1

The Woman Does Not Exist: Lacan and Femininity

Contents

The Woman Does Not Exist

Not-All
Symptom
Ravage
Passing-Between-Two
Mother
Hysteria
Obsessional Neurosis
Secretary For a Schizophrenic
Cosmetic Surgery Addiction
Manic Depression
Anorexia
Orgasm
Between-Two-Deaths
Split
Act
Sisters
Ravisssement
From Rejection to Annihilation
Polyamorist
Feminist
Capitalist Machine
In and Against Power
Nun
Counselor
Epilogue
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Prologue

Despite many psychoanalysts’ theoretical reflections and clinical contributions, femininity remains a bizarre
enigma and embarrassing scandal. This book examines the enigma of femininity through Lacanian
psychoanalysis. Lacan emphasized that femininity does not have an essence through the formula that “the
Woman does not exist.” In the end, it is the feminine subject’s experience that one should resort to. It is an
irreducible experience that is both common and exceptional, a singular experience that exquisitely blends
universality and particularity, and an experience that is approachable through intense analytic process and yet
anchored at the edge of the unanalyzable. This book delineates women’s experiences of approaching the
unconscious truth of their own in the format of fragmentary notes because the truth is seldom caught in a grand
discourse or a broad framework. However, note that the format presented here also amounts to a form of
knowledge. If we lose a sensitive awareness of the fine boundaries between truth and knowledge, isn’t it an
arrogant illusion of a person who thinks he or she has the answer, rather than the rigid ethics of approaching a
riddle?

Lacan’s core texts devoted to femininity are “Guidelines for a Congress on Female Sexuality,” “L’étourdit,” and
Seminar XX. Instead of concentrating only on these texts, I will try to do a jigsaw rather than a coherent
theorization by referring to a number of Lacan’s materials and various researchers’ articles. As in all other
issues, Lacan’s discussion of femininity is difficult to grasp. It is dispersed in seminars, Écrits, presentations,
and lectures. It is like a signifier as the symbol of absence in that it is everywhere and nowhere, unlike everyday
objects. It is up to the reader to judge how sharp and rigorous the search for this signifier is. Each chapter
addresses a woman, sometimes through the new concepts Lacan posed, sometimes through clinical diagnostic
categories, and sometimes through socio-political contexts. Although a few chapters contain purely theoretical
insights, the majority of chapters interlace particular cases and theoretical concepts thoroughly. These women’s
discourses are a faction, namely, a truth expressed in a fictional framework, but they will be enough to clarify,
illustrate, and expand the title of each chapter. I hope that this book will be able to provide a little inspiration for
thought and practice to readers who are theoretically and clinically interested in Lacanian psychoanalysis and
the problem of femininity.
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The Woman Does Not Exist

The Woman does not exist (La Femme n’existe pas). This Lacanian formula can be read in many ways. First, a
woman does not have a signifying or libidinal essence. Woman as a signifier is only relative to another signifier,
that of “man,” and woman’s jouissance is divided and redoubled. Second, a woman is close to an open series,
not a closed set. She resists universality, requiring us to concentrate on singularity. Third, a woman exists both
inside and outside the symbolic order and the logic of discourse. One is haunted by her topological spectrality
that cuts across the boundary’s interior and the exterior. Fourth, a woman ex-sists, rather than exists. She
embodies the real that is logically impossible to represent, rather than presents a being that is imaginarily
unified. Finally, a woman knows that the unconscious follows the paradox of the inconsistent Other. She is
conversant to how the unconscious, as the locus of the Other within us, is heterogeneous to the logic of the One,
and that even the unconscious can never say everything (S(Ⱥ)). Therefore, she is proficient in dealing with the
unconscious.

Lacan says, “woman is called woman and defamed (on la dit-femme, on la diffâme).”1 We humiliate her by
saying as if the Woman exists. We defame her honor by giving the Woman a substantiality. Take a closer look at
the signifier “defamed (diffamé).” It indicates that a crucial part representing the symbolic honor is missing in a
coat of arms. Despite it is still a coat of arms, it lacks strength and power. An anomalous and incomplete coat of
arms, a coat of arms without family or genealogy, a coat of arms that is undecidable by the worldly logic, and
the real coat of arms that relieves symbolic power, these are women’s coat of arms. If so, when we make an
already exhausted mother into a super-mom, are we not commending violence by inscribing a brilliant crest that
she does not want and praising a woman for being fit for the Name-of-the-Father? Also, does not she also forget
the truth that the coat of arms with loud adornments are oppressive and distressing? Ironically, the low birth rate
is a social symptom that decides not to undermine the honor of femininity with the title of a super-mom rather
than the avoidance of maternity. Notice another meaning of the signifier “defamed (diffamé).” The signifier
refers to a lion without a tail. In the end, there is no way to address her inexplicable truth without going through
an analytic discourse. There is no way to know which kind of coat of arms she desires, whether she is pleased or
distressed with her coat of arms, or whether she chooses to keep struggling to maintain the coat of arms that
torments her. Outside the analytic discourse, femininity remains a mystery. You cannot pursue the lion who cuts
its tail and hides its trace.

Thus, should we remain silent about the vague traces of femininity? Is there any way one can talk about the non-
existent Woman without defaming her honor? What about Freud, who asked, “What does woman want?” On the
one hand, he takes the position of a scientist who explores the dark continent of femininity. On the other hand,
he humbly acknowledges the fundamental ambiguity of that continent. In short, Freud rationally clarifies the
irrational aspects of femininity and respects the remnants that resist rationalization. However, for Lacan, Freud’s
take is unsatisfactory because “interrogating (s’interroger) woman” and “becoming (devenir) woman” are
1
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972―1973, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: Norton, 1999, p. 85.
 4

totally different.2 Freud asked questions about femininity and left a valuable psychoanalytic insight distinct from
biological and sociological viewpoints, but he did not reach becoming a woman. Although Freud states that
psychoanalysis does not describe what a woman is, but traces how a girl becomes a woman, his approach has
fixed the inconsistency of becoming a woman to a phallic consistency. Freud defames the Woman through the
phallogocentric logic by imposing a specific existence on her, more specifically, by defining femininity as penis-
envy or reducing femininity to maternity.

