprocally, the loved one is also inhabited by a fantasy that
represents us in his or her unconscious and attaches him or her to our person.
We can see how the fantasy is a psychical formation that is unique and shared
by two partners and how it was, until now, inadequate, however necessary, to
speak of the fantasy of the one and the fantasy of the other, to speak of his
or her unconscious or the unconscious of the other. This is what I want
to say: the fantasy and more generally the unconscious that it manifests is a
36
psychic structure, a complex edifice that stands, invisible, in the space of the
in-between and rests on foundations of living bodies of the partners. Consequently, when we lose the person of the loved one, the fantasy collapses like
a building from which one has removed a pillar. It is then that pain appears.
To the question: What do we lose when we lose the one that we love?
we respondBy losing the living body of the other, we lose one of the sources
that nourishes the force of desire without completely losing that force, a force
that remains indestructible and inexhaustible as long as we have life in us. We
also lose the animated silhouette that sustained the internal mirror that
reflects our images. But by losing the loved one we also lose the rhythm
according to which the real force of desire vibrates. To lose the rhythm is to
lose the symbolic other, the limit that gives the unconscious its consistency. By
losing the one that we love, we lose a source of nourishment, the object of our
imaginary projections, and the rhythm of our common desire. That is to say,
we lose the cohesion and texture of a fantasy indispensable to our structure.
We return now to our definitions of pain. We had said that corporeal pain was
produced by a wound situated at the periphery of our selves, that is to say, in
the body. But in the same way that one believes, wrongly, that the painful sensation due to a wound of the arm is located in the arm, one also wrongly
believes that the psychical pain is due to the loss of the person of the loved
one. It is as if it was his or her absence that caused the pain. It is not the
absence of the other that causes the pain but the effects in me of the absence.
I do not suffer from the lack of the other. I suffer because the force of my desire
is deprived of the excitement provided by the sensibility of his or her living
body. It because the symbolic rhythm of this force is broken by the disappearance of the tempo that his or her excitations caused; and also because the psychical mirror that reflected my images collapsed, lacking the living support
that his or her body had become. The wound that provokes the psychical pain
is, then, not the physical disappearance of the loved one, but the internal turmoil engendered by the disarticulation of the fantasy of the loved one.
In the pages that preceded our considerations about the fantasized presence of the loved one, we defined pain as the reaction to the loss of the object
of love. Now we can be more specific and advance the idea that pain is a reaction, not to some loss, but to the fracture of the fantasy that attached us to
the loved other. The true cause of pain is thus not the loss of the loved one,
37
that is to say, the removal of one of the pillars that supported the structure of
the fantasy, but the collapse of that structure. The loss is a triggering cause,
the collapse is the efficient cause. If we lose the loved one, the fantasy is
undone and the subject is then exposed without recourse to an ultimate tension of desire, a desire without a fantasy to support itself, an errant and
unhinged desire. To affirm that psychic pain results from the collapse of the
fantasy is to locate its source, not in the external event of an actual loss, but
in the subjects confrontation with its own inner turmoil. Pain is here a distress imposed inexorably on me when I discover that my desire is bare, mad,
and object-less. We find, henceforth, in another form, one of the propositions
offered at the beginning of this chapter. We said that pain is the affect that
expresses the egos self-perception of the trauma that ravages it when it is
deprived of its loved one. Now that we recognize the destruction of the fantasy as the major intersubjective event that follows the loss of the loved one,
we can affirm that pain expresses the brutal and immediate encounter between the
subject and its own panic-stricken desire.
It is at that moment of intense disturbance of the drives that our ego desperately tries to save the unity of a collapsing fantasy by concentrating all
available energy on a small part of the image of the lost other, a fragmentary
image that will become saturated with affect. It is at this point that pain,
which immediately surged from a tumultuous desire, intensifies instead of
being diminished. Some months later, once the work of mourning is under
way, the hypertrophy of this fragment of the image of the lost one diminishes,
and the pain associated with it eases progressively.
The moment of conclusion has arrived. Through the several hypotheses
I have offered, I wanted to take you on the same path that led me to modify
my initial point of view with respect to pain. I began from the common idea
that pain is a sensation of a wound and that the psychical pain is the wound
of the soul. That is the first idea. If one had asked me, What is psychic
pain? I would have responded without much thought: it is the confusion of
someone who, having lost a loved one, loses a part of him or herself. At this
point we can respond more accurately and say: pain is the confusion that we
experience when having lost a loved one we find ourselves faced with the most
extreme internal tension confronted by a mad desire within ourselves, a sort of
madness within that lies dormant in us as long as an external loss does not come to
unleash its fury.
38
Pain emerges from the disorder of the drives prevailing in the Id, consequent
to the rupture of the barrier of the fantasy.
Pain emerges from the hypertrophy of one of the fragmentary images of the
lost other.
A last word in the form of a question:What use can we make of this psychoanalytic theory of pain that I am advancing? I would dare to say quite simply: make no use of it. Leave it for the moment. Let the theory simmer within
us. Leave it to operate without our knowledge. If this theory of pain, as
abstract as it may be, is really fertile, it will perhaps change our manner of listening to the suffering patient or to our own intimate suffering.
Let us recall here the case of Clmence, where the psychoanalysts intervention took place at the intersection of theory and the unconscious. In his
or her way of remaining open to suffering or coming to terms with it and
offering decisive words that transform the unbearable illness into symbolized
pain, the psychoanalyst has acted on the basis of his or her theoretical knowledge but also with his or her unconscious. In this way, through his or her
knowledge of pain and his or her knowledge based on the transference, he or
she has eased the pain by giving it a context. He or she has taken the place
of the symbolic other who, in Clmences fantasy, articulated the rhythm of
her desire, that other that Clmence had lost by losing her child.
Faced with the pain of his or her patient, the analyst becomes a symbolic other who imposes a rhythm on the disorder of the drives so as to
finally ease the pain.
39
B. Loss of Corporeal
Integrity
Pain seems to us to be
internal, absolute, irremediable, and at times
even necessary. It is
within me as my vital
substance.
Archipelago of Pain
42
Unconscious pain
Often the patient feels grief without knowing why he or she is sad nor what
loss he or she has suffered. In other cases, he or she is inhabited by pain without even knowing that he or she is in pain. This is the case with the alcoholic
subject who ignores the deep pain that is at the source of his or her compulsive thirst. One drinks in order to intoxicate his or her ego and thus neutralize the capacity to perceive the disturbances in the Id. The turmoil of the drives exists, but the ego that is anesthetized by alcohol does not translate them
into painful emotion. It is as if alcohol had the effect of neutralizing the function of the ego, translator of the language of the Id into the language of conscious feelings.
ARCHIPELAGO OF PAIN
43
slightest triggering event can be either exterior or interior to the ego. Such a
memory or insignificant dream can appear so precise in these circumstances
that it release a savage flux of internal excitations that overflow and wound
the ego. That state is then experienced as a traumatic pain.
44
ARCHIPELAGO OF PAIN
45
46
happened and of the definitive character of his or her absence. During this
process pain manifests itself as momentary episodes of grief. In order to
understand the nature of these painful episodes one must consider mourning as a slow work by which the ego patiently undoes what it had invested
in the urgency affected by the blow of the loss. Mourning works to slowly
undo what was precipitously formed. In fact, in order to protect itself from
the ravaging effects of the trauma, the ego overinvests the representation of
the loved one who has died. Now, during the period of mourning, the ego
undergoes the inverse path: little by little it disinvests the representation of
the loved one until that representation loses its vivacity and ceases to be a
foreign bodya source of pain for the ego. To disinvest the representation
mean to remove the excess of affect from it, to reposition it among other
representations and invest it differently. Thus, mourning can be defined as
a slow and painful process of the withdrawal of love from the deceased in
order to love him or her differently. For the sake of clarification, we would
say that in mourning the mourner does not forget the deceased or cease loving him or her but only tempers an excessive attachment that has resulted
from the brutal loss.
Now that we have defined mourning as a process of the withdrawal of
love we understand that pain occurs each time that there is a resurgence of
love. In mourning pain corresponds to the momentary reinvestment of an
image in the process of being disinvested. This is what happens when the
mourner accidentally encounters in reality some detail reminding him or her
of the loved one when he or she was alive. At the moment when the representation of the deceased is reanimated by the force of memory and the subject must again bear the obvious irreversible loss, pain returns. There is pain
each time the image of the deceased is reanimated and, simultaneously, when
I recognize the incontestable death of the other. The episodes of pain that
punctuate mourning are thus the insistence of a tenacious love which does
not want to disappear.
ARCHIPELAGO OF PAIN
47
Pathological mourning
In the case of pathological mourning, the affective overinvestment has permanently crystallized on the psychical representation of the loved one who
has been lost, as if we were attempting in vain to revive him or her. Pathological mourning is love frozen around an image.
48
is a relation to the loss of a loved one, to the loss of his or her love,
to the loss of my corporeal integrity, or to the loss of the integrity of
my image.
Jealousy
Anxiety
Guilt
Narcissistic
Humiliation
Hate
Corporeal Pain:
A Psychoanalytic Conception
We think most often that physical pain is the exclusive concern of neurophysiology and only concerns the psyche if it has an effect on the personality
of the suffering man or woman. It is as if, on the one hand, there would be a
painful phenomenon that can be explained scientifically by the transmission
of the nociceptive message of pain within the nervous system, and, on the
other hand, the inevitable social and psychological consequences brought
about by a chronic pain. There would first be pain, and then its emotional
consequences. We know the importance for a practitionermedical or psychoanalyticof listening to not only the patients corporeal suffering but also
the psychological problems that the physical pain provokes. However, we
prefer here to occupy ourselves not with the repercussions of pain but with its
psychical origin. More precisely, we need to occupy ourselves with the psychical factor that intervenes in the genesis of any corporeal pain.
Let us note that our interest in delimiting the psychical element of pain
is curiously shared by current research in neuroscience. I was surprised when
I discovered, for example, the doubts and questions of the scientists at the
International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) concerning the incidence of psychical factors in the neurophysiology of pain. Without going as
far as a formal explanation, they hold the psychical factor to be one of the
principal causes of a painful emotion whose inner mechanism still remains
unexplored. They consider, in particular, that this unknown factor is responsible for a quite atypical pain known as psychogenic, that is to say, a pain
whose origin is exclusively psychical. It is a question of a painful sensation
effectively felt by the subject but without any cause that would explain it.
Therefore, the official definition of pain proposed by the IASP betrays
various uncertainties with respect to the role of the psychical factor. I would
like to reproduce here the exact terms of this definition. Pain, it is said, would
49
50
CORPOREAL PAIN
51
arbitrary, each corresponds to a definition or a use of the term ego that was
proposed by Freud at some point in his work.
After this clarification of our vocabulary, we will address now how a pain
emerges in the body and how it is transformed into unconscious pain.
52
revived by the birth of the mental representation of the wound. The subject
feels a stinging pain and simultaneously it visualizes a diffuse image of the
flesh and its arm. The perception of the wound is not only the grasp of a brutal transformation of the state of the protective tissues; it also acts as a stamp
that fixes the mental representation of the wounded area in consciousness.
We call the representation that will play a decisive role in the third phase of
the painful process, a representation of the wounded and pained place of
the body.9
Now, this mental image of the wound born out of the perception of
the wound identifies and fixes the pain that is experienced. In feeling pain,
the person who was burned believes that his or her pain is entirely contained within that wound and only emanates from the gaping hole in the
tissues. It is as if the source of suffering was reduced to the place of the burn
alone. The painful feeling is so specific and determined in the wound that
the damaged region seems autonomous and stands as a tyrannical outgrowth that is detached from the body and wears down and weakens the
ego. The sensory perception of the injury has formed the mental image of
the wound, which is accompanied not only by the impression that the seat
of the pain is in the damaged tissue and that the damaged tissue is on the
periphery, but also by the impression that the painful place, detached from
the body, has become a hostile growth. Surely, without the wound there
would not be pain, but the pain is not in the wound, it is in the ego,
entirely contained in an internal image in the egoan image of the
wounded place.
To summarize, we can say that the ego is a sensible captor of changes in
the tissues, but a bad mapmaker. It not only locates any corporeal injury as a
peripheral wound but it is deceived when it believes that the source of the
pain is in the wound. The pain is not in the wound, it is in the brain, in the
case of the painful sensation, and in the underpinnings of the egoin the
Idin the case of the painful emotion. In a word, the pain of the wound carries three aspects: real, symbolic, and imaginary.
Real: a somatic-sensorial perception of a violent excitation affecting the
organic tissues.
Symbolic: a sudden formation of a mental and conscious representation of the
place of the body where the injury took place.
Imaginary: since the body is experienced as a periphery, any wound will be
experienced as peripheral. The painful sensation, referred by the imagination
to be the wound, seems to emanate only from the wound and the wound
seems to institute itself as a second body.
CORPOREAL PAIN
53
Just as the impact of the external and local excitation creates the image in
the ego of the wounded and painful zone, the violence of the trauma leaves
54
External aggression
Injury
Protective
envelope
of the
ego
Massive surge
of energy
Memory
neurones
FIGURE 2
Pain results from an injury to the protective envelope of the ego and from a massive
surge of energy that attacks the memory neurones. The ego is represented in the simplified form of a living vesicle.
its traces. There again it is a matter of the formation of an image, but a very
different one from the immediate and local one elaborated consciously at
the time of the wound. The internal trauma is so upsetting and painful that
its image remains imprinted not only in ordinary memorywhich retrieves
the past as conscious memorybut engraved in the depths of the unconscious, which is also memory, a quite different memory. In effect, the
unconscious harbors the past but does not reflect it to the surface of consciousness. Thus, the pain of the trauma remains marked in the unconscious, but its return will take other forms than the mere recollection of an
unfortunate episode. Certainly the person who has suffered a trauma can
recall the circumstances of the accident, recover the unbearable feelings
that he or she experienced, and live in the fear of a new attack, but there
are the other forms of the return of the trauma that he or she ignores. The
CORPOREAL PAIN
55
56
neuron contains the mnemonic trace or image of a past event and the affect
that invests it. In these two cases we have both a representative content and
its affective investment.
Finally, the third neuronal group, like the first, carries out a perceptual
function directed not toward the external world but toward the inner world
to capture the fluctuations of internal energy. These perceptual neurons do
not only have the task of detecting the variations of psychical tension but
also of echoing them in consciousness as affects, whether agreeable, disagreeable, or painful. They are agreeable when the rhythm of energetic flux is synchronic, disagreeable when accelerated and asynchronic, and painful when
the rhythm is broken or in turmoil.
What must we retain of this synthetic tableau? First, that this fiction of
the ego imagined by Freud at the very beginning of the twentieth century
remainswith some minor variationsthe matrix of psychical life such as
most psychoanalysts conceive of it today. A remarkable fiction indeed, judging by its echoes in the current scientific literature. Let us retain the concept
of the memory neuron that assists us in understanding the transformation of
corporeal pain into unconscious pain.
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its energy in the form of a new pain, wound, action, or painful affect. Freud
advanced the term facilitation (Bahnung) to designate this phenomenon of
the sensitizing of the memory neurons. The influx of energy has sensitized the
neurons to such an extent that weak excitations will suffice to reactivate
them and reanimate the image that they contain. These excitations will not
be as brutal as the burn, but imperceptible and fainter. Such stimulations
could be either external or internal. Thus, as soon as the mnemonic image of
the aggression is reactivated by one of the unnoticed excitations a new pain
can occur, for example, less violent than the first and located in a different
part of the body from the one affected by the initial accident. In this case, the
subject will experience an inexplicable pain that is without any discernable
organic cause. He or she will suffer without knowing that the present pain is
the active memory of a past pain.
I would like to dwell for a moment on this painful return because of its
clinical importance. This new paina frequent cause of medical consultationoften appears to the clinician as a physical suffering without organic
cause. We can imagine a doctor confronted with a patient complaining of
muscular, visceral, or tendon-related pain that cannot be explained. Perhaps
he or she will be content to attribute this pain to a vague psychological origin and diagnosis it as a psychogenic pain. Prudently, he or she will probably
prescribe an anti-anxiety medication, or perhaps a placebo. However, we are
convinced that his or her clinical attitude would be modified if he or she
admittedas we propose in these pagesthat the body is a screen on which
memories are projected and that the current somatic suffering of the patient
is the vivid resurgence of an earlier pain that had been forgotten. He or she
would invite the patient to speak about earlier traumatic shocks, whether
psychical or corporeal, that the patient could remember.
But we have said that the earlier pain could just as well reappear transfigured in another affect that is as painful as a feeling of guilt, transformed
into a psychosomatic injury or metamorphosed into an impulsive act. How do
we explain these avatars of pain?
It could happen that the flux of painful energy can strike other neurons
than those upon which the image of the aggression is inscribed: other neurons, for example, that carry the traces of painful events that were experienced but then forgotten by the subject. Consider the case of a person absent
from the bedside of his or her dying father and who has forgotten what, at the
time, was considered a moral failure. Let us suppose that this moral failure
remained engraved in a memory neuron. Later, on the occasion of a violent
corporeal pain the neuron of the memory of the moral failure will be facilitated, that is, sensitized so that a slight ulterior stimulation will suffice to
awaken an inexplicable feeling of guilt in the subject. The patient will feel
oppressed and guilty without understanding the reason for it. With this short
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60
when the external aggression that provoked a traumatic pain leaves its traces
in the unconscious, it also produces a state of hypersensitivity such that a
mere spark can reawaken a new pain. In order to be more precise, we can say
that the unconscious pain does not designate a thing or a sensation apart
from consciousness but a circuit that, reactivated by a slight stimulation, discharges itself into a painful manifestation.
Finally, the unconscious pain is an aptitude, an aptitude of the ego to
remember an earlier traumatic pain, but not as a conscious memory; unconscious pain is the name we give to the unconscious memory of pain.13
What have we tried to understand thus far? Namely, that the psychical
origin of corporeal pain is always the revivification of a primordial pain.
Therefore, in the painful emotion we have both the unpleasant sensation of
today and the reawakening of a first pain. It is precisely this reawakening that
communicates to the unpleasant sensation of the moment its character as a
painful affect, and furthermore, as a specifically human affect. Pain is human
because it is unconscious memory. It is indeed the unconscious that humanizes the painful affect because it gives life again to the former pain of a founding trauma.
Before moving on, we can already draw the following conclusion: at each
stage of its genesis, corporeal pain is marked by the predominance of the psychical factor. In fact, we have seen how the psyche successively forms the representation of the body-injury (ego-consciousness), undergoes the impact of
the disturbance (ego-upheaval), self-perceives the upheaval that it produces
(ego-endoperceptor organ), and registers and restitutes the aforesaid disturbance (unconscious ego-memory).
The developments that follow will confirm the powerful action of the
psyche in the determination of the painful fact.
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ego suffers from a protestation against pain. Corporeal pain is no longer due to
an injury and to the upheaval that goes with it, but from an immense effort of
the ego to fend off the upheaval. Physical pain becomes the expression of a
defensive effort rather than a simple manifestation of an injury of the tissues.
But what is this defense that causes suffering? The answer to this question will be decisive for our later understanding of psychical pain. While the
ego is in a state of shock what does it do to defend itself? How does it react?
It performs a gesture that will increase the suffering; it tries desperately to
heal itself alone by carrying out a sort of self-bandaging. In response to the
injury the ego sends all the energy at its disposal to surround the wound in
order to fill the hole and stop the massive influx of excitations. It is this reactive movement of energywhich Freud called counter-investment or
counter-chargethat is opposed to the brutal eruption of excitation caused
by the burn. However, this self-bandaging is not applied to the damaged tissues of the wound, but on the psychical representation of that wound. And
the fact that the defensive counterinvestment does not concern the wound
itself but the representation of the wound reveals the incontestably psychical
nature of any corporeal pain. Why? Because the response to a physical injury
is not only physiological but is also and above all a displacement of energy
within the network of psychical representations that are constitutive of the
ego. The body is wounded and the ego tends to it by concerning itself with
the representation of the place of the injury (Fig. 3).
Each time that our body suffers a violent event, a psychical reaction is
triggered: the ego counterinvests the mental representation of the damaged
place. An astonishing consequence follows from this: the pain provoked by
the aggression is not diminished by this symbolic bandaging, rather intensified by it. This is the phenomenon of a painful and inadequate defense that I
want to explain now.
In what exactly does this defense consist and why is it painful? Further,
what role does the representation of the area of the wound play?
First, one must recall that the ego functions as a psychical mirror that
reflects, in a mosaic of images, parts of the body, or aspects of things or people to which we are affectively and durably attached. We may then postulate
the following hypothesis: when we are deprived of the integrity of our body
or deprived of our object of attachment, when our physical integrity is at
stake, an affective excess of affective investment of the image of the wounded
place of the body occurs. When the presence of the object is at stake, an excess
of investment of the image of the lost object occurs. Such a compensatory
excess is translated into pain. In psychoanalysis, the overinvestment of the
psychical image of a point of our body is called narcissistic overinvestment,
and that of the image of a partial aspect of the object that is dear to us (the
loved one) is called the overinvestment of the object.
62
External
aggression
Real
wound
Convergence
of all the energy
onto the
representation
(overinvestment)
Psychical
representation
of the
wounded arm
FIGURE 3
The ego bandages the representation of the wound since it is unable to bandage the
real wound.
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ego bandages the symbol of the wound. In this way, to resist the disturbance it
throws itself frantically at the symbol of the affected place and clings to it
affectively with its entire being. It is precisely here that the pain appears; it
results from the desperate effort of the ego to free itself from the disturbance
by focusing exclusively on a symbol. We suffer because we panic in the face
of danger. What causes pain is thus a futile focus on the image of the wounded
body, an inadequate defensive attempt to address the disturbance, a local isolated attempt that, for that very reason, is doomed to failure.
Certainly the question remains of knowing whether the ego could have
reacted differently, more intelligently and less vigorously. Perhaps a global
action would have been more efficacious and less painful than an isolated gesture. But the ego cannot do otherwise. Its blind contraction into a single
point is a survival-reflex and is the only possible response so as not to despair
in the face of the disturbance. We must stress this again: it is in this final reaction of the ego that pain originates.
But it is here that another question presents itself: why does a passionate
attachment to a symbolI mean an excess of energetic charge investing a
representationbecome painful? The answer is contained in one word:
exclusion. Yes, the mental representation of the injured organ is so charged
with energy and so heavy that it is isolated and excluded from the system of
the other structuring representations of the ego. The psychical cohesion then
disappears and the ego must now function with a structure that is destabilized
by the isolation of a representation within the system. Certainly the ego was
able to contain the disturbance but at the price of engendering a monstrous
affect that disturbs it from then on. It is thus, indeed, the polarization of all
psychical energy upon a single representation that has become excentered
that produces the pain. The corollary that rises from our assertion is simple.
We will state it in the following way: there is no corporeal pain without representation. Far from tempering the pain, I intensify it by saturating the representation of my wound with energy.
In this last stage, corporeal pain results from the reactive and passionate
attachment of the ego to the symbol of the injured place of the body. We can
put this more rigorously: the said symbol, overinvested with affect, crystallizes
as a foreign body and weighs upon and rends the fabric of the ego. It is this
tear of the internal fibers that provokes the pain.
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causes, namely, the impression that my pain emanates from the burn; the selfperception of the panic of my libidinal tensions; the revival of immemorial
pain; the mobilization of all of my forces on the mental representation of the
injured arm; and, finally, the isolation of this representation.
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66
But beyond this aid, it has permitted me, above all, to identify the psychical
factor acting in the formation of any corporeal pain, whatever it may be. Let
us recall, in fact, the basic Freudian idea, which we have formulated in the
following way: there is pain sustained by the narcissistic overinvestment of
the representation of the injured place of the body. Such a hypothesis seems
so rich that I would not hesitate to propose it to neurologists who would seek
to unveil the inner mechanisms of pain. You see, we are no longer waiting for
current science to confirm earlier psychoanalytic elaborations. Quite to the
contrary, we invite future scientists to extend the thesis of the overinvestment of the mental image of the affected part of the body. I am convinced
that this Freudian thesis of overinvestment will become a key concept for the
neurological research of pain in the future.
That said, your question provides me the opportunity to draw a chart
comparing Freudian conceptsparticularly in the Projectwith the
hypotheses of neuroscience. I will then comment upon the theory of pain
recently proposed by an eminent representative of the neurosciences, Antonio R. Damasio.15
I will attempt, therefore, to highlight the themes that are surprisingly
common to psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. I think in particular of the
definition of memory, which we identify with the unconscious and which
neurologists explain in terms of images stored in the neurons. Another question is that of the rhythm of the drives with regard to the rhythm of the propagation of the nerve impulse. Finally, I will consider the relation between the
structural network of the ego and the spatial order of the neuronal system. As
you see, we have a good deal of work to do.
Let us address the problem of memory. What does neuroscience teach us?
It formulates hypotheses that are surprisingly similar to Freuds first elaborations concerning a memory that occurs at the cellular level in memory neurones (SE I, 299300). Today, some scientists, including Jean Pierre
Changeux, postulate the existence of mental images stored in the neurons
called mental objects.16 Others, such as Damasio, think that the mental
images, instead of being stored in the cells, stem from a proto-image that they
call a potential representation. The appearance of a painful memory, for
example, would result from the activation of a so-called potential representation; this representation is not the memory itself but the means of forming
the memory. In fact, the expression potential representation does not designate an intra-neuronal element but rather a very specific connection
between different neurons when awaiting reactivation.
But whether the neurons retain a stored image or whether they elaborate
it on the basis of a potential representation, these scientific hypotheses are
surprisingly similar to Freuds early findings. You recall my remark about the
memory neurons that are capable of retaining the images of the hostile object
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at the origin of a first pain. Recall our remark concerning the memory neurons that are able to store the image of the aggressive object at the origin of
the first pain. We have said that the reactivation of the memory neurons by
a slight endogenic excitation provoked either the appearance of a pain similar to the initial pain or various manifestations in the spheres of thought or
action. These are manifestations the subject will undergo without understanding why.
I think also of another rapprochement that can be discerned between
Freud and contemporary scientists concerning precisely the memory neurones and the biochemical transmission of the nerve impulses. In fact, we
know now that the painful feeling results, among other factors, from the
mediation of a protein called substance P (where P stands for pain). The
nociceptive message (of pain) is transmitted when the axon of a neuron
secretes the neurotransmitter P that enters into contact with the receptors
located in the dendrite of another neuron. Now we are surprised to see in the
Project the hypothesis of the existence of a similar chemical contact
between the memory neurones and another category of neurons called
secreting neurons. According to Freud, these neurons, having themselves
been stimulated by weak internal excitations, would release a substance that
generates pain. It is a substance that, once produced, would excite the memory neurons, revive the image of the hostile object, and reawaken the former
pain. In this way one can imagine that a weak endogenic excitation relayed
by a secreted substance is capable of reviving the memory neuron and causing a new pain to appear. I find Freuds ideas absolutely surprising given the
time in which he proposed them (1895) and strikingly contemporary in relation to modern neuroscientific theories.
You have advanced the idea of an unconscious memory by relying on the concept of
memory neurons. Could you clarify the nature of these neurons and their relation to the unconscious?