Can we then conduct an experiment on becoming a woman who, as a mystery or scandal, neither exists nor says
anything about herself, by giving her a voice? The key is not to give a clear definition of femininity, to
illuminate the unexplored dark continent, to liberate oppressed femininity, or comfort women who have been
hurt. The key is to associate a woman as a problematic void with the ethical saying, beyond biologically
essential womanliness, socio-politically idealized femaleness, and ideologically gendered femininity. In other
words, what is at stake is whether a woman “says well (bien-dire)” about her own truth. Of course, the
psychoanalytically oriented well-saying is paradoxical, because “the saying comes from where the real
determines the truth.”3 It is a courageous saying that faces the repressed unconscious and a “half-saying (mi-
dire)” that acknowledges the impossibility of saying all the truths. So the discourses of women in this book
might look eccentric from an ordinary viewpoint. However, they are the forms of saying that are familiar to the
analytic discourse, which is to say, lonely mumbling, clumsy stuttering, impersonal rumbling, sloppy
prevarications, furious crying, incoherent gibberish, intimate whispers, sudden silence, etc. Since it is socially
difficult to tolerate or share these sayings, we test a saying that touches on the real by using a consulting room
(cabinet) as a washroom (cabinet). Is a saying possible that combines becoming a woman with analytic
discourse? How much can we expect from the analytic saying about femininity? How does the analytic
discourse come to terms with femininity as a problematic void, while minimizing defaming women?

2
Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg, New York:
Norton, 1997, p. 178.
3
Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 453.
 5

Not-All

“They [Women] are not-All. … they do not lend themselves to generalization. Not even, I say this
parenthetically, to phallocentric generalization.”4 How does woman as the not-all slip out of phallic universality?
Lacan distinguishes the sexuated positions not according to biological givenness or cultural construction, but the
way man and woman relate to the phallic function that institutes symbolic castration. The male position is
composed of universality as all and One as exception. All men are bound to castration. However, castration’s
universality is established on one exception: the mythical father in the Freudian horde. Exception proves the
rule. Universality depends on the privileged One. “The universal is something that results from the envelopment
of a certain field by something of the order of One.” 5 The female position is composed of non-exception and
not-all. All women are castrated without exception. Not a single woman is not subordinated to castration, insofar
as she is not an angel or a fairy. Therefore, the term ‘not-all’ does not mean there is some privileged woman who
is not subordinated to castration. Rather, it refers to how woman is elusive to the phallic function based on the
logic of universality. Woman is not entirely subordinated to castration. Woman cannot be fully defined by
castration and the effect of castration remains partially definitive among women. Woman remains
undeterminable by phallic function. Woman “is not contained within the phallic function, without being its
negation either.”6 Woman is between center and absence. She nullifies the hierarchy of the center and periphery.
The not-all is not simply a counter-phallic resistance. The not-all does not fall into either the logic of the center
ruling over the periphery or the irony of the periphery leading to re-centralization. While the master’s discourse
clings to the center without acknowledging the periphery, resistance to language, discourse, norms, code and law
possesses the hysteric’s discourse. The not-all is far from ignorant domination or blind resistance, but
surnumerary supplementation. “It’s not because she is not-wholly in the phallic function that she is not there at
all. She is not not at all there. She is there in full. But there is something more.” 7 For this reason, the feminine
jouissance is split into the jouissance of presence (jouisse-presence) and the jouissance of absence (jouis-
absence). Woman enjoys the jouissance of presence by participating in the center and experiences the jouissance
of absence by wandering the periphery. In sum, the not-all is a possibility of opening the third option: deviating
from yes-or-no question with regard to the phallic function.

Let us elaborate on this point. In “L’étourdit,” Lacan comments on the not-all: “To say that a woman is not-all,
this is what the myth about Tiresias points out to us in that she is the only one in that her jouissance goes
beyond, the one that is created from coitus. … Although one satisfies the requirement of love, the jouissance that
one has of a woman divides her, making here a partner of her solitude, while union remains on the threshold.
For to what could the man acknowledge as best serving the woman he wants to enjoy, than rendering to her own
jouissance which does not make it all his: to re-surrect something of it in her.” 8

4
Jacques Lacan, “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom,” in Analysis No. 1, trans. Russell Grigg, Melbourne: Centre for
Psychoanalytic Research, 1989, p. 18.
5
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIX: ...or Worse, 1971-1972, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Adrian Price, Cambridge:
Polity, 2018, p. 181.
6
Ibid., p.104.
7
Lacan, SXX, p. 74.
8
Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 466.
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Take a look at the bottom of the female position in the formulae of sexuation. Woman with its article crossed out
(La Femme) who is not reducible to universality relates to the symbolic phallus and to S( Ⱥ). In Seminar XIX,
Lacan relates S(Ⱥ) with the absence of sexual jouissance. “S(Ⱥ) implies, “from the Other we derive jouissance
mentally.”9 Jouissance is not sexual but mental. In other words, fantasy frames the sexual relationship. A man
thinks of another woman while making love with his partner, and she thinks herself as this woman in her male
partner’s fantasy. If there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, then it is because there is only fantasmatic
relationship. In a sexual relationship, fantasy comes before jouissance. We enjoy with and through fantasy. More
precisely, it is fantasy enjoying and deceiving us. Insofar as fantasy vainly aims at the lost object and the loss of
an object stems from castration, fantasy is deeply rooted in castration. However, castration only partially defines
a woman so that woman is less determined by fantasy. In this respect, a woman gets to know that “jouissance
that is created from coitus” is always entailed with fantasy. She is well-aware that there is no Other in the sexual
relationship and the Other is constructed by fantasy. “From the moment sexual relation is at issue, the Other is
absent.”10 She is versed in the impossibility of sexual union since she is aware of jouissance’s limits in a sexual
relationship and the non-existence of the Other. She incarnates the analytic axiom that there is no such thing as a
sexual relationship. She also realizes the close relationship between love and solitude. No matter how hard a
man tries to satisfy her by meeting her demands and providing sexual jouissance, the sexual jouissance splits
women. What kind of split would it be? Let us refer to Arendt who distinguishes loneliness and solitude.
Together with her man, a woman is not lonely, but she is still in solitude within herself. The woman’s hidden
partner is not the man but her solitude. Herein lies the best homage that man can give woman. Etymologically,
homage means the way man respects woman for the sake of sexual intercourse. What kind of man respects a
woman the most and therefore is able and deserves to enjoy a woman the most? He is a man letting the woman
keep her solitude, but not making her lonely, bringing back woman’s own pleasure and allowing her to
encounter her solitary jouissance beyond fantasy, possession, and fusion. He lets woman relate to something
beyond fantasy-coitus-sexual jouissance. As our reality is constructed by phallic jouissance of fantasy and the
logic of capitalistic surplus jouissance, even a woman is highly likely to forget her feminine jouissance.
However, this admirable man does not push away her feminine jouissance, but rather supports and encourages
it. Therefore, the man who enjoys woman well is also the man who cannot enjoy a woman at all since he relates
to her not as an object, but as a split subject. He respects the irreducible feminine jouissance. Again, this
distinction of man and woman is neither biological nor gendered. If a biological woman supports her lover’s
solitary artistic creation by partially giving up her love, she is opening up a place for her lover’s feminine
jouissance and giving her lover her best homage.