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rhythm of the drives within, and on the other hand, echoes it to the surface
of consciousness. What is the intermediary? It is the ego itself when it exercises its twofold function of endopsychic detection and conscious translation.
You can see that the psychoanalytic concept of affect in general and pain
in particular cannot be understood without the notion of endopsychic perception. This is a perception that, alone, allows us to account for the radar
function of the ego when it registers the libidinal cadence and translates it
into consciousness in the form of agreeable affects of pleasure, disagreeable
affects of displeasure or even pain. Freud had already hinted at this notion of
endopsychic perception of the ego when in the Project, while studying the
perceptual neurons (a group distinct from the memory neurons), he differentiated two types. There are in effect two types of perceptual neurons. Those
that perceive the excitations coming from the periphery of the body and others that capture the oscillations of internal tensions and transpose them into
consciousness as affects. The first only perceive external stimulations and the
others detect internal affects of these stimulations and translate them into
conscious affects.
Specifically, it is the latter group, the one that detects and translates,
that interests us. The neurons that detect the amplitude and cadencies of the
internal tensions play the role of a two-sided sensorial organ. On the one
hand, they capture the tension of the rhythm and on the other hand they
transforms these rhythms into diverse affects including pain. Thus, pain is an
affect felt consciously that expresses intolerable variations and sudden ruptures of
the rhythm of the drives.
Let us continue our dialogue with the neurosciences and address now the
third point shared in common. I had moved away from it to better explore a
theme that is important to me, that of rhythm in relation to some of my
major statements about pain. This third point concerns the incidence of the
topology of the neuronal network on the transmission of the nerve signals.
Today the neuroscientists have a growing interest in studying the spatial
arrangement of the neurons. Now, I could not help comparing the topology
of the neuronal network to the topology of the ego established by Freud in
1895 (SE I, 32224). Once again, I was surprised to see how Freuds early
writings contained the signs of modern scientific developments.
At that time, Freud conceived of the ego as a network of neurons organized in such a way that the flux of excitations running through it could,
according to the circumstances, be inhibited. He did not hesitate to claim
that if an ego exists it must hinder the primary process of the psyche, that
is, hinder the circulation of free energy. The function of the ego is to stem
energetic movement through a very precise spatial order: that of a lattice.
This lattice is arranged in such a way that a neuron that is overinvested with
energy can transfer part of its charge toward lateral neurons. The ego,
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representation of a wounded body that results from it. The other perception
described by Damasio, whence comes the emotional quality, and that he
characterizes as a perception of a global disturbance of the body, recalls our
second moment of the formation of pain, namely, the egos self-perception of
the state of internal disturbance.
While Damasio speaks of the perception of the state of disturbance of the
body, we advance the idea of an internal and immediate apperception of the
sudden variations of the libidinal tensions or, more exactly, of the break of
the rhythm of the drives. It is as if, in order to take account of the painful
emotion, Damasio depended on the global perception of the body without
daring to imagine that it is not the body that is perceived but indeed the psyche. The difference between us can be summarized in the exchange. Damasio would say, Painful emotion emerges when the brain perceives the disturbed state of the body. I would respond that pain emerges when the
distraught ego self-perceives the libidinal disturbance.
Could you speak again about psychogenic pain? How are we to understand that a
pain is located in only one part of the body?
Psychogenic pain
Let us recall first that psychogenic pain is not a psychical pain but a corporeal suffering, minor or major, acute or chronic, the origin of which is psychical (psychogenic means that it is of psychical origin). This is a somatic
pain experienced by the subject without any organic reason to justify it, and
to which one attributeslacking a better alternativea psychological cause
that is in general unknown. It is a matter of persistent physical pains, most
often erratic and deceptive. When they are attached to a specific place of the
body, their locality remains enigmatic. Generally, the patient describes his or
her pain in a self-indulgent manner, in a language rich in detail or at times
confused and evasive. But more important is the special relationship that the
patient maintains with his or her pain. The patient speaks of his or her suffering as a capricious or demanding other that inhabits his or her body.
That said, before responding to your question on the place where the
pain appears, I must pose another question: What are the psychical origins
of this psychogenic suffering experienced in the body without an identifiable
organic cause? I propose three possible origins of psychogenic pain.
The first of the psychical causes capable of provoking a psychogenic pain
presupposes the idea of a body endowed with memory. You will recall our discussion in the beginning. A much earlier pain, intense and felt in a specific
place of the body, has left such traces in the unconscious that later an internal
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Thus, we can say that the drive encounters by chance a banal pain.
Henceforth this accidental muscular pain affects the drive, and their fates are
forever intertwined. So, in our example, the drive affected by the pain in the
shoulder is changed later into a painful feeling situated in the shoulder without any explainable cause. We can see how a repressed drive can convert
itself in a suffering body because it was wounded long ago, stamped by an
earlier organic pain, however minor it was. We will call this third mechanism
the somatic imprint of the drive. In other words, a banal pain, present in a certain place of the body and associated with the surge of a drive, has opened the
way for that drive to reappear later in the form of a unexplained painful sensation in that same place of the body.
If we want now to compare the hysterical origin of psychogenic pain to
that other origin we have just discussed, we would suggest the following.
Whereas conversion hysteria, in its very definition, falls under the Freudian
concept of the enigmatic leap from the psychical to the somatic, from the
drive to the body, the third cause of the psychogenic pain falls under a more
general concept: a leap from the somatic to the psychical, then from the psychical to the somatic. There is a leap from an organic pain to the drive and
from the drive to a psychogenic pain.19
Allow me a synthetic comment to conclude this point. Psychogenic pain
can be defined in three different ways. First, as the painful revival of a former
organic pain that has been forgotten: psychogenic pain is here the memory in
the body of a former pain. Next, it can be defined as the painful expression
of a repressed drive that previously affected a place in the body: this is the
case of conversion. Finally, it can be the case that psychogenic pain manifests
a drive that has itself been affected by a past organic pain: this is the case of
the somatic imprint. I think I have responded to your question concerning the
place where psychogenic pain chooses to appear. It can appear where a former painof which it is the memoryhas appeared. It can also appear in the
place affected long ago by a drive or a place where the drive had been affected
by a previous pain.
You have defined unconscious pain as a chain of events beginning with a painful
trauma and ending in the reawakening of that trauma. But how can we speak of a
pain that would be both experienced and unconscious?
Unconscious pain
I prefer to respond to you by proposing a schema that clearly separates the
past from the present, that is to say, the past traumatic pain and its reappearance in a present pain. I hope to show you that unconscious pain is different
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76
This line of questioning may seem abstract and purely speculative, but it
raises a major clinical problem for the practitioner. If the psychical representation was held apart while remaining in the system, corporeal pain would be
explained by a mechanism of conversion similar to that of hysteria. Pain
would thus be the somatic double of a symbolic element or, in other words,
the somatic expression of the representation of the wounded body. Following
this line of thought, we would take corporeal pain to be a hysterical symptom
or would even conclude that all physical suffering, in whatever form, is to
some extent hysterical. We could even state that the psychical part at the
basis of all organic pain is subject to the same law of conversion hysteria.
If, on the contrary, we follow another line of thought that takes the
exclusion of the representation of the wounded body to be a radical exclusion
from the ego, we would assimilate the mechanism of corporeal pain to foreclosure, that is, a specific mechanism of psychosis. In that case, we should
draw another conclusion: all physical pain obeys the same laws of production
as psychotic hallucination.
Finally, what position should we adopt? We cannot decide. We observe
once more the extent to which pain slips between the fingers and evades reason. And we see that it is situated not only at the limit of the body and the
soul, but also on the border between hysteria and psychosis.
Lessons on Pain
The pages that follow are the transcription of an oral seminar that was the
basis of this work. In spite of the stylistic differences between these lessons
and the preceding chapters, a single intention guides the entire book: to raise
pain to the rank of a psychoanalytic concept. In the course of these lessons,
influenced by Lacans theory, you will find a kind of thinking in progress,
which is not the transmission of an already established knowledge. Also, in
order to remain faithful to this spirit, I have preferred to maintain the oral
tone, the unavoidable detours and questions that inevitably punctuate the
paths of an elaboration. However, a clear hypothesis orients our entire project: pain is one of the most exemplary figures of jouissance; jouissance here is
not understood in the sense of sexual pleasure, but as the maximal tension
that can be borne by the psyche. Thus, pain is the final stage of jouissance at
the limits of tolerance.
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analysand are capable of speaking without knowing what they are saying.
Nothing binds us more to others than responding to them without understanding the implications of this response. Such an intertwining of signifiers
binds us far more than any love or hate. Transference is therefore far more
powerful at the level of signifiers than at the level of affective relations.
Now, in such a transference structured like a signifying network, sexuality emerges just as it does in the unconscious. Let us call this sexuality jouissance, and ask ourselves how jouissance presents itself in the analytical situation. How does sexuality manifest itself in the analytical relation? Is love
sufficient? Is it enough to say, there is a transference love, to admit the presence of sexuality? These are the questions that lead to the issue of pain. I
believe, indeed, that pain is one of the ways sexualityand even jouissance
appears in the transference. This is what we are trying to investigate, uncover,
and understand. Now, between these general questions that aim at identifying
the various forms of jouissance in the transference (and, in particular, the question of whether pain is one of these forms), there is the following intermediate link: I believethis is my hypothesisthat all forms of jouissance within
the transference relation are dominated by the object. I call these different
forms of jouissance formations of object a. This unifying expression is a way
for me to seek a common logic. Thus, we investigate pain and are trying to
determine whether it corresponds to the logic proper to the formations of
object a, that is, whether the appearance of pain within the cure obeys the
same laws as those of the manifestations of jouissance in the transference.
It is therefore from this perspective that I will approach the theme of
pain. Recall that we already stressed the characteristic of pain as excitation.21
We referred to the Project, where we found the definition of corporeal pain as
a violent excitation erupting in the system that protects the psychical apparatus against excitations (SE I, 32224). The only important point to retain
here is that pain, considered as a traumatic excitation, does not belong to the
criteria of pleasure and unpleasure. Certainly, it is an unpleasant affect, but it
has a very different quality than unpleasure. We recall that the occurrence of
pain means that the pleasure/unpleasure principle that regulates the functioning of our psyche has been abolished. We could thus claim that whenever
there is pain, we are beyond the pleasure principle.
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79
Let us begin with the first question, and let the second one insert itself
in our discussion. We ask: How can pain lead to sexual satisfaction? Freud
provides an answer to this question with which we do not agree. He answers
by using the concept of facilitation, according to which a sexual excitation
arises from a bodily excitation. For our purpose, we could say that sexual excitation is based on a painful sensation. Through various texts, Freud would
claim that physical pain, as an excitation exceeding a certain quantitative
threshold, can be the source of a perverse sexual pleasure. In fact, from a psychoanalytical perspective, all sexual pleasure is perverse since it takes place
at the margins of the physiological life of the body. Sexual pleasure is an
excess that is superimposed on the strict satisfaction of a need (or a disorder of the body): it is always a parasitic pleasure of the body. Thus, a physical
pain can very well give rise to an excitation and a satisfaction of a sexual
nature. This is the position held by Freud in two texts, Three Essays on Sexuality (SE VII, 12343), and, twenty years later, The Economic Problem of
Masochism (SE XIX, 15970). Elsewhere, in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (SE XIV, 11740), Freud would take an opposite view, noting that it
is physical pain that exceeds and encroaches on the sexual domain. But
whether pain exceeds sexuality or sexuality exceeds pain, they are always
combined. Freud names this relationship libidinal co-excitation. This is
how he would answer your question: the libidinal co-excitation accounts for
the fact that one can find a perverse pleasure in a painful experience.
Such an answer, however, does not satisfy us; we must go farther. One
needs to raise a question that is not often asked: What is the genesis of sexuality, from whence does it emerge? Freuds answer and, later, Lacans are both
quite similar. Sexuality emerges in our relationship with the orifices of the
body, where there are edges, insufficiencies, palpitating lips, where the body
trembles, opens and closes. Sexuality emerges where the body vibrates and
opens in a gap that is not only orificial but also temporal. There is indeed a
temporal gap between the drive erupting through partial and disorganized
bursts and an immature ego that is not ready to manage these uncontrollable
excesses of desire. Freud says as much when he situates the ego prior to the
sexual drives it cannot manage and beyond these same drives, when the ego
imagines the body to be more mature than it is.
With Lacan, it is even more explicit insofar as he invents the wellknown mirror stage. What is at stake in such a stage is a discordance, a fundamental gap between a premature body and the anticipatory image of that
body that is already mature. There is, therefore, a temporal gap between an
incomplete body and its reflected image, one that is overly unified and elaborate. There is also a gap between a body that experiences the distressing
swarming of internal sensations, and its image that, before it, reflects it in a
unified and jubilant manner. Sexuality emerges in the discordance between
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our immature body and an imaginary order that anticipates a maturity that
will never really be attained. It is in this gap between levels, between these
two planes of the body and of the image, that we can situate the place of the
emergence of the libido conceived of as a kind of hydraulic energy.
But the mirror stage still does not offer us the complete matrix of the
genesis of sexuality. What gives us this complete matrix is indeed discordance, but not between an immature body and an image, not between a lacking body and an anticipatory image, but between the desire of the child and
that of the mother. For psychoanalysis, the essential, almost axiomatic discordance consists in the fact that the desire of the child is absolutely inoperative before the desire of the mother. One could almost say of these two
desires that one is impotent, and the other impossible. One could also state
that the impotence of the childs desireimpotence of the physical means
that are necessary for the sexual actfaces the impossible, that is, inaccessible character of the mothers desire. It is in this discordance experienced by
the child, between the impotence of his desire and the inaccessibility of the
desire of the Other that, at the phallic stageat the stage of the Oedipus
complexsexuality emerges. Let us change our terms, and instead of speaking of the emergence of sexuality, let us say the emergence of the phallus
as signifier. On the basis of this fundamental discordance between an incomplete, premature desirethat of the childand the intolerable and impossible desire of the mother, the phallus emerges as a signifier that indicates all
dissymetries between impotence and impossibility, or between the immature
condition and the imaginary illusion of a possible whole.
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fier like the phallus. All are aborted phenomena that cannot become signifiers.
It is different with the penis. At the oedipal stage, in the relation between the
desire of the child and the desire of his mother, the penis is not an object that
is lost, but only threatened. This threat provokes such anxiety that the child is
forced to find a solution to this impasse. To remove the threat of the mutilation
of his organ, he must find the most humane solution: that of inventing a signifier. To save his penis, he transforms it into a symbol. Now, the difference
between the penis and all other objects that are consumed by desire and
detachable from the body, is that the penis remains the only part of the body
that is capable of becoming a signifier. There cannot be a signifying breast, a
signifying voice, or signifying feces, for the simple reason that none of these
objects can be detached under a threat or in a state of anxiety. Thus, none of
these parts can accede to the rank of signifier. However, they will remain
attached to erogenous orifices and will become inoperative in the domain of
sexual desire. It is as if sexual desire was attracted to these objects, consumed
them, then disposed of them. The object of the drivesuch as the pacifier or
even the mothers nippleis thus a disposable object: once it has been used by
our desires, we drop it and move to something else, to another object. This is
what Lacan would have called the fall of object a. The fate of the penis is
quite otherwise; it does not fall but on the contrary it is raised to the status of
the signifier of desire. Now, precisely when desire consumes an object and a
residue remains, the fall of this remainder follows the logic of sexual desire and
its signifier, the phallus. The relation of the child to the breast is a relation
dominated by desire: the child seeks the breast, consumes it, and finally abandons it. We will say that weaning is a separation ruled by the phallic signifier
for the simple reason that the phallus is the signifier of desire. Let us note that
the attraction for the breast, from our perspective, is an expression of the sexual desire of the infant, and that the pleasure of sucking is also sexual.
It is precisely this process of separation that we need to investigate, not
by treating of the breast or the gaze, but of pain. The idea I would like to propose is that one should add pain to the list of the objects of the drive, and conceive
of its detachment from the body as a separation brought about by the phallic
signifier. Now what are the conditions that allow us to think and verify that
pain is phallic, that is, that pain is an object that can be consumed? In other
words, how can we understand the fact that pain satisfies an essentially sexual desire? There are three conditions that I would like to propose:
The Other must be present for sexual desire to exist.
For sexual desire to exist, there must be a motion of the drive following a
circular trajectory composed of three curves: the first, an active one, goes
toward the Other; the second, a passive one, comes from the Other; and
the third, also active, is directed at oneself.
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83
sider things from the beginning. To identify pain with phallic jouissance
means that pain is a sexual jouissance engendered under the aegis of sexual
desire, and its signifier, the phallus. We should then find in the emergence of
pain the same oedipal context where the powerless desire of the child faces
the inaccessible desire of the mother. However, I already stressed that this
response did not satisfy us and was in no way helpful for our understanding of
the pain of melancholy or that of hysteria, for example. For a pain to be considered as sexual jouissance, there must be more than the reproduction of the
phallic situation: the three conditions that I just stated must be present.
Now, the three conditions are verified when we consider pain as the
object of the sadomasochistic drive. Without dwelling on the general concept
of drive, and before going to what I think is the heart of the matter, I would
simply like to make a few remarks about the sadomasochistic drive.
First, I say sadomasochistic drive and not sadomasochistic perversions;
indeed, drive is not perversion. The difference is clear: in the drive, the object
is present in a naked state, stripped of any semblance [semblant], while in the
perverse staging, what gives coherence and coordinates the perverse scenario is
precisely the semblance of the libidinal object. For example, the object of the
scopic drive is the gaze, but what counts in the perversion of the voyeur or the
exhibitionist is not the gaze in itself, but the form, the semblance of the gaze.
Now, what is the semblance of the gaze in the case of the voyeur? It is the modesty of the other, the blushing of the little girl faced with the fact that someone
sees her nude. Or even the surprise, the shame, and the anger of the lovers discovered while making love by someone in hiding. What the voyeur really seeks
to come upon is not the intimacy of the couple, but the moment when the surprised partners will cover up in shame and react with violence. In this way,
then, in perversion it is not the object that matters but the semblance of the
object, that is to say, the effects that the object provokes and the situation it
creates. In the case of the drive, it is the object itself that matters. There is a
second difference between drive and perversion, namely, that in the latter case,
the object is petrified and crystallized in its semblance and the actors in the scenario play stereotypical roles. For example, in sadomasochistic perversion, the
place of the subject can only be that of the agent or the victim; in voyeurism,
the pervert is the one who sees; in exhibitionism, the one who reveals. In the
case of the drive, the subject does not occupy a clearly defined placeone
should even say that the subject is not there, that there is no subject. The drive
is an egoless montage reduced to the bare form of a circuit that gravitates
around an objectwhether it be the gaze, pain, or some other object. I therefore am speaking of sadomasochistic drive, and not of sadomasochistic perversion. This, of course, is only a theoretical difference, but it will always be difficult to discern precisely whether it is drive or perversion that is in question. It
is already important that we clarified this distinction.
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Now, pain in the sadomasochistic drive only appears after three stages.
Those three successive stages of the drive follow two of the four vicissitudes
of the drive. These vicissitudes are, one recalls: repression, sublimation, turning back on the person, and finally the reversal of aims. The two that interest us here are the turning back, which concerns the source, and the reversal,
which concerns the aim. Following the way processes of reversal and turning
back take place, we will distinguish three stages: three stages that are defined
according to the grammatical forms of the verb indicating the action of the
drive. With respect to the sadomasochistic drive, the verb is to torture, and
the three stages are therefore: the active form (to torture), the passive form
(to be tortured), and the reflexive form (to torture oneself). Pain only
appears at the end of the three stages (Fig. 4).
The first stage of the sadomasochistic driveto torturecorresponds
to the movement of a purely sadistic tendency, sadistic in the general sense
of the term. In this first active appearance of the drive, the aim is to torture
the Other, but without the intention of making him or her suffer, nor of
taking pleasure in the suffering. It is not a matter, strictly speaking, of provoking pain in the Other. Freud makes an important remark, in this regard,
to which he returns often. Sadism of the first stage is an aggressive libidinal
tendency, to be sure, but without the intention of provoking a suffering. He
calls it the drive to mastery, that is to say, the drive to possess the object
without intending to hurt it. There is a will to conquer the Other and dom-
4.
The pleasure of torturing the Other (sadism)
To torture oneself
1.
3.
EGO
2.
The pleasure of being tortured by the Other (masochism)
FIGURE 4
O
T
H
E
R
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inate it without making it suffer. Freud gives the example of sadistic children who destroy all they encounter without, however, seeking to provoke
pain. We can refer to this sadismdestructive but not malevolentas
original sadism.
The second stageto be torturedis that of turning back this sadoaggressive tendency on oneself. It is in this turning back on the person that
the ego truly experiences pain and masochistically enjoys the experience.
This would be the pain and the pleasure provoked by the torture that the supposedly sadistic Other would inflict on him or her. What Other? The ego
itself or, more precisely, a part of the ego. The ego splits in two: one part that
causes pain and the other that suffers and experiences jouissance from the
pain. I just said ego, although earlier I claimed that there was no subject in
the drive. We will nonetheless use this term during our explication and one
will see how the ego disappears as a subject.
The second stage is the masochistic stage. But it is necessary for me to
make a remark here. Freud significantly modified his conception of
masochism. In 1915, he formulated things as I have explained them, while in
1924, in the Economic Problem in Masochism, he added a further specification. He thought it would be better to conceive of masochism as no longer
appearing after the sado-aggressive drive, but as already there, even before
that first stage. This is what Freud called primary masochism. But, I suggestso that we not confuse our pathswe set this remark aside and come
to the third stage, as described in metapsychology (SE XIV, 12729).
The third stage is to torture oneself: When once feeling pains has
become a masochistic aim, the sadistic aim of causing pain can arise also . . .
(SE XIV, 128). In the third stage of secondary sadism, the tendency is to
make the Other suffer and to take pleasure in its pain. But Freuds thinking is
not so simple. Until now, we have not discussed sexual pain. In this last stage
of sadism, properly speaking, the pleasure of making the Other suffer could
only be understood if we accept that the victim is first and foremost . . . the
ego itself. The humiliated other, beaten, humbled, or soiled, is the ego, as if
there had been a second return upon the self. In fact, the drive returns twice
on the ego: a first time, when it takes masochistic pleasure in being tortured
by the Other (second stage), and a second time, when it is a matter of experiencing the same pain that the tortured Other experiences. The ego tortures
itself and hurts itself, in order to know what the tortured Other would experience. It is in this case that Freud uses the verb in its reflexive form: to torture oneself. One sees that the third stage of sadism, properly speaking,
involves two parts: that of hurting oneself and that of causing the Other to
experience the same painful feeling.
Let us dwell for a moment on this third stage, to torture oneself. When
I say oneself, I mean that it is the ego itself who is both victim and agent of
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the torture. I ask that one not take this reasoning to be fancy theoretical
footwork: this is in fact a central notion from the clinical point of view. Why?
Because, if we accept this idea, we must draw several conclusions from it.
What, finally, does this stage of self-torture mean? Whether it is a matter of
pain that one inflicts without malevolent intention (first stage), or of a pain
that one submits to masochistically (second stage), or of a pain that one identifies with the Other subjected to sadism (third stage), we are always dealing
with a masochistic pain, that is to say, the pleasure of a pain suffered by the
ego. This is why Freud tells us that there is an identification of the ego with
the Other who suffers. In the context of the sadomasochistic drive, pain is
always felt by the ego, either because it suffers it, or because it identifies with
the one who suffers it. We can conclude that sexual jouissance, in the context
of the sadomasochistic drive, always remains a fundamentally masochistic
jouissance. Thus one should no longer speak of a sadomasochistic drive, but
only of a masochistic drive.
We must make a remark here. Even in the case of perversion properly
speaking, the sadist who tortures his or her partner also undergoes a
masochistic jouissance. Why? Because he or she acts following the will of an
Other. In other words, I can undergo jouissance masochistically as the victim
of a punishment, but can also undergo jouissance by being submitted to the
law or the will of a master. Since the sadist acts following the will of a
supreme master, he or she undergoes jouissance masochistically through his or
her servility.
These remarks are clinically important because they alter our psychoanalytic listening. I am not necessarily speaking of perverse patients, who rarely
seek analysis, and, if they do, do not stay long. The true pervert only seeks
consultation at certain moments of collapse and such moments last a very
short time. This is why it is so difficult to have a clinical experience with subjects who act out perverse actions. Nevertheless, they teach us a lot about the
perverse fantasies of neurotics. Thus, when we receive a patient who presents
the symptoms of a perverse sadist, we try to make him or her understand that
the jouissance that permeates him or her is in fact a masochistic jouissance,
since it is the object of the will of the Other.
Let us come to our conclusion, namely, that pain only appears in the
third stage: causing oneself pain, torturing oneself; pain only appears when
the ego identifies with the other who suffers and, beyond that, with the one
who provokes the pain. As soon as the ego identifies with the masochistic
and sadistic Other, as soon as it assumes the two roles, it inscribes the characters of the sadomasochistic fantasy on the scene of its psyche: a sadistic
superego and an ego that is always masochistic. In the case of hysteria, we
find the same duplication: recall Freuds text Hysterical Phantasies and
Their Relation to Bisexuality (SE IX, 166). He describes the example of a
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87
fantasy where the hysteric is both the violator of the young girl and the violated young girl. Freud drew this conclusion from a case of a patient who
mimicked a rapist with one hand, and mimicked the call for help of the victim, with the other hand. From this example, we understand that a fantasy
always implies an interchangeable double position: subject-violator and subject-violated, executioner and victim.
In the case of the sadomasochist, we find the same complexity: the ego
is the one who causes pain, who inflicts pain on itself, and the one who
endures the pain. What is important in each case is that the subject undergoes jouissance masochistically. Why? For the simple reasonI insistthat
he or she undergoes jouissance from being, at one and the same time, the victim and the agent.
Let us summarize: as sexual jouissance, pain emerges precisely when the
ego abandons external reality to live through the characters of his or her fantasy alone. A convergence and condensation appears between three terms:
the ego who suffers the pain, the sadistic ego who tortures itself (sadistic
superego), and pain itself. We therefore have three terms that are merged in
one element: the ego that undergoes jouissance from its own suffering. In sum,
we are faced with a convergence of Ego/Other/Pain, the three becoming one
and the same thing in the fantasy.
But in what does pain consist? Pain is the object around which the libidinal complex is organized and around which the libidinal circuit turns. Pain
isthis is how I defined it in my book LInconscient venir 22an in-between,
a body-interval. Pain detaches from the body and falls in the intermediary
space between the ego and the Other, between the ego who undergoes jouissance from suffering and the one who undergoes jouissance from causing suffering, or, more simply, pain falls between the masochistic ego and the sadistic superego. We can certainly consider pain as an object with which the ego
identifies, but pain remains in itself an absent object around which the libidinal circuit turns. That is what is difficult to understand: apart from the fantasy, we have no clinical representation of the drive, and even less of the
libidinal object. If you ask me where pain is located in the transference, one
would need to look into the sadomasochistic fantasy in the analytic relation
and imagine that painthe libidinal objecthas no substance. It is a painhole, a pain-interval.