Then why is it Teiresias? How do Teiresias and the not-all relate to each other? As always, Lacan does not
elaborate on it, but it is still important to do so.

Let us put various versions of myths together to take a closer look at the life of Teiresias. Teiresias was a son of
a shepherd Everes and a nymph Charicol. One day, he was passing by Mount Cyllene on the Pelloponnesus,
9
Lacan, SXIX, p. 96.
10
Ibid, p. 89.
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found a pair of copulating snakes, and killed a female one. Infuriated by the killing, Hera punished him by
transforming him into a woman (Let us refer to Teiresias as “s/he” from now on). S/he somehow managed to
live as a woman and gave birth to three daughters. After a few years, s/he encountered another pair of snakes
copulating and killed the male one, which brought him back to his original sex. One day, Zeus and Hera argued
about who experienced greater pleasure; man or woman. Zeus thought it was woman, and Hera thought
otherwise. They asked Teiresias about this since s/he experienced both. S/he told them it was woman, claiming
that man’s pleasure was only one-tenth of that of woman. Hera was displeased so that she made Teiresias blind,
but Zeus gave him prophecy, an ability to understand birds, and extended his life for 300 years. Later, Teiresias
ended up with prophesying Thebe’s major tragedies. S/he told Oedipus that he would kill his father King Laius
and marry his mother Queen Jocasta, but Oedipus did not believe it and condemned Teiresias for treason.
Oedipus then later found himself fulfilling the prophecy. S/he also warned Creon that he would be harmed if he
did not allow Antigone to hold a proper funeral for her brother. But Creon rejected the prophecy and blamed
Teiresias for spreading deceiving words. Creon lost his wife and son and became ‘no one.’ Teiresias found his
life as a prophet difficult in this aspect. Being a prophet was burdensome and others did not even welcome it. He
had to tell things in a way others disliked, but he could not tell a lie since it would incur the gods’ anger. After
death, s/he still had a prophecy so that Odysseus visited Teiresias living in the nether world and asked for help to
go back to his home.

In Seminar X, Lacan refers to Teiresias as “the patron saint of psychoanalysis.” 11 An analyst listens to the
discourse of desire manifested through and beyond an ordinary conversation with an analysand, similar to how
Teiresias listens to birds. An analyst is in the prophet position, since he or she claims that our desires and
fantasies determine our destiny. In addition, an analyst frequently encounters uneasy truths in the form of a
symptom, just like Teiresias. Therefore, it is natural for the analyst to be scared of his actions of mobilizing
subjective truth, even though it is for the sake of the advent of a new subject. “The psychoanalyst holds his act
in horror.”12 Beyond these similarities between analyst and Teiresias, note that Teiresias embodies the quality of
in-betweenness in many aspects. Teiresias is a pure slash between man and woman (s/he), cuts across mortality
and immortality, and traverses visibility and invisibility in that s/he is blind but sees the future. Let us bring in
Teiresias’ quality of in-betweenness to deal with the relationship between Teiresias and the not-all.

Let us pose the hypothesis that the connection between Teiresias and the not-all can be located within Lacan’s
idea of “the third sex” in Seminar XXVI. As we have discussed, the feminine not-all opens up a third option for
the phallic function. With Teiresias, the not-all’s function extends even more. If the feminine not-all works with
regard to the phallic function, Teiresias’s not-all works with regard to both sexes, leading psychoanalysis out of
either the masculine position (all and exception) or feminine position (not-all and non-exception). Freud names
the Oedipal Complex as a main narrative of psychoanalysis in relation to human’s psychosexual development.
Lacan approaches the formulae of sexuation as a logical device of revealing the impossibility of a sexual

11
Jacques Lacan, Seminar X: Anxiety, 1962-1963, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Adrian Price, Cambridge: Polity,
2016, p. 183.
12
Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Denis Hollier,
Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York: Norton, 1990, p. 135.
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relationship. Teiresias’s not-all takes psychoanalysis beyond the Oedipal drama, to the logical expansion of the
not-all. Psychoanalysis then encounters with transgenders, non-surgical transgenders, homosexuality,
bisexuality, asexuality, intersexuality, and questionaries. In other words, psychoanalysis is encouraged to
overcome not only the heterosexuality defining man and woman, but also cisgenderity naturalizing the
correspondence between one’s gender and birth sex, which works in concert with Freud’s classic claim that there
is no fixed object of drive and the drive is polymorphous. Human sexuality remains elusive to any pre-
constituted norm about what is normal and abnormal.

Here, let us refer to Lacan’s comment on the third sex. One of the major inspirations for Lacan to formulate the
not-all was a mathematical insight of set theory that “there is no such thing as whole.” In the set-theoretical
world, new sets emerge infinitely and one single set cannot combine all of them. In Seminar XXVI, Lacan states,
“This third sex cannot subsist in the presence of the other two.” 13 (One could think about a situation in which a
non-surgical transgender cannot urinate in a public bathroom, as it divides its users according to the binary
distinction of lady and gentleman.) In the next lesson, Lacan connects the third sex to a new topological concept
of “generalized Borromean knots” (nœud borroméen généralisé). The generalized Borromean knot refers to an
infinite number of rings, all of which would collapse if anyone of them is untied. Here, note that the Borromean
knot’s core message lies within the impossibility of a sexual relationship. One ring (a man) and the other ring (a
woman) are not connected or related to each other. These two rings could belong in the same structure only
because there is a third ring. In this respect, the third ring resembles the mediating effect of the phallic function,
which fills the hole of the impossibility of a sexual relationship by promoting the possibility and necessity of a
sexual relationship. However, in the case of the generalized Borromean knot, to which the third sex refers, the
mediating function of the third ring is omitted. Although the typical Borromean knot and the generalized
Borromean knot share some features in common that none of the rings are directly connected to the other, what
is distinctive in the generalized Borromean knot is that we cannot tell which ring mediates which pair of rings.
None of the rings directly relate to the other, but still forms a knot by the presence of some unspecifiable ring.
Correlatively, the third sex implies that no sex is related to the other, but is involved in a structure because of
some unidentifiable yet existent sex. In this regard, the third sex makes unnecessary the phallic function of
constituting and distributing sexual positions. The third sex would bring the not-all to a wider range of
(in)human sexualities, and an unprecedented discourse on sexuality will be facilitated. The third sex pushing the
not-all to its limits will lead “some all outside universe (un tout d’hors univers)” as “the singular of a limit (le
singulier d’un confin).”14 The third sex serves as a singular guardian of the non-universal and non-totalizing all.
If the feminine position consists of non-exception and not-all, the third sex consists of non-relationship and
relationship. The third sex simultaneously connects some sexual identity to another and separates them, and the
identity could keep its singularity and be baptized in the name of void under the third sex’s influence. This is
how we can prove that the connection between Teiresias and the not-all is located within the third sex. The third
sex as an expansion of the feminine not-all is the emblem of the non-hierarchical infinity of human sexual
position.

13
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXVI: Topology and Time, January 16th, 1979 (unpublished).
14
Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 466.
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Symptom

A woman is a phallus. A man tries to fill up his structural lack as a speaking being with a woman.
A woman is an object. A man finds an object that causes his desire through the lens of fantasy.
A woman is a symptom. A man relates to his own unconscious as the One through woman.

Some might question whether all of these formulae are constructed in a male-centered perspective, forcing a
woman in a certain way. For our part, instead of pointing out that some women resist becoming a man’s phallus,
criticize the masculine objectification of woman, or remain elusive to being reduced to a man’s symptom, let us
rather note that there are other formulae in Lacan, which suggest alternative Lacanian women.

The feminine jouissance goes beyond the phallus.

The feminine not-all relates to an inexplicable good that is not caused by the object a.
As the absolute Other, a woman reveals a hole in the unconscious as the One.

With this complexity of the Lacanian woman in mind, let us delve into the woman-symptom. Lacan’s first
comment on the woman-symptom appears in Seminar XXII. “For the one encumbered with the phallus, what is a
woman? It is a symptom.”15 Both man and woman are uncomfortable with the idea of the phallus, unless a
mythical vibrator or imaginary stopper fills up the structural lack. Man is uncomfortable because he does not
have full control over the phallus, and woman is uncomfortable because she does not have one. This makes
woman appear as a symptom for every speaking being. The thesis of the woman-symptom in Seminar XXII is
something new, but it correlates with the following comment in Seminar XX. “Man believes he creates—he
believes believes believes, he creates creates creates. He creates creates creates woman. In reality, he puts her to
work—to the work of the One.”16 Woman is something that man creates and believes in. The man believes that
he brings a woman into existence. In the clinical context, Lacan states that as much as man believes in woman,
the analysand believes in the symptom. “What is striking in the symptom, in this something which gives a little
peck to the unconscious, is that it is believed.” 17 In the context of Seminar XXII, the symptom is not simply the
symbolic unconscious formation in the Freudian sense. For late Lacan, the symptom simultaneously is located in
the real and is reaching out to the edge of the symbolic. As the symptom partially stands outside the unconscious
as the symbolic, it can kiss on the unconscious. During the analysis, the analysand believes that his/her symptom
means something and has certain origins and contexts. The analysand also believes that, even though the
symptom does not carry any meaning, it still could be translated into some signifier in the unconscious. As the
analysand articulates the demand for analysis, he or she is thinking, “I have this symptom because of my
father’s way of speaking,” or, “I did not have this symptom until I broke up with him.”

While this clinical thread supports the thesis of the woman-symptom, there is also a literary thread. In the same
lesson of Seminar XXII, Lacan recommends his students to read Friedrich de la Motte Fouque’s Undine, saying

15
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXII: RSI, January 21st, 1975 (unpublished).
16
Lacan, SXX, p. 131.
17
Ibid., p. 131.
 10

that “Undine manifests what is at stake. A woman in the life of a man is something he believes in. … He thinks
that there is a species, in the style of sylphs or water sprites. What is it to believe in sylphs or water sprites?” 18

Inspired by the four elements theory, the Swiss doctor Paracelsus conjured the idea of the four spirits of air,
water, fire, and earth. Undine is the name of the water spirit (“Undine” originates from Latin “unda” meaning
wave or tide). She thinks and acts like a human, but does not have soul. She has to marry a man to get a soul.
However, her husband must be punished if he insults Undine nearby water. Appropriating Paracelsus’ theory,
Fouqué narrates the story of Undine and Huldebrand the knight; their love, betrayal, revenge, and parting.

Let us take a brief look at the novella’s plot. Undine, who was living with an old fisherman and his wife as their
daughter, fell in love with Huldebrand the knight, who was lost when he reached Undine’s forest. Per her water
nature, Undine had an extremely volatile personality. She sometimes behaved as a perfect lady and sometimes
as mischievous, impish girl. However, Undine came to embody a number of phallic values as she married
Huldebrand and acquired a soul. The marriage turned her into a kind, enduring, beautiful, and submissive wife.
In fact, Huldebrand was earlier in love with some other woman called Bertalda. As Undine and Huldebrand
moved to a city, Undine encountered Bertalda as a romantic rival, but later they became good friends. One day,
Undine, Huldebrand, and Bertalda travelled to the Danube River, and Undine’s uncle Kuhleborn teased
Bertalda. Annoyed by Kuhleborn, Huldebrand insulted Undine by calling her a sorceress, violating the taboo not
to insult his wife near water. Then Undine lost her soul and returned to the water as a spirit, leaving despairing
Huldebrand behind. Huldebrand later married Bertalda after getting over the loss. As a spirit, Undine had to kill
Huldebrand as he violated the rule by marrying two women, but she blocked spring water in the castle to protect
Huldebrand. However, Bertalda broke the taboo and removed the stone blocking the spring water. Undine had to
take Huldebrand’s life, and he calmly accepted his death. “I might die by a kiss from you!”19

To a man, a woman is what he believes in. And there are two kinds of beliefs. One is believing in woman half-
heartedly. He still doubts woman in some degree. This kind of belief could be translated into “It could be.”
Lacan calls it “believing her words (y croire).” In clinical term, this belief corresponds to neurosis. The other
belief is absolute and blindfolded. It is translated into “Amen! I believe!” In Lacan’s word, it is “believing her
(la croire).” It corresponds to psychosis in clinical terms. It is similar to how the psychotic is certain that his or
her auditory hallucinations are targeted at him or her. If a man believes not only the woman’s words (y croire),
but also the woman herself (la croire) (in other words, if he does not fill up the hole in the real with the stopper
by transitioning from “It could be” to “Amen”), there comes love as a psychotic comedy. This man is sure of his
partner having a mysterious and unique aura. He forgets that he chose his partner according to his unconscious
structure and is convinced there must be some significant meaning in his choice. This is how the woman-
symptom emerges beyond the limit and turns a man into a psychotic actor. This actor keeps shouting in a bitter-
sweet comedy: “The Woman exists!” As Lacan states, “To believe that there is one of them, that takes you