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times quickly, at times slowlythat he or she was only the miserable instrument of someone else. When he or she tortured the victim, he or she ignored
the fact that he or she underwent jouissance masochistically from being the
instrument of a supreme master who commanded him or her. Beyond his or
her coldness and cruelty, the torturer is something of a monstrous puppet.
The pervert encounters the same limit when, for example, the masochist
realizes that the pain must not be too intensefor that would mean death
or when the sadist realizes that he or she is nothing other than a puppet
guided by the hands of a master. It is at this point that he or she anguishes
before his or her own clown-like image. This confrontation of the pervert
with its own limit is called the denial of castration. Such an expression
means that the perverse subject recognizes that he is castrated while denying his limits and believing himself capable of going beyond them. Now, precisely, no speaking being can undergo jouissance fully. This is why masochistic jouissance remains a partial jouissance in relation to an incommensurable
jouissance, that of the will of the Other. This is where the problem lies: the
notion of the Other functions as much for the pervert as it does for the psychotic and the neurotic. For the neurotic, there is a jouissance of the Other,
but it is not, as it is for the pervert, the jouissance of a God or a Master. The
Other of the neurotic is a father who enjoys and possesses all women, it is a
fantasmatically perverse father. For the perverse subject, on the other hand,
the jouissance of the Other is the insatiable will of a master who commands
him or her. For the neurotic, the jouissance of the Other is the debauchery of
the father.
Before concluding, we can introduce the theme that will be developed in
the next lesson. I just stated that, in the drive, the object appears stripped of
any semblance, while in perversion, semblance occupies the center of the
perverse scenario. Now, the semblance that crystallizes in the sadomasochistic scenariothe semblance of painis the scream. What is fetishized, what
is crystallized, that around which the perverse scene is arranged, is a scream
that simulates pain as well as pleasure. The simulacrum of pain, that is, its
fetishized feature, is the scream.
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Oral
Demand
of the
Other
Anal
Pleasure
principle
Desire
of the
Other
Glance
Jouissance
of the
Other
Voice
Pain
FIGURE 5
Pain is a new object of the drive, when the drive is out of control and is no longer
ruled by the pleasure principle.
that all these libidinal trajectories are ruled by the pleasure principle, except
for pain, which supposes the neutralization of this principle.
We previously identified the three conditions that would allow us to
approach pain as an object of the sadomasochistic drive. Following the four
stages of the libidinal trajectories, we found that the ego, the Other, and
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pain merged in one phenomenon: pain as an object of the drive. Now this
identification is called fantasy. More exactly, it is called masochistic fantasy. I do not say sadomasochistic fantasy, but only masochistic. I will not
go back over what we have already established. As an object, pain only
appears at the source of the drive, after the double loop of the circling of
the libidinal trajectory, when the second little loop closes. Let us recall the
three stages of the libidinal motion: to torture, to be tortured, and to
torture oneself. It is when the second loop closesto torture oneself
that the ego identifies with the object-pain. It is at that point that pain is
finally constituted as an object of the drive, that is to say, as sexual pain.
But let us not forget that pain, as a libidinal object, is also a fantasmatic
pain, an object of fantasy. As a libidinal object, pain is a hole, an absence;
and as an object of fantasy, it is that same hole, but filled by the subject
(identification of the subject with the object). Now, whether as a vacant
hole or as a hole inhabited by the subject, whether as real or fantasmatic,
pain remains invariably unconscious, as unconscious as the originary fantasies of which Freud spoke.
We thus propose to add pain to the list of libidinal objects (objects a). If
the breast is detached from the body, following the cut of the demand for the
Other, the feces detached following the cut of the demand of the Other, the
gaze following the cut of the desire of the Other, and the voice following the
cut of the desire of the Other, pain, on the contrary, is the ultimate object,
the ultimate fantasy. That fantasy does not face the demand or the desire of
the Other, but its jouissance. What does this mean? This means that pain is
the part that is sacrificed to avoid suffering, and to avoid confronting intolerable jouissanceeven if this jouissance is an unrealizable threat.
The extreme and intolerable jouissancethe jouissance of the Other
remains for the neurotic the background of all his or her fantasies, from the
primal scene until what concerns us now, the sadomasochistic fantasy. In the
case of the latter, in contrast to the other fantasies, this unimaginable and
unattainable suffering becomes imminent and perceptible. The most caricatured human figure by which the neurotic represents the Other in a
masochistic fantasy of flagellation, for example, is that of a perverse Other.
Now this Other laughs about my suffering, is cruel and severe, demands and
commands. What does he or she command of me? He or she commands that
I undergo jouissance and suffer, and undergo jouissance from my suffering.
Undergo jouissance! [Jouis] screams my perverse superego, Undergo jouissance from everything beyond your pain and beyond your very life. Experience death while still alive! In relation to the absurdity of such an exhortation, the actual jouissance that I draw from the sadomasochistic fantasythe
pain and the pleasure of feeling itis only a lukewarm satisfaction, a very
restrained response to the unrealistic commands of a perverse superego. In a
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word, pain is a dam against the jouissance of the Other in two ways: I undergo
jouissance from the pain in my flesh so as to avoid suffering the mad jouissance
of death. But I also suffer the pain of the whip in order to appease the perverse will of the Other.
Let us conclude that, for psychoanalysis and for psychoanalysis alone,
pain is a peculiar relief for two reasons: first, because pain is a suffering in
order to escape suffering, a partial suffering associated with a fantasy in order
to avoid an unlimited and dangerous suffering. This partial suffering is also a
peculiar relief, because this pain satisfies a strong need to be punished.
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subject capable of undergoing jouissance from the pain provoked by punishment, but also from the distressful feeling that guilt itself represents. Freud
calls this pleasure of feeling guilty moral masochism.
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96
the guilt and the pain in the guise of a worsening of his or her symptoms.
Now, precisely, why not apply here the Freudian idea of the displacement of
the libido that withdraws from the fantasy in order to invest consciousness?
We would say that the masochistic fantasy is disinvested and reappears outside, transformed in a reality perceived as external. Unconscious guilt and
pain appear, then, in an external and disguised form. The negative therapeutic reaction would be, then, the perceptible simulacra of these two unconscious affects.
That being the case, there is a mask that pain adopts frequently, one that
is very different from clinical pathological formations: the scream and tears.
The scream and the tears are semblances that are the most attuned and closest to that object that is unconscious pain.
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You see now why the masochist is not, properly speaking, a slave, but a
master, a master manipulator of the forms and semblances of pain. The pervert is the master of the semblance; he or she discerns and isolates the semblance, fetishizes and appropriates it. These are the three moments of the perverse operation: detachment of the semblance from the lived experience of
the partner, fetishization and appropriation. Now the semblance that the
masochist masters best is the scream. The pervert is the one who succeeds in
disassociating semblance from jouissance, or, better, the one who succeeds in
disassociating semblance from partial-pain jouissance, or, rather, the libidinalpain object. In other words, the pervert excels in the art of semblance, he or
she is the master of the scream.
The masochistic fantasy is exactly the opposite. While in the perverse
world, the Other is absolutely rejected outside, in the masochistic fantasy the
Other is absolutely assimilated. The Other is so present, so included, and so
absorbed by the ego, that the ego identifies with it. The other gives substance
to the fantasy. While the pervert separates semblance from jouissance, the
neurotic, on the contrary, blends semblance and jouissance in his or her fantasy. If, as we have said, the world of the perversion remains the world of repetition and of the fixed code of forms, then the world of fantasy is the world
of the possible: anything is possible in the fantasy since the subject makes the
Other play all the imaginary roles, and the subject plays them as well. This is
exactly how we must think clinically about the fantasy. When we work with
a patient and think of the fantasy, we must suppose that the subject is everywhere and takes every possible position.
I would like to speak of the scream and suggest this formula: the scream
is the semblance of pain. But before being a mask, the scream is a demand, a
call, the most primal and primitive call, and the most inarticulate. The
scream is already a statement, but an ultra-condensed statement, almost an
interjection. I asked a linguist recently if he understood the scream as an
interjection. He responded that some of his colleagues in fact considered it in
that way, and that some others considered it even more elementary than an
interjection. From the economic point of view, Freud considered the scream
as a release, a release of an excess energy. Given a high level of excitation
(which is nothing other than pain), the scream is a dissipation of energy. But
this release has a secondary function. The scream is a call directed toward two
recipients: first, toward the Other, and then toward oneself. The scream will
be considered as a theme in the next lesson.
Is there a relation between the direct perception of the exterior and the image?
There are two ways to respond to the question. This question is quite opportune because it allows me to clarify the logic of the formations of the object.
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My first response borrows from Freuds text, which we just discussed, and in
which he explains that an endopsychic perception can become an external
perception. One can consider, in effect, that the new investment of the conscious perception is an overly immediate apprehension of the external
object. It is as if the intermediary of an image was lacking. To offer a better
response, we could examine the relation between conscious perception, representation of the object, endopsychic perception, and, finally, the image.
Freud, at the time, was not concerned with the image; the only image that
mattered to him was the ego ideal. The ego ideal was the ego to which the
libido returned.
The second response, which seems more accurate and more complete,
borrows from Lacans optical schema. It would be necessary to clarify that, in
the case of hallucination, delirium, or the negative therapeutic reaction, the
virtual image disappears. More precisely, the virtual image and the object it
reflects are disassociated. Normally, in the sadomasochistic fantasy, such as
we have described it, the Other is absolutely included, absorbed by the subject, and the subject by the object. Now, this absorption of the Other occurs
due to the virtual image that the Other reflects back to me and, particularly,
through the hole of the virtual image. What hole? The one Lacan calls ( )
or imaginary phallus. It is through the image reflected by the Other, and the
hole in this image, that I appropriate it. In fact, there is only a fantasy on this
condition: the imaginary dimension. In other words, one sees that when we
speak of the imaginary, it is not simply a matter of an image but of an image
with holes [troue], pierced [troue] by the imaginary phallus, that is to say,
affected by a missing part. What is missing in the image, that is, what is not
reflected there, if not the libido that invests the image? As energy, the libido
cannot have an image. It is not specular.
While the masochistic fantasy takes the form of the negative therapeutic reaction, it is perceived without the mediation of a virtual image. In order
to use your adjective direct, there would be in fact a sort of direct perception of the external object that would constitute the primary operation of
the formations of the object. In other words, the formation of the object,
unlike the fantasy, is devoid of both a virtual and phallic image. There is no
imaginary mediation, whether in acting out, in hallucination, or, in the negative therapeutic reaction. Therefore, I concede that there is no imaginary;
but above all, that there is no virtual image with holes. What matters in the
image is not the image itself, but that it has holes, otherwise, it would not be
a sexualized image. Why insist on this? Because to state that an image has
holes means that it is the constitutive surface of a sexual fantasy. If there was
no ( ), if the Other was a full image without holes, the scenario of the fantasy would not be sexualized and, to speak in Freudian terms, there would be
no libido. Psychoanalytically speaking, the image only interests us to the
extent that it is invested with libido, that is to say, sexualized and with holes.
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that the analyst must pose to him or herself fairly oftenbecause it would
allow him or her to intervene better and to settle into the transference more
effectivelyis the following: What is my share of the satisfaction in the
action I engage and that engages me?
There is a surprising citation from Freud that is pertinent here (SE
XIX, 56). Freud is interested in the function of the ego in its relation to the
Id and to reality. Thus, he is led to compare the function of the ego to that
of the psychoanalyst. Here is what he writes: The ego offers itself . . . as a
libidinal object to the Id. You can replace ego with analyst and say:
The ego (analyst) offers itself as a libidinal object to the Id and aims at
attaching the Ids libido to itself. It is not only a helper to the Id; it is also
a submissive slave who courts his masters love. Whenever possible it tries
to remain on good terms with the Id; it pretends that the Id is showing obedience to admonitions of reality; it masks the Ids conflict with reality. In
its position midway between the Id and reality, it only too often yields to
the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunistic, and lying, like a
politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favor.
This is extraordinary because, in fact, the analyst can, in certain circumstances, allow him or herself to be tempted and, like the ego, become a liar,
opportunistic, or sycophantic.
I will conclude by reconsidering the theme of masochism on the basis of
this citation from Freud. He continues: Toward the two classes of instincts
the egos attitude is not impartial. Through its work of identification and
sublimation it gives the death instincts in the Id assistance in gaining control over the libido. . . . Then he reconsiders what we have read earlier. The
ego is the assistant of the Id but runs the risk of becoming the object of the
death instincts and of itself perishing. In order to be able to help in this way
it has had itself to become filled with libido; it thus itself becomes the representative of Eros and thenceforward desires to live and be loved. In conclusion, he warns: But since the egos work of sublimation results in a defusion of the instincts and a liberation of the aggressive instincts in the
super-ego, its struggle against the libido exposes it (ego or analyst) to the
danger of maltreatment or death. You will agree that these lines devoted to
the ego are eminently evocative of the action of the psychoanalyst, of his or
her joys and sorrows, and of the struggles and temptations to which he or she
remains vulnerable.
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The scream strikes the ears of the one who utters it and inscribes itself in
his or her memory
In what does the specificity of the scream consist? It is twofold. On the one
hand, the scream is an address to the Other, a call directed to the caretaker;
we will return to the function of the call at the end of this lesson. On the
other hand, the scream is also a sound perceived by the one who utters it.
Thus, the scream goes to the other, but as a sound it comes back to the ears
of the one who uttered it.
We will first consider the scream-sound that we hear before treating it as
a call to the Other. As a sound-discharge, the scream returns to the one who
utters it as a novel echo and is inscribed without his or her knowledge in the
system of memory neurons ( neurones). The one who screams out receives
it as it returns and inscribes it in his or her memory. But of what is the scream
a memory? Let us defer this question for a moment and approach now the
marking function of the scream. The sound uttered by the one who suffers
does not only represent his or her pain, but it also confers on the agentthe
cause of the woundits fundamentally dangerous and aggressive character.