18
Lacan, SXXII, January 21st, 1976 (unpublished).
19
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Undine: With Introductory Essays by George MacDonald and Lafcadio Hearn, Read
& Co. Books, p. 125.
 11

precisely towards believing that there is The, The which is altogether a fallacious belief.”20 In Undine,
Huldebrand did not fall into such a belief. After just getting married, he asked Undine about the “earth spirit”
and “Kuhleborn” and thought he might have married a fairy or goblin. However, enchanted by his beautiful
wife, he retracted his doubt the next morning. He also sternly interrogated Undine about her behavior, after
listening to Bertalda’s complaint about Undine, who prevented Bertalda from drawing water from spring.
Undine explained that she did so to protect Bertalda from Kuhleborn, and Huldebrand came to trust and support
Undine. Thus, Huldebrand believed Undine not blindly. The Greek sculptor Pygmalion was disillusioned by
promiscuous women in Cyprus and immersed himself in sculpting. He fell in love with one of his sculpture, and
Aphrodite turned the sculpture into a woman that he married. Marrying Undine, Huldebrand “esteemed himself
even more happy than Pygmalion.”21 Like Pygmalion, Huldebrand believed that man created woman. Therefore,
Undine was Huldebrand’s symptom, namely, a woman-neurosis.

The German poet Heinrich Heine refers to Fouqué’s work as a kiss. Lacan refers to Fouqué’s work as a beautiful
description of the sexual non-relationship. In fact, a woman-symptom is a sign for the sexual non-relationship.
“These points of suspension of the symptom are in fact questioning points in the non-relationship.” 22 The
troublesome sexual non-relationship appears implicitly and partially through symptom. Where a woman appears
as a symptom, there is no sexual relationship. A symptom is the way a man enjoys his own unconscious, not a
woman. No matter how he relates to his woman, he is in love with and through his own unconscious. A
woman’s partner is solitude, and a man’s partner is his unconscious. This makes both man and woman alone in
the sexual relationship, just as a human male and a fairy woman are alone. Huldebrand believed in the water
spirit to some degree, but he could not be in harmony with her. Her impish attitude was unbearable to him since
he valued honor and glory as a knight. Being annoyed with Kuhleborn during the trip, Huldebrand said; “This
comes when like marries not like—when a man forms an unnatural union with a sea-maiden.” 23 But there is no
perfect match immune to the amorous misfortune. Rather, a match can arrive only by working through the
structural misfortune. Love necessarily requires the coordination between different species. In the same seminar,
Lacan says that, “believing her is a widespread condition because it provides company, you are no longer all
alone. And that is why love is precious, eh!, rarely realized, as everyone knows only lasting for a time and all the
same made up of the fact that it is essentially this breaking down of the wall where one can only give yourself a
bump on the forehead.”24 The woman-symptom is everywhere. The woman-symptom is a valuable companion
for a man. Therein lies the importance of love. However, this companionship is quite intense, insofar as love is
the fracturing of a wall, leaving one with a bump. While Lacan brought up a neologism: “lovewall ((a)mur)” (a
combination of love [amour] and wall [mur]) previously, the wall in this case refers to the one as the
impossibility of a sexual relationship. A couple challenges the wall of a sexual relationship’s impossibility, and
breaks bits of the wall. Herein lies the aesthetic beauty of Undine. Undine, who gave Huldebrand a deadly kiss,
later participated in his funeral. Then she disappeared and became a spring, flowing around Huldebrand’s tomb.

20
Lacan, SXXII, January 21st, 1976 (unpublished).
21
Fouqué, Undine, p. 77.
22
Lacan, SXXII, January 21st, 1975 (unpublished).
23
Fouqué, Undine, p. 112.
24
Lacan, SXXII, January 21st, 1975 (unpublished).
 12

A woman hugged her lover in her original figure, showing there was a wall between love, and at the same time
water could flow between love.

In sum, the woman-symptom in Undine is ambivalent. On the one hand, it fits into man’s unconscious as the
One. On the other hand, it proves the impossibility of a sexual relationship and the non-existence of the Other.
In his lecture on the symptom, Lacan states, “I didn’t say that woman is an object for man. On the contrary, I
said that here is something he never knows how to cope with.” 25 Lacan adds that a man always burns his fingers
in his approach to the woman-symptom. A woman is a foreign symptom which simultaneously conspires with
the One and reveals the incompleteness of the One.

25
Lacan, “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom,” in Analysis, No. 1, p. 18.
 13

Ravage

In a night in which love becomes rampant, you are in nowhere, free from hasty sadness, moaning so softly to the
emptiness, to where all the nameless belong, with such composure, with such poignancy, forgetting the abyss,
without the anonymous mask, to where everyone mutters discursively. It is love deeper than wandering, ravage
deeper than disaster.

She made a phone call to him. It had been six months after they broke up officially. They sometimes met each
other unofficially. To be precise, he was spending his time for her. She already knew that his heart already grew
cold, but she could not give up on him. She asked him to give her some time to get herself together, to stay with
her whenever she was going through an unbearable night. He rejected this right away, but she urged him
earnestly. With some hesitation, he eventually accepted her request. Was it pity, or the last bits of affection? It
might be neither. He might have agreed with her way of mourning. Insofar as love is neither entirely dominated
by the beautiful imaginary nor fully imbued with the jouissance of the real, it requires some degree of rules.
Also, there is no fixed, mandatory rule if not some conventions as a guideline. Any rules are possible, including
marriage, living together, adultery, dates twice a week, looking after the partner when he or she is sick, children,
family, divorce, an exchange of sex and money, faithfulness to an eternity of love, etc. There is no absolute rule
for love. What each couple agrees on becomes the rule. To this point, the rule to “stay together on an unbearable
night” was a reluctant one for him. However, for her, it was a rule in which the mourning for love’s termination
and the interminable love were indiscernibly interlocked.

He was not as kind and warm as he used to be. He was speechless. If we assume love is not about telling the
truth but performing pretention, then his silence is fair enough. It would be too much to ask him to talk, as he
was already trying hard to hide his awkwardness. In this way, he was still expressing a small kind of love.
However, she could not bear his silence. A man barely talks whether he actually loves a lot or not. “Love goes
without saying because his jouissance is enough for him. … But for a woman, things must be taken from a
different angle. … The jouissance of the woman for her part does not go without saying, namely, without the
saying of the truth.”26 If a man does not understand love at all, then it is because he reduces every single aspect
of love to jouissance. Too busy enjoying, he does not want to talk, although what he is enjoying through the
jouissance of a woman is not a woman, but his own unconscious. However, for a woman, there is a field of
speech that cannot be reduced to jouissance. A woman’s jouissance requires a talk about truth. Note that this is
dealing with a woman’s jouissance, not a woman’s love. A woman’s love could be something beyond the reach
of her jouissance. What kind of truth does her jouissance tell—the jouissance she is sticking to by not letting go
of the man?

It tells us that if a woman is a symptom of a man, then a man is a ravage of a woman. This ravage does not
originate from a man’s insufficient love, cold indifference, or a series of betrayals. A woman’s love for a man
remains an obscure absoluteness so that a man appears as a ravage, whereas a man’s love for a woman is

26
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXI: Les non-Dupes Errent, February 12th, 1974 (unpublished).
 14

trapped with the structure of phallic jouissance so that a woman appears as a symptom. A woman’s problem
seems to be about the man on the surface, but in its essence, it is a matter of the absolute of love. Therefore, a
woman’s way of love never can be defined despite what the common stereotype states about feminine love: it is
more focused on communication, relationship, and emotion, more motherly and devoted or, inversely, more
egoistic and unreliable. It is more suitable to say in the following: Anyone who tries to push love into the field
of the absolute void without any positive conclusion loves as a woman. Then a ravage stranger more than any
sort of disaster takes place. What kind of ravage happened to her in this case?

Another ravaging night had haunted her. She called him to visit at her home. She asked him to hug her. Then she
wanted to make love as they used to. He replied that he did not want to. She asked repeatedly. He did as he was
asked, but since it was not from his will, he showed a destructive irony. He almost raped her. She did not resist
in any way. She realized a few days later that her inner vagina had been damaged. She experienced the mouth of
her vagina being damaged before, but it was the first time her inner vagina was hurt. Does this mean she
naturally embodies the notorious theme of feminine masochism? Hardly. There is a huge difference between her
and a masochist. A masochist aims to make the Other anxious by letting his or her body be an object to the
Other. A masochist suffers in his or her body, but is dominating psychically. Unlike a masochist, she craves for
the “beyond,” with love that surpasses body. She suffered on her body, but what mattered to her was not an
object to love or hate, but the very love that was free of object and yet remains unobjectionable. He could read
only the corporeal demand from her saying, “I want to be hugged and make love,” not something more than
that. Lacan states that, “I regret that we speak a language in which we say I love a woman, in the same way as
saying, I beat her.”27 Whereas a man says “I love you,” a woman says “I love to you (j’aime à toi).” Woman’s
love is a love that does not set a direct object, that can survive beyond an object even if it is with the object, and
that exceeds and overflows an object. Marguerite Anzieu, the first psychotic that Lacan encountered, wrote in
her novel that, “love is like a torrent, do not try to stop it in the middle of its course, to annihilate it, to bar it, you
will believe it is subjugated, but it will hold. The sources are as immutable when they come from the heart
[cœur] of the earth as when they come from the heart [cœur] of man.”28 It is not a coincidence that her alias is
Aimée (the beloved).

Her unique way of mourning lasted for about a year and she eventually could let go of him. She came to realize
that such violent sex was his way of making her give up on him. Even though some points had been cleared up,
she still had unanswered questions. Why was it him, not other men who had become a ravage? Did any other
factors come into play?

In Television, Lacan claims that, “a woman only encounters Man (L’homme) in psychosis.”29 She has to pay for
aiming at the “beyond” of love; the price is “the Other jouissance” appearing as a disaster. Man as the Other can
nullify woman as a subject and eventually make her realize that there is no place for her in the symbolic, as the
absence of the Other of the Other (S(Ⱥ)) appears as a hole in the real. Because of this, some women stay away
27
Lacan, SXIX, p. 69.
28
Marie Pesenti-Irrmann, Lacan à l’École des Femmes, Paris: Érès, 2017, p. 253.
29
Lacan, Television, p. 40.
 15

from a chance to meet the Man since they know a relationship with the Man could bring irreparable ravage.
Here, a Lacanian answer to Freud’s question, “What does woman want?” emerges. “The universal of what
women desire is sheer madness. … there is no limit to the concessions made by any woman for a man: of her
body, her soul, her possessions.”30 Psychotic jouissance makes a women a victim of love. A woman in this point
simultaneously is rich and poor. She owns overwhelmingly rich jouissance, but she gives every specific object
to a man. Lacan connects this madness to fantasy. This madness that allows the Other to own her body, soul,
and belongings is based on some fantasy that she carries out with ease, and she is vulnerable to fantasy. Why?
Let us connect Television and Seminar XX to delve into it. In love, a woman confuses a man with what she
actually enjoys, namely, God.31 In our case, in which aspect did she confuse a man with God? If what she
desired was psychotic jouissance and what she aimed at through her jouissance was the “beyond” in love, then
what did she see in him? What exactly was the godly figure that she found from him? Was it a power to protect
her, an economic strength to support her, an insight to enlighten her, or a substitute to replace her father who
was symbolically absent?

According to Freud, what a woman repeatedly enacts in a relationship with her husband is not a relationship
with her father. It is a relationship with her mother. Correlatively, Lacan argues that feminine ravage can occur
in relationships with both the mother and a man. “In the case of the woman for the most part, her relationship to
her mother, from whom she seems indeed to expect as woman more substance than from her father—the trouble
she has with him is secondary, in this ravage.” 32 It is not about a girl’s discontent with her mother: “Why did
you not give me a penis?” or competition for the father’s love. The point is a real privation and de-Oedipalized
dead end, not imaginary castration or an Oedipal situation. A ravage emerges as a structural effect of the
feminine not-all. A girl’s difficulty lies within how she lacks a signifier on which she can write her feminine
existence symbolically. She expects her mother to give this signifier, but she gets let down not too long after.
What her mother gives her instead is an obscure jouissance. Her mother does not have an ultimate solution for
the feminine not-all’s hole, either. The mother is confused as much as her daughter is. Sometimes the mother
could utilize her daughter as an instrument to ease her feminine jouissance.