The scream does more than represent pain and the agent who provokes it
it indicates the intolerable character of one and the injurious character of the
other. This shows, indeed, that the essence of pain is realized in a scream. The
scream would not only be the semblance of pain but also the resonant substance giving pain its consistency as an unpleasant affect. This opens an
immense question. You will see that Freud goes even farther and makes a supplementary leap, which we will follow.
But let us remain for a moment where we are now. I say that it is an
important conceptual development to say that the scream incarnates pain (as
opposed to simply representing it), communicates to it its nature as an unacceptable affect, and sustains and founds it. This leads us to our thesis in the
last chapter, according to which the scream is the semblance of pain. I established a relation between the scream as semblance of pain and the perverse
scenario in masochism. We defined the masochist as a master of the semblance-scream, as someone who really knows how to scream. In this respect,
I associate the Lacanian notion of semblance with the simulacra of
Lucretius. In De Natura Rerum,27 he borrows the concept of the simulacrum
from his master Epicurus. I advise psychoanalysts to study it. They will see
that it is absolutely fascinating on a theoretical level, but not only that. I
advise them to read these pages of Lucretius on the simulacrum and then
undertake the work of listening to their patients.
What Lucretius tells us is that the simulacra are strange emanations from
objects, kinds of light membranes, detached from the surface of the bodies,
floating in the air, and flying in all directions. He adds that these membranes
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are in some cases images, and others not; in some cases visible, but not
always. These are often impalpable images, strange exhalations, and, above
all, rapid irradiations that emerge, spread and dissipate very quickly. This text
of Lucretius would demand that we devote an entire seminar on the very crucial concept of semblance in Lacans work by comparing it to the Epicurean
notion of simulacra. Such a seminar could be inspired by the following idea,
which is already sketched in Lucretius: that of a causal relation, almost physical, between the thing and its semblance, between pain and the scream.
The scream is an emanation of pain, but also the breath that enflames it
Let us return to our earlier hypothesis: the view that the scream is not only
a symbolic representative of pain, but that it also marks pain as well as the
agent that provokes it (and its harmful and noxious nature). In this respect,
Freud made an advance in his thinking. He tells us first that the scream is a
representative of pain, then that it gives the pain its distressing tone, and
above allit is here that he makes the leaphe tells us that the scream is
capable of reawakening the pain. Until now, we stated the inverse: that pain
produced the scream. Now we are saying that the scream produces pain.
How is this the case? Here, we can respond to our question: Of what is the
scream a memory? As Pavlovs bell is capable of arousing hunger and making dogs salivate, the scream is just as capable of reawakening pain, as well
as the fear of seeing the cause of the attack reappear. Once uttered, the
scream remains associated, in memory, with the agent of the harm and with
the pain. Henceforth, each time that a sharp screaming strikes the ears of
the subject, whether a scream proffered by the other, or a new scream from
the subject itself, the pain reappears as a memory in the flesh. By hearing the
scream, the subject feels an inexplicable physical pain. The scream is thus
not only a figure of pain, it can also be, because it is a memory, an excitation
that leads to a painful sensation without an identifiable organic cause. It is
as if the sensation was a hallucinated pain. The sequence of our reasoning
would be as follows: the scream reflects pain, the scream refracts pain, and
then the scream triggers pain. It shows it, marks it, and engenders it as a hallucinated production.
To read these pages of Freud in light of what Lacan has taught us, we recognize clearly two important articulations. The first is as follows: the relation
between the scream and the hallucinated pain is a perfect example of the
foundational relation between the signifier and the affect. Lacan has often
been reproached for his intellectualist privileging of the signifier to the detriment of the affect. It suffices to read Freud with this reproach in mind to see
that he himself responds to such a charge. This is not an interpretation on my
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part; it is present throughout the Freudian writings. In fact, the psychoanalytic definition of the affect repeats the Darwinian perspective. It was Darwin
who influenced Freuds thesis that any affect is a repetition, the repetition of
a very old traumatic event. In this respect, an affect experienced today is the
reminiscence of a past experience. More precisely, it is a symbol of an originary trauma. The affect is thus a symbol or, better, a signifier. Why? Because
it is reproducible.
Our idea that the scream generates a hallucinated pain clearly illustrates
a very Lacanian principle, namely, that the signifier takes place. In effect,
it is not sufficient to say that a signifier represents the subject for another signifier, or that the signifier is different from the other signifiers that compose
the system; it is not enough to say that the signifier is only a signifier for other
signifiers. One must rather say that the signifier is what takes place and constitutes the place. Therefore, the relation between the signifier and the affect
is that the signifier constitutes the affect and constitutes the place of the affect. Here
is a principle that is incontestably Lacanian.
The second connection that we establish between Lacan and the Project
refers to a passage where Freud proposes that the screamonce uttered as a
soundis registered in memory and associated with the painful sensation
that was felt by the subject at that time and with the perception of the agent
who inflicted the wound. I utter the scream, I hear it, and it is inscribed in
my memory while bringing back the pain and its cause. Freud remarks elsewhere that the same phenomenon takes place with language. The words
heard are the necessary pathways for thought to remain, thanks to the memory of language, a constantly active process. If there were no verbal productions in the space of sound, there would not be any trace of thought and, consequently, thinking would not be possible.
This sonorous materiality of language, which renders it apt to inscribe
itself in our memory and preserve the dynamism of thought, reminds me of
the Lacanian conception of language, not as a symbolic system but as a physical and real organ. Allow me to elaborate on this point. When Deleuze and
Guattari advanced Artauds thesis of the body without organs, Lacan
replied that the psychotic is not deprived of organs, since he possesses one
fundamental organ with which he coexists as we all do: language. There is
here a conceptual twist, a change in perspective. We usually take language to
be a symbolic structure. This is quite right, and there is no going back on it.
As a network composed of different elements obeying a rigorous logic, language indeed belongs to a symbolic order. But it is not exclusively symbolic,
it is also something real, a real that flies around us, as Lucretius wrote, with
respect to the simulacra. Furthermore, it is a real that flutters about constantly in the analytic session, within the analytic chamber. Language is an
organ, not in the instrumental sense of an efficacious toolas Chomsky
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believesbut an organ that prolongs and extends the body. When I make
this statement, the myth of the lamelle, of the libido as lamelle, comes immediately to mind. Such a libido radiates from the body like an emanation of its
vital force and goes beyond its limits. Rather than situating language in the
symbolic dimension alone, it is appropriate to conceive of it as a real sound
organ that extends our body indefinitely. If I emphasize this real aspect of language, it is in order to show that language is not only a material utterance of
the subject, but is also stored in memory. This summarizes our comments with
respect to the scream as a physical, sonorous, and cumulative entity.
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describes as mutual understanding. This understanding is, in fact, quite limited, since the infant only communicates with a single aspect of the Other.
Indeed, the Other appears to the infant in two different ways: as a being
that is accessible and familiar, but also as one that is unknown and inaccessible. I need to recall here the Freudian notion of the perceptual complex of
the other person. According to this notion, the mother or titular adult
appears to the eyes of the infant as an other [prochain] who lives, changes, and
moves, and, on the other hand, as one who, in spite of the coming and going,
always remains the same, inalterable. The perceptual complex has thus two
parts: one where the other changes, and the other where the other is stable
and immutable. The Other who changes appears as an other whose characteristics mirror my own characteristics, whose gestures mirror my own gestures, and so forth, in an interminable coming and going. In these permanent
reflections, there is a work of rememoration, for these gestures recall my own,
and when he or she is upset, his or her screams remind me of my own screams
that cause me to relive my first painful experiences. It is precisely in this confrontation with the changing face of the mother that Freud situates, not only
the origin of the superego, but also and especially the origin of judgment.
However, we are equally interested in the other part of the perceptual complex of the other. We are interested in the immutable and unknown face of
the Other. This Other appears, no longer as a similar human being, but as an
inaccessible Thing (das Ding), that thing that Lacan spoke of so often. The
Thing is the inassimilable part of the Other, an uncanny and unchanging
presence. This is the point that I would like to stress. The scream is situated
between the two parts of this complex of the otherbetween the perception
of the Other as a double helping me recognize myself and the perception of
the Other as an absolute and impenetrable Thing.
The scream gathers these two aspects of the Other in the form of scream
with two sides. One, which we have just established and that we accept most
easily: the child screams and the mother responds, the mother screams and
the child remembers his or her screams and pains. While the other side of the
scream, that which corresponds to the second part of the complex of the
other, is no longer communication with the Other but an appeal to the
Thing, a lightning flash that reveals it. One only needs an intense and visceral scream to perceive, at the core of the bond with the mother, the silent
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immensity of das Ding, the absolute and inassimilable Thing. This Thing,
external to me, is however that which is most central and intimate for me,
since the Thing is nothing other than an absolute void, impersonal and common to the two partners who share a bond of love and desire. Lacan invents
the neologism extimacy [extimit] to refer to the Thing, both external and
intimate at the same time. This Thing, however, neither resonates nor
vibrates, it is silence, pure silence: I scream, he or she screams and it is the
silence of the Thing that bursts forth and imposes itself.
We began with the following question: How can one conceive of a pain
that is not felt? You see, it is not a question of physical pain nor of the pain
of the sadomasochistic fantasy that we studied earlier. Nor is it a question of
the various clinical forms that this pain takes, such as the negative therapeutic reaction. Now I would like to go further, to push the paradox to its limits.
We considered the scream as a motor discharge and in this respect we were
on solid ground. Then we defined it as a scream-appeal and then as a sound
inscribed in memory. But now we are faced with a new threshold to cross,
faced with a completely different domain: a scream that appeals to the Thing
and makes silence emerge. We have twisted things a bit and found a paradox:
a scream that engenders silence and a pain that is not felt.
How can a scream that engenders silence be manifest? How can this fragment of the real be visualized? We need a painted scream, the painting of a
scream. This evening, I brought a picture of a scream. There is only one
painter, and I would say only one painting, that has given me the feeling of
being in the presence of the scream I was seeking. It is a painting by Francis
Bacon, a well-known artist. It was painted in 1949 from the portrait of Pope
Innocent X, which was completed in 1650 by Velasquez during a trip that he
took to Italy. This work of Bacon, entitled Head IV, has been considered at
length in a remarkable book of interviews between the artist and the journalist David Sylvester.28 The painter evokes his relation to the scream. But let
us allow Bacon to speak before I tell you why this painting represents exactly
what I was looking for. David Sylvester is surprised that the painter had
painted a scream from a pope and asked him if there was a relation to the
father. Bacon responded that he never made the slightest connection
between the father and the pope, but that he always had been fascinated by
the smiling mouth painted by Velasquez, a mouth he had many times
attempted to reproduce in vain. One senses a mixture of regret and humility
in Bacons response when he confesses to have drawn a badly formed mouth
because he was unable to paint a smile, or expression of joy on the lips. Next,
he explains that in the end, he wanted to represent a screaming mouth
instead of a smiling mouth. But it is, above all, the rest of the interview that
interests me. He confides the following: You could say that a scream is an
image of horror; in fact, I wanted to paint the scream rather than the horror.
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If you look well at the painting you will see that it gives the curious impression that no sound is coming from the open mouth, that no shrill scream
seems to form there. Something else is at issue. Dont you feel with some
dread that this mute and deep scream is not a brutal expiration of the breath
but is in fact an inspirationeven more, a violent aspiration of the air shooting into the head and exploding it. Look at the head of this person. It is an
atomized skull as if the silence prevailing in this container were absorbed in
one breath by the gaping, aspirating mouth, of that strange pope.
What I describe was confirmed by a patient. At the time, I was taken by
it. I was preparing this lesson and seeking works representing a scream. In
fact, Bacon himself tells us that for him the most beautiful scream in a painting is that of Poussin in the Massacre des Innocents that one can see at the
Chantilly Museum. I went to see the painting but it did not cause the same
effect in me as it had in Bacon. At that same time, a session took place with
a patient who had the particular problem of not being able to stop screaming
and who suffered greatly from it. This symptom vanished after her pregnancy.
Here is the conversation I had with her: You see, she said, I no longer
scream now, the police no longer come to the house in the middle of the
night. How do you explain it ? I asked her. I dont know, she responded.
But what did it mean to you, to scream? To scream? she responded. Each
time that I wailed I felt the scream rise in my head and fill a void; as if I would
scream with my whole head, or, as if my whole head was a mouth. I do not
know. Is this not the best and most sensitive description of the painting? It
is a mute scream, a scream of silence, an absorbing scream. It is not a scream
that exhales. It is a scream that inhales and empties space. Now, when I say
this word inhalation, I am thinking of the Freudian conception of melancholic
pain understood as an internal hemorrhage provoked by a violent inhalation
of air. Freud uses the expressions valve, and sucking-pump, to represent
the force that sucks and empties all libido. It is precisely the powerful suction
of the interior that is painful. Indeed, this silence, this scream drawn by
Bacon, is a scream that absorbs silence; this is just such a scream, it is a hemorrhage toward the inside.