What was her mother for her? She was a model student when she was in middle school, but her mother did not
acknowledge her effort. Her mother always asked for a better result. Studying more and more, she became worn
out and gave up on studying after getting into high school. She managed to enter a university, but the conflict
between her and her mother reached its peak around that time. Her minimum goal was not to make too much
trouble with her mother, let alone try to have a deep conversation. They had a meal and did laundry separately
and avoided all sorts of family meetings where they were asked to participate together. Around that time, she
had a boyfriend. He acknowledged her will and potential, which her mother never did. A feeling of being truly

30
Lacan, Television, p. 40.
31
Lacan, SXX, p. 89.
32
Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 465.
 16

accepted seemed to be filling up her existential lack insofar as his love aimed at her being. However, with the
loss of his love for her, her lack of being returned in form of the excessive jouissance. Then a subject falls not
into some manageable lack, but into a devastating ravage that endangers her very existence. After breaking up
with him, she sometimes thought: “How about treating my petty life randomly and carelessly?”

The absolute of love and the Man-ravage has swept her life. The Man-ravage presents the following paradox
about love to her: the love she could not let go of led to a lethal result, and the most innocent love hung on the
most powerful fantasy. What is left to her now is not a night with failed love, but a night of ruin from a ravage
deeper than a disaster. And her errance was much deeper and darker than her eros.
 17

Passing-Between-Two

“My name is Esmeralda and I am fourteen years old. I live with my parents, two brothers, and a sister. I wish to
become a police officer because everyone is upset with them. I think I could make a good police officer, a
decent one in the future. Or I want to be a rapper. I am a big fan of Médine. I like to eat, sleep, and hang out
with my friends around the tiéquar.”

Her teacher immediately commented on her writing after her presentation. “Not the last word.” She corrected
herself, muttering the word “quartier” (town). The teacher was obviously not familiar with “verlan,” a sort of
slang in which words were used with their syllables switched. However, this world is already upside-down
anyways, so words could switch themselves too, maybe. Hail to verlan! Hail to lanver!

Before we take a closer look at the story of Esmeralda, let us refer to Alain Badiou, a philosopher who delves
into Lacanian psychoanalysis. Badiou tries to conceptualize a new kind of femininity, leaving off the Lacanian
approach to femininity based on the non-exception and the not-all. While Lacan focuses on elaborating the not-
all, Badiou points out that the core of femininity lies in rejecting all sorts of the transcendental and exceptional
One rather than All. A woman constitutes “passing-between-Two (entre-deux)” surpassing and subverting every
kind of the One. She is not a place or position, but a process or an act. She is an act of coming and going, a
process of passing-between-Two. What does this “Two” refer to?

Let us take a historical detour before addressing “passing-between-Two” more deeply. In pre-modern society, a
problem of a girl or a young woman was relatively simple. For young girls, shifting from a virgin to a mother
was a critical rite of passage with a presence of a man (as the real) or marriage (as the symbolic). In this
traditional context, a presence of a single-mother and spinster is considered as scandal. A single mother is a
mother because she has a baby, but she still remains as a girl because she has not married. In the case of a
spinster, she is an anomaly since she is an aged virgin who is supposed to be young and therefore is unable to
shift to a mother. Now let us assume a girl who smoothly shifted into a mother. What is going to happen to her
after becoming a mother? There are three core values—labor, family, and nation—in a traditional society and
the first two were considered to be the men’s domain and the last to be that of women. In 1960s France, wives
were obliged to stay within their home, whereas husbands had the freedom of movement. Wives were bound to
their home and family, taking care of their hard-working husbands and their sons serving in the army for the
sake of nation. According to second wave feminist Betty Friedman, home in this case is more like “a
comfortable prison camp.” The mother-woman was suffering from an identity crisis and loss of her self-image.
There must be something wrong, but the problem was inexplicable. However, nowadays such a problem is
undergoing some change. Now, a girl is no longer obliged to be bound to a man or pressured to get married. She
is free to date and marry a man or not to do so. She can have more than one lover, live as a single mother, bear a
child via sperm donation, and even avoid laboring by hiring a surrogate mother. Then, what kind of options are
 18

left when traditional roles imposed on girls and young women are gone? More precisely, contemporary girls and
young women have to look up to traditional femininity to create a new kind of femininity for themselves,
putting aside a case in which they create a brand-new self-image by totally cutting off from tradition. In this
process, the questions is, what kind of traditional feminine role will be appropriated and reconstructed?

According to Badiou, there are four figures of traditional femininity: the servant (la Domestique), the seductress
(la Séductrice), the lover (l’Amoureuse), and the saint (la Sainte). They obviously originate from masculine
perspective, but still are useful to construct a profound notion on women. An important fact to be noted here is
that none of these categories act upon their own, but rather operate in a pair. A housekeeper ( femme au foyer)
who does housechores in front of a fire pot (foyer), is expected to be in charge of the housechores and at the
same time is expected to be sexually attractive to her husband. (Therefore a man relates to a woman within a
fantastic, binary frame, divided into a caring mother and a sensual prostitute.) Here a woman oscillates between
a servant and a seductress. However, her sexual attractiveness is not valid exclusively to her husband; if another
man provides her warm care and love, which her husband did not give, her sexual attractiveness will combine
with a passion of love. Now she oscillates between a seductress and a lover. If her passion grows too big and
makes her unable to be satisfied with a man in real life, she will desire to become a wife of God and devote
herself to ascetic jouissance. In this case a woman oscillates between a lover and a saint. As is revealed in the
case of the Virgin Mary, all forms of saint overlap with an image of a mother who takes care of her children and
genuinely sympathizes with their pain. In this case a woman oscillates between a saint and a servant. Thus, a
circular flow emerges. In this regard, woman is defined as “passing-between-Two” within a circular flow
consisting of four different figures. Furthermore, the power of Two splits each of the figure within itself. The
figure of a servant represents, on one hand, labor and reproductivity, and on the other hand, ornaments and
sophistication (as she does a fine job with housechores and shows off her elegance in her social life). Taking
another example, the figure of a saint bears both a sublime mystery and a loathsome foulness. (A nun is a
symbol of sacred agape and also a popular actress in a pornography). In summary, femininity embodies the
power of the Two whether two different figures make a pair or one figure is internally divided. This overthrows
masculinity, which traditionally embodies an authority of the One.