I would not want to end without discussing what the introduction of a
painting in our seminar means to me. My gesture aims at something other
than a mere illustration of theoretical knowledge about the scream. It is more
than that. It is an indication of the position the analyst can assume in the
face of pain and the scream of his or her patients. We have a theory that only
has value, in my view, in that it makes us ask good questions. You could read
any number of texts, but the only important thing is that you ask the right
question. For me, the relation between theory and practice takes place in the
question. The analysts know-how is to know how to question. But, here,
we are elsewhere; we are in another register than that of knowing how to ask
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good questions. Certainly, we have engaged pain and the scream theoretically; we have used concepts and we have posed good questions, such as:
What is a pain that is not felt? But I insist that the introduction of a painting in a seminar does not seek to illustrate what we know theoretically or
what we think we know. For psychical formations such as pain and the
scream, reflections and questions are not enough. Something else is needed:
to focusI have to blind myself artificially in order to focus all the light on
one dark spot, and then see, that is to say, visualize the real, and nearly hallucinate it. These words will seem surprising to those who have not worked
with patients. But I think the analysts who practice listening or the
analysands who have been through analysis understand me. It can happen
that practitioners are no longer satisfied at certain moments with their
knowledge and are led to visualize or hallucinate the fantasies that emerge in
the transference. When I heard my patient tell of the pain she suffered when
she was screaming, I must say I was surprised for, at the precise moment when
I had this painting in mind I was hearing the voice of someone who was
describing the very painting to me without ever having seen it. There is no
better way to tell you about the desire of the analyst.
Why did the artist paint the scream rather than the horror?
Recall Bacons reply. You could say that a scream is an image of horror; in
fact, I wanted to paint the scream rather than the horror. It is precisely
because the painter wanted to depict the scream rather than the horror that
the Thing is revealed. I believe that if he had wanted to represent horror, he
would have made a figurative painting of horror and we would have been
deprived of the emotion of an exceptional scream, a mute scream. He does
not paint horror, but the scream, and presents the horror in the form of an
absorbed silence.
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tions with which I would like to begin the lesson. The first is taken from
Mourning and Melancholia, a text that will be our principal reference.
While speaking of the work of mourning, Freud wrote: Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so
extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics (SE
XIV, 245). Six years later, we read almost the same sentence in Inhibition,
Symptom and Anxiety: In discussing the subject of mourning on a previous
occasion I found that there was one feature about it that remained quite
unexplained. This was its peculiar painfulness (SE XX, 169). It seems to us
nevertheless obvious that the separation from the object is painful.
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The identification of the mourner with his or her lost loved one
But in what exactly does this identification consist? What does it mean that
the ego identifies with the object? This so-called narcissistic identification is
explained by a mechanism that interested Freud greatly between 1915 and
1917, namely, the withdrawal of the libido onto the ego. The entire libido of
the lover who cathected the object when it was alive would return to his or
her ego after the death of the loved one. This is the movement underlying
the narcissistic appropriation of the love-object that has disappeared. I situate the discovery of this mechanism of identification between 1915 and 1917,
but it was in fact since 1900 that Freud concerned himself with formalizing a
logic of the various modes of libido-withdrawal according to various clinical
structures. Whether in paranoia, melancholia, or hysteria, we invariably
observe a withdrawal of the libido. Recall that we already considered this
question. But now we will treat it from a different perspective.
If there is a withdrawal of the libido, we wonder whence and whither this
withdrawal occurs. Clearly, it moves from the object to the ego. But what is
this object that we refer to as loved and lost? Our immediate response: it is
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not the deceased, but rather his or her representation or image in my unconscious. It is thus not his or her person as such that was the object of my affective investment, but his or her mental representations in me. What representations? The representations of unconscious things relative to the loved
one who is now gone. To return to our question, then, whence issues the
withdrawal of the libido? The response is as follows: the libido falls back onto
the ego from the representations of things that were related to the love-object
that was lost. Loved, that is to say, selected by a narcissistic choice. In other
words, the libido withdraws from the representations of the love-object in
order to arrive at a very precise part of the ego that Freud calls the realitytesting. One might object that the ordeal is not a place. Clearly the ordeal
of reality is above all a function of the ego, a sort of screening by which the
ego differentiates internal perceptions from external perceptions. However,
this reality-testing operates in a quite limited area in the ego: the system of
conscious perception. I refer here to passages that I suppose are well-known;
in particular, I refer to the schema in chapter VII of The Interpretation of
Dreams. In this chapter, Freud makes the following remark: perceptual
identity is established by the external world (SE V, 56667). But there is also
an internal reality-testing. Imagine the bark of a tree with two sidesan outside for the perception of external reality and an inside to perceive . . . what?
To capture the movements of the drives endopsychically and to reflect them
in consciousness as feelings. We have already used the term feeling in the second lesson, when trying to identify the unconscious feeling of guilt produced by the endopsychic perception of incestuous desire.
We need to clarify this. The withdrawal of the libido onto the ego is in
fact a displacement within the ego itself. This shows how minimal the displacement of the libido is. But it is precisely in these minimal movements
that the true work of mourning occurs.
Let us change the context for a moment to consider the same identification with the love-object that is lost, but in a different form. Freud tells us
that mourning is the reaction to the loss of a loved object (SE XIV, 245).
I insist this is not just any object. One does not mourn a person that is indifferent to us, but a person that we have chosen and loved intensely; the
object choice has been effected on a narcissistic basis (SE XIV, 249). But
what is the narcissistic object par excellence? I mean: what is the object that
has been privileged by a strictly narcissistic interest, then lost? What is the
paradigmatic object of mourning? The most narcissistic object for which we
mourn is the penis. In this respect one should read simultaneously Mourning and Melancholia (SE XIV, 239), and another short piece entitled The
Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (SE XIX, 17382). One will connect
immediately the mourning for a loved one with what can be considered as
the mourning for an organ that is also loved: the penis. This mourning is
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identify them, because the imaginary object of the castration of the Other is
only the guise, the imaginary mask, of object a. I cannot dwell on this point
and so I leave it in suspense for now, but indulge me in making this leap in
understanding Lacans sentence in the following way: we mourn those for
whom we have been object a. The death of the loved one shows usduring
a funeral, for instance, with the striking view of his or her inert bodythat
we have been his or her lack, that we were the object of his or her desire. It
is as if before the other died, we had been his or her object without knowing
it and, after his or her death, we discover painfully that we had always been
the object and we will continue to be the object, for a time, the time of
mourning. In other words, it is something like a deferred revelation of a place
that we did not know we occupied in relation to our own desire and the desire
of the Other. This is what we can say about the process of identification with
the object : it is an identification that takes place, not only in mourning, but
well before the death of the loved one.
To conclude, we can state that when the other dieswho was my chosen one and for whom I was the chosen oneI lose, not only the person, but
also the place of object a and of the imaginary object, a place that I occupied
for him or her.
But a question arises: what does it mean to lose ones place as objet a and
as the imaginary object? And, in this respect, how is this loss related to
mourning? I will respond in two ways.
What is lost with the loss of the loved one is first of all my own image
that he or she gives me to cherish. What I lose, above all, is the love of myself
that the Other made possible; that is to say, what is lost is my ideal ego or,
more exactly, my ideal ego as linked to the person who has departed. I say
person, but who is he or she, really? Certainly, we can agree that with the
death of someone who is dear to us, I lose the ideal ego proper to our love
relation and to our desire. However, is that the only thing lost? I was the
object, to be sure, but who was he or she exactly? He or she was not my ideal
ego, but the real support of that ego. However, something else has vanished
with his or her death. What has vanished is not only my ideal ego, but the
living support provided by his or her person, namely, his or her smell, the
sound of his or her voice, the charm of his or her presence. What I lose by
losing my loved one is the drive, the drive of the body, or, more exactly, the
object of the drive that gave consistency to my imageideal egoand which
nurtured my love. This leads us to reread Lacans formula, We mourn those
for whom we have been the object, that is to say, the lack. We reformulate
it in the following way: We mourn those who, in turn, have been the object
for us, as well as the lack, the drive/support of our ideal ego.
Nevertheless, I cannot claim that, by losing my loved one, I lose the
drive, since I continue to live. Yes, I lose that voice, that object of the drive,
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The pain of mourning is not the pain of separation but the pain of love
Pain is generated and released in the activity of compromise and transaction
that is proper to the work of mourning. Why, Freud asks, is this transactional
activity that is governed by the reality principlethe mourner must separate
him or herself from the one who has diedso painful? In what does this work
consist? What is the work of mourning? It is a slow and laborious reconsideration of each of the details of the bond that linked me to the loved object
that has been lost. In this work, each memory of the deceased is treated by
the ego in three ways. First, there is a focusing and a delimitation of each
memory and of each image associated with the lost object. Once the image is
clearly delineated, a disinvestment of that image takes place. The first operation: focus. Second operation: disinvestment. Third operation: the libido,
detached from the mental image of the other, is transferred onto a large part
of the ego. It is this movement, specifically, that produces the identification
with the object or, more exactly, with the image of the object. Let me emphasize straightaway a very important aspect for what follows, namely, that the
focus on each of the unconscious representations of the objectwhich we
also call memory, or imageconsists in an affective overinvestment. We
can thus enumerate the three stages of the work of mourning: overinvestment,
disinvestment, and finally, the transfer of the affect onto the whole of the ego,
that is to say, identification.
But how is pain involved here? When one reads Mourning and Melancholia, one has the impression that the main task that the ego must accomplish in mourning is to detach itself from the memories connected to the
deceased, that is to say, to undertake an affective disinvestment. After this
reading, one would conclude that if there is pain it is due to the disassocia-
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Conclusion: The pain of mourning is not the pain of separation but the
pain of bond. This is what must be emphasized at this point. One must consider that what causes pain is not the separation but the attachment to the lost
object, an attachment that is stronger than ever. Thus, in these three stages
that we have characterized just now, it seems that pain is engendered not
in the operation of detachment but in the focusing and overinvestment of
the psychical bond with the object. If with this thesis in mind you listen to
an analysand who speaks to you of a pain with which they have been
afflicted since the loss of a loved one, you will be no doubt surprised. You
will be surprised to find that the pain is not so much from the absence of
the loved other, but from having him or her present like never before. The
pain is not the pain of losing but of sealing too strongly the bonds with the
representation of the absent other. That said, let us note that Freud, a few
pages later, concludes that the cause of pain resides as much in detachment
as in overinvestment. We must conclude that Freud settles on an ambiguous position, a solution, a compromise without revealing the true economic
dimension of pain.
I would like to consider a final question now. In his commentary on
Hamlet, Lacan formulated a fruitful hypothesis concerning the phenomenon
of mourning. Hamlet was not able to mourn for his assassinated father, for
most of the funeral rites were not respected. His mother, especially, did not
observe the necessary time between the death of her husband and her remarriage. Lacan refered to such rushed mourning, which led to Hamlets madness, as an incomplete mourning [non satisfait]. With another expression
borrowed from Freud, he also calls it a hole in the real (I should say, on the
basis of an expression from Freud, since it is an expression taken from the G
Manuscript [SE I, 205] that considers the pain of melancholia as an internal
hemorrhage). It would be like a brutal decompression of excitations that rush
through a hole in the psyche. In Mourning and Melancholia, he used again
the image of the in-drawing hole: The complex of melancholia behaves like
an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energiesfrom all directions, and
emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished (SE XIV, 253). It is thus a
kind of suction of the internal energy.
But here is Lacans complete sentence that I would like to comment on:
As a hole in the real, mourning is the inverse of psychotic foreclosure.
While mourning would be a hole in the real, operating like the core of a
whirlpool (like an abyss around whose edges the symbolic system revolves),
foreclosure, for its part, undertakes the rejection of a signifier in a centrifugal
movement so that it falls into the real, thereby rejected from the system. In
other words, the sucking hole in the real of pathological mourning is the
inverse of the rejection of foreclosure. Let us note, however, that this opposition is only legitimate on the condition that one identifies foreclosure as a
LESSONS ON PAIN
121
movement of rejection. But I am not so certain that it is necessary to conceive of the operation of foreclosure as an operation of exclusion. But this is
another question that I have treated elsewhere.
Can one say that the pain of mourning is conscious as well as unconscious?
It is troubling to affirm that the pain of mourning is not only the one we feel
when our loved one has departed, but that it is also a suffering of which we
are not conscious. The expression unconscious pain immediately suggests a
contradiction in terms. This is the same difficulty Freud encountered when
studying the unconscious feeling of guilt. He advised us that it was difficult
to modify his expression, although he knew that the words feeling and unconscious are contradictory. Without solving the problem, there is a concept that
can be useful to us, that of endopsychical perception. Both the unconscious
feeling and pain would result from the endopsychical perception of the movement of the drives.
122
is a period of latency that we should not forget, but the Oedipus complex culminates with the anxiety of castration, then declines to be finally put to rest.
But the woman never escapes Oedipus. It is what gives her the possibility of
becoming woman. But mourning, perhaps, is just as interminable.
Freud and Lacan have rarely addressed the theme of pain and never devoted an
exclusive study to it. The citations that follow are drawn from short passages
from the works of these authors. The lines in italics are Dr. Nasios commentary.
124
To lose the love of the loved one is also to lose the organizing center of my psyche.
If he loses the love of another person on whom he is dependent, he also
ceases to be protected from a variety of dangers. (SE XXI, 124)
What is mourning? Mourning is a withdrawal of the affective investment of the psychical representation of the object that was loved and lost. Mourning is a process of
the withdrawal of love [dsamour]. It is a slow, meticulous and painful work. It can
last days, weeks, and months, or even a lifetime.
Its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great
expense of time and cathectic energy. (SE XIV, 245)
Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is
bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected and detachment of
the libido is accomplished in respect of it. (SE XIV, 245)
125
very early time, this libido is diverted from the ego onto objects, which are
thus in a sense taken into our ego. If the objects are destroyed or if they
are lost to us, our capacity for love (our libido) is once more liberated. . . .
But why is it that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such
a painful process is a mystery to us. . . . We only see that libido clings to
its objects and will not renounce those that are lost. . . . Such then is
mourning. (SE XIV, 306307)
Mourning is a permanent struggle between a love that refuses to give up the lost
loved one, and a force that separates us from him or her.
One cannot terminate mourning, perhaps because it is truly an unconscious
love. (Les Premiers Psychanalystes [Paris: Gallimard, 1983] t. iv, 139)
In the course of mourning, the ego identifies with the image of the lost loved one:
the shadow of the object falls on the ego. This identification is a form of love.
If one has lost a love-object, the most obvious reaction is to identify oneself with it, to replace it from within, as it were, by identification. (SE
XXIII, 193)
126
Just like melancholy, mourning is a struggle taking place in the arena of the unconscious between a determined love for the image of the lost loved one and the hatred
that allows us to part from it. Unlike melancholy in mourning, the struggle can also
be felt consciously.
In melancholy, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on over
the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks
to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain the position of
the libido against the assault. . . . In mourning, too, the efforts to detach the
libido are made in this same system; but in it nothing hinders these
processes from proceeding along the normal path through the Pcs. to consciousness. (SE XIV, 25657)
127
A certain amount of protection against suffering is secured, in that non-satisfaction is not so painfully felt in the case of instincts kept in dependence
as in the case of uninhibited ones. (SE XXI, 79)
A dangerous situation is different from a traumatic situation. While danger awakens anxiety, trauma provokes pain.
The traumatic situation of missing the mother differs in one important
respect from the traumatic situation of birth. At birth no object existed and
so no object could be missed. Anxiety was the only reaction that occurred.
Since then repeated situations of satisfaction have created an object out of
the mother; and this object, whenever the infant feels a need, receives an
intense cathexis which might be described as a longing one. (SE XX, 170)
The anxiety of the woman: To lose the love of her loved one
In the fantasy of the woman, the most precious objectthe phallusis the love
coming from the loved one and not the loved one himself. Thus, specifically feminine anxiety is the fear of losing love and being abandoned.
It is precisely in women that the danger-situation of loss of object seems
to have remained the most effective. All we need to do is make a slight
128
The skin is the erogenous zone from which perverse pain emanates.
In scopophilia and exhibitionism the eye corresponds to an erotogenic zone;
while in the case of those components of the sexual instinct which involve
pain and cruelty the same role is assumed by the skin. (SE VII, 169)
Professor Freud observes . . . that one can only subscribe to the idea that the
organic substance of sadomasochism must necessarily be the surface of the
skin. (Les Premiers Psychanalystes, 6 November 1912, 139)
Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Confessions, it has been well known to
all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of buttocks is
one of the erotogenic roots of the passive instinct of cruelty (masochism).
(SE VII, 193)
129
The pain of existence is the pain of being submitted to the determination, the repetition, indeed, the destiny, of the signifier.
This is a sort of pure feeling of existence, an existence which is, if you will,
indefinite. From within this existence a new existence always surges
anew. . . . Existence is apprehended and felt as something that by its very
nature can only end by re-surging elsewhere, and this precisely is accompanied by an intolerable pain. (Lacan, Le dsir et son interprtation, lesson of 10
December 1959)
130
this necessary intersection, it is at that point that we would situate the case
of narcissistic investment, the function of pain, otherwise logically properly
speaking in Freuds text, where although admirably elucidated, it is unthinkable. (Lacan, Problmes cruciaux de la psychanalyse, lesson of 10 March 1965)
Corporeal pain
Freud thought that physical pain resulted from the violent eruption of great quantities of energy that reach the heart of the ego where the memory neurones are
located, that is, at the level of the unconscious. Pain in the body is inscribed in
the unconscious.
The specific unpleasure of physical pain is probably the result of the protective shield having been broken through in a limited area. There is then
a continuous stream of excitations from the part of the periphery concerned
to the central apparatus of the mind. (SE XVIII, 30)
Pain consists in the irruption of Qs into . (SE I, 307) (TN. Q = large
quantities of energy, = system of impermeable neurones)
Pain sets the as well as the in motion, there is no obstacle to its conduction, it is the most imperative of all processes. (SE I, 307) (TN. = system of permeable neurones)
Freud defined corporeal pain as a massive eruption of energy in the egolike a bolt
of lightningthat suppresses all resistances and reaches the core of the memory neurones where it leaves a trace.
Q [the quantity of energy] produces a facilitation, pain no doubt leaves permanent facilitations behind in [memory neurons]as though there had
been a stroke of lightning. (SE I, 307)
Corporeal pain means a serious disturbance of the ego and a paralysis of the pleasure principle, the guardian of our psychic equilibrium. Pain reaches beyond the
pleasure principle. It shocks the ego but does not destroy it.
131
132
Pain is a pseudo-drive
In the rare cases where Freud defined corporeal pain, he compared it to a drive. The
external and unusual aggression that provokes the pain evokes the internal and normal aggression of the drive. In both cases the excitation is constant.
We know very little about pain either. The only fact we are certain of is that
pain occurs in the first instance and as a regular thing whenever a stimulus
which impinges on the periphery breaks through the devices of the protective shield against stimuli and proceeds to act like a continuous instinctual
stimulus. (SE XX, 170)
The specific unpleasure of physical pain is probably the result of the protective shield having been broken through in a limited area. There is then
a continuous stream of excitations from the part of the periphery concerned
to the central apparatus of the mind. (SE XVIII, 30)
Corporeal pain is comparable to the drive. When the external aggression which has
provoked a pain leaves its traces in the unconscious, it becomes a constant internal
excitation which can reawaken the pain again at any time. Here again, drive and
pain are comparable due to the constant excitation of the source.
It may happen that an external stimulus becomes internalizedfor example, by eating into or destroying some bodily organso that a new source of
constant excitation and increase of tension arises. The stimulus thereby
acquires a far-reaching similarity to an instinct. We know that a case of this
sort is experienced by us as pain. (SE XIV, 146)
But, in truth, pain is not a drive. Their aims are different: pain is a red flag to stop
the affliction while the drive seeks pleasure. The defenses of the ego differ in both
cases: faced with the drive the ego opposes repression, faced with imperious pain it
remains powerless.
The aim of this pseudo-instinct, however, is simply the cessation of the
change in the organ and the unpleasure accompanying it. . . . Further, pain
is imperative; the only things to which it can yield are removed by some
toxic agent or the influence of mental distraction. (SE XIV, 146)
133
The earlier traumatic pain has rendered the memory neurones so sensitive that the
slightest internal stimulation reactivates them and a new pain appears. Freud
called this new pain affect and the phenomenon of the sensitizing of the neurones facilitation.
Pain passes along all pathways of discharge. . . . Pain no doubt leaves permanent facilitations behind in [memory neurones]as though there had
been a stroke of lightning. (SE I, 307)
134
Like any affect, a pain that is experienced is the memory of an earlier pain.
[Affects are] . . . reproductions of very early, perhaps even pre-individual
experiences, experiences of vital importance. (SE XX, 93)
Affective states have become incorporated in the mind as precipitates of
primeval traumatic experiences, and when a similar situation occurs they
are revived like mnemic symbols. (SE XX, 93)
Any pain is the memory of an earlier pain and any loss the
reproduction of a first loss that is already forgotten
The capacity to represent a corporeal lesion and to experience pain was acquired in
the course of different losses in childhood: birth, defecation, or weaning. These
experiences have taught the child that these essential things are missing. When the
boy comes to represent the loss of his penis to himself, an anxiety of loss occurs, an
anxiety that we know as castration anxiety.
[T]he child gets the idea of a narcissistic injury through a bodily loss from the
experience of losing his mothers breast after nursing, from the daily surrender of feces, and indeed, even from his separation from the womb at birth.
Nevertheless, one ought not to speak of a castration complex until this idea
of a loss has become connected with the male genitals. (SE XIX, 144)
Sooner or later the child, who is so proud of his possession of a penis, has
the view of the genital region of the little girl, and cannot help being convinced of the absence of the penis in a creature who is so like himself. With
this, the loss of his own penis becomes imaginable, and the threat of castration takes its deferred affect. (SE XIX, 17576)
Unconscious pain
Freud defined unconscious pain as a link between an internal perception and an
external perception. The trace that a past pain has left in the unconscious can
become an internal excitation capable of triggering another pain. The earlier pain
was provoked by an external perception while the new pain is awakened by an internal perception.
In the same way that the tensions arising from physical needs can remain
unconscious, so also can paina thing intermediate between external and
internal perception, which behaves like an internal perception even when
its source is in the external world. (SE XIX, 22)
135
Pain is an affect that results from the overinvestment of the representation of the
injured organ and, simultaneously, from the disinvestment of the external world.
When there is psychical pain, a high degree of what may be termed narcissistic cathexis of the painful place occurs. This cathexis continues to
increase and tends, as it were, to empty the ego. (SE XX, 171)
A person who is tormented by organic pain . . . gives up his interest in the
things of the external world, insofar as they do not concern his suffering. . . .
He also withdraws libidinal interest from his love-objects: so long as he suffers, he ceases to love. (SE XIV, 82)
136
A persons own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both
external and internal perceptions may spring. . . . Pain, too, seems to play a
part in the process . . . we gain a new knowledge of our organs . . . [and] we
arrive at the idea of our body. (SE XIX, 2526)
The ego is a surface in two ways: the mental image of the surface of the body and
the perceptual surface of the psychical apparatus.
The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego, it is not merely a surface entity,
but is itself the projection of a surface. (SE XIX, 26)
Psychogenic pain
Psychogenic pain is here the somatic expression of a drive inhibited by repression; in the
place of the repressed drive, a corporeal pain without organic cause appears. If repression had not stopped the drive, it would have expressed itself fully as a moral pain.
We may ask: What is it that turns into physical pain here? . . . A cautious
reply would be: Something that might have become, and should have
become, mental pain. (SE II, 167)
The mechanism was that of conversion: i.e. in place of the mental pains
which she avoided, physical pains made their appearance. (SE II, 166)
Notes
1. Juan-David Nasio, The Book of Love and Pain: Thinking at the Limit with Freud
and Lacan, trans. David Pettigrew and Franois Raffoul (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2003), herein as LP followed by the page number. The Book of Love
and Pain: Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan is a translation of Juan-David
Nasios Le Livre de la Douleur et de IAmour (Paris: Editions Payot et Rivages, 1996).
2. Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, trans. David Pettigrew and Franois Raffoul (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998),
7576.
3. Is it necessary to recall that the narration of an experience that we have had,
although faithful, remains inevitably a fiction, a fiction of the writer?
4. A term we have already employed and that we will often find in what follows
is that of drive [pulsion]. In this chapter, we take drive and desire to be equivalent. In spite of their differences, we prefer to use these two concepts interchangeably
by taking into account what is essential to each of them, that is, the fact that they designate movement within the unconscious, more exactly, any drive that has to discharge and express itself.
5. We remember that it is one of these symbolic representations that is strongly
overinvested by the ego when it tries to contain a libidinal upheaval provoked by the
loss of a loved one. However, the use of the Lacanian term symbolic refers to the following. The symbolic dimension always has two parts, a network of elementscalled
signifiers or unconscious representationsand a unique element, situated at the
periphery of the network, which constitutes both its limit and cohesion. Lacan names
this organizing principle of the network, the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father.
Now, as we will see, the special person has a double symbolic existence: as a network
and as a one. It is symbolic when we propose that its person is fixed in our unconscious by a multitude of unconscious representations. It is a singular limit of the network, as signifier of the Name-of-the-Father, when it guarantees the cohesion of my
psyche. We will see in a moment that the function of the limit corresponds to the
rhythm of the pulse of desire.
6. This deformed loop of the fantasm has been fabricated for a very long time,
from our very first vital trembling, from the first encounter with the special, primordial Other, whether the mother or a titular adult figure.
137
138
NOTES
139
17. The reader will find the two passages in which Freud defines pleasure and
unpleasure according to the rhythm of the drives, on page 133.
18. Damasio, 296306; 32934.
19. Pierre Benot already considered a possible reversal of the well-known
Freudian formula that takes conversion hysteria to be a leap from the psychical to the
somatic. Cf. his article Le saut du psychique au somatique, in Psychiatrie franaise, no.
5 (1985).
20. Maine de Biran, De laperception immdiate (Paris: Vrin, 1963), 89106.
21. This lecture by J.-D. Nasio, not published here, presents in particular the
Freudian hypotheses from the Project concerning corporeal pain. These developments
have been reconsidered at length in the chapter on corporeal pain.
22. J.-D. Nasio, LInconscient venir (Paris: Rivages, 1993).
23. SE I, letter 71, Oct 15, 1897, 26366.
24. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic
Society Volume I, 19081910, trans. M. Nunberg (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1967), 449.
25. Ernst Freud, ed., Letters of Sigmund Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (New
York: Basic Books, 1960), 312.
26. Lacan refers to Stockess Theorem in Position de lInconscient, in Ecrits
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), 83839.
27. Lucretius, The Nature of Things, in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers.
The Complete Extant Writings of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, ed.
Whitney Oates (New York: Random House, 1940).
28. D. Sylvester, LArt de limpossible. Entretiens avec Bacon (Paris: Flammarion,
1996).
29. Lacan, LAngoisse (unpublished seminar), lesson of 3 July 1963.
Index
castration complex, 80
castration of the Other, 116
cathexis, 119
Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 66
consciousness, 16, 19, 21, 52, 54, 55, 68
corporeal pain, 49, 55, 57, 6162,
6567, 131136; and psychical pain
14; as wound, 39
counter-investment, 61
facilitation [Bahnung], 57
fantasy, 29, 30, 35, 43, 44, 90, 96; fracture of, 36; of the loved one, 29; as
masochistic, 96; as sadomasochistic,
82, 90
feminine Oedipus complex, the, 121
foreclosure, 25, 76, 120, 121
formations of object a, 78, 92, 93, 95
Freud, Sigmund, 20, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58,
61, 66, 67, 69, 99, 105
141
142
INDEX
143