At this point a question must be raised. How can we address the problem that the Badiouian “passing-between-
Two” is still involved with a masculine perspective? While it is true that, “passing-between-Two” is different
from the Lacanian not-all, our world shows how deeply “passing-between-Two” is subject to the masculine
logic of the One. For example, for some women, becoming a housewife by using her sexual attraction as an
erotic capital might seem temptational. For other women, a romantic relationship might signify a financially
successful and emotionally stable life, rather than a subjectively challenging process. A woman might simply
yearn for a transcendental figure of masculinity based on the idealized body image and the socio-political
phallic power. Dismissing such a yearning, some women have already become fully adept at seizing capital and
power. All of this proves how deeply “passing-between-Two” can conspire with the masculine logic of the One.
 19

To reach out for a truly feminine “passing-between-Two,” one should go outside the existing framework
consisting of the four traditional figures and introduce other heterogeneous elements into the framework,
maintaining the subversive power of Two. To push the Badiouian perspective further, each element embodying
“passing-between-Two” should gain independence from the masculine logic, so that an element no longer
remains just a partition within a pre-established framework. As Lacan states, an ethic of analysis is not to fit a
case (cas) into a pigeonhole (casier).33 In this regard, the case of Esmeralda is noteworthy.

It was a French class. Students were learning new vocabulary. One of them asked the meaning of a word
“succulent.” The teacher wrote down a sentence on the blackboard: “Bill is eating a juicy (succulent) cheese
burger.” Esmeralda and her deskmate asked: “Why do you always use names like Bill?” Then the teacher
answered that it was not a strange name, it was the name of a former president of United States. “But you never
have used names like Aïssata, Rachid, and Ahmed.” Indeed, the teacher only used white, Anglo-Saxon, French
names. The teacher asked Esmeralda; “Aren’t you French too?” Esmeralda answered that she was not French.
Actually she was, but it was no big deal. At some point it is natural to find nothing special about being French.
When Algerian young people carried out an arson attack on public buildings, Médine wrote an essay titled,
“How Much More Do I Have To Be French?” In France, the police routinely checks citizens’ IDs, who look
suspicious. French citizens widely agree with their government declaring a state of emergency. Western press
takes France as a potential victim of terrorism like 9/11, in which five million Muslims reside. In such an
environment, would it be fair to blame only the young Algerian’s violence? Maybe Esmeralda is like a
contemporary gypsy woman (just like the one in The Hunchback of Notre–Dame written by Victor Hugo), who
embodies a failure of social integration and wanders within France even though she is French. In this regard, it
is a comical irony that Esmeralda wishes to become a police officer who experienced continuous disharmony
with the police. As her deskmate urged her teacher to an answer, the teacher stated that it would be way too
time-consuming to use the names that represent every kind of ethnicities. Esmeralda and her deskmate shouted
at the same time; “Make a little change!”

Before long, Esmeralda participated in a school meeting as a class leader with her classmate Louise, where all
teachers and the headmaster participated. In the meeting, she heard the news that her friend Shleiman could be
suspended. She told the news to him, including the teacher’s commentary on him: “He is a hopeless child.” The
teacher asked Esmeralda why she did so, pointing out that her intention was to turn them against each other
(foutez le bordel). Esmeralda defended herself in that she just told him what was discussed in the meeting. Then
the teacher replied, “I did not know you were that interested in school meeting.” The teacher also commented
that, “I am ashamed of you for just messing around.” She said that not a single teacher was ashamed of them.
The teacher said that he felt uncomfortable. She replied that he was the only one feeling uncomfortable. Then he
said, “I am sorry but you were like a bitch (pétasse). How could you laugh around in the meeting like that?”

33
Jacques Lacan, “Geneva Lecture on the Symptom,” in Analysis, no. 1, trans. Russell Grigg, Melbourne: Centre for
Psychoanalytic Research, 1989, p. 11.
 20

“Are you mad?” “How could you say that?” The teacher already mentioned, “turning someone against the other
(foutre le bordel)” and a brothel (bordel), so it was not a coincidence that a word like “bitch” followed. He
explained himself that he did not mean to insult his students, but they only looked like a bitch at the moment of
laughing rudely. The students added, “Okay, Go on.”

Esmeralda had another round with the teacher. One of the students said that teachers were all sons of a bitch,
who just preached to students without even knowing them and called students “bitch.” The teacher was outraged
by that commentary, but Esmeralda concluded that it was a draw since he said “bitch” and they said “son of a
bitch.” He insisted it was not the same, but it was a draw anyway.

The incident had been wrapped up (but one cannot be sure whether it had been totally concluded or ceased
temporarily) and a semester passed by. The teacher asked students to describe what they had learned in the
semester so far. Someone said that he learned Spanish and said, “Vacation is around the corner” in Spanish.
Esmeralda said that she had not learned anything. The teacher replied that it was impossible not to learn
anything if she attended school for nine months. She said she was a proof and claimed the school textbooks
were useless. He asked her whether she read any books on her own. She replied that she read The Republic. The
teacher repeated his question to make sure it was The Republic by Plato. He was startled. He seemed that he
wanted to scoff at her. He asked Esmeralda to give a brief summary of the book. “There was a man… wait, what
was his name?” The teacher replied “Socrates.” It was the right one. Socrates asked random people whether they
were sure of his or her thoughts and deeds. Then people come to get to know more about how they think and
act. Now then they started to ask questions by themselves. Socrates was a great man. He was an archetype of a
guy with a sexy brain. He pursued knowledge not as an objective fact or a means of showing off, but as an
immortal idea. The teacher asked what topics people started to raise question about. She replied: “About
everything.” About love, God, religion, people, and so on. He said that he was proud of her reading the book.
“Of course you should. It is not for a bitch!”

Badiou regards the new femininity as the subject of truth. The subject of truth reaches out to the true life by
committing its animal life to politics, art, mathematics, and love. Badiou asks, “What is a woman who engages
in the politics of emancipation? What is a woman artist, musician, painter, or poet? A woman who is brilliant in
math or physics? A woman who, rather than being some mysterious goddess, takes equal responsibility for
thought and action in a love relationship? What is a woman philosopher?”34

Here is a girl who exemplifies a woman philosopher. Some criticize that the emphasis on the “woman”
philosopher or a thinking “girl” could be another discrimination to be removed. However, our emphasis is only
effective to the extent that it warns all philosophers not to submit to the masculine logic of the One. Esmeralda
does not simply embody the Badiouian “passing-between-Two.” She stubbornly sticks to “in-between,” in that

34
Alain Badiou, The True Life, trans. Susan Spitzer, Polity: Cambridge, 2017, p. 104.
 21

her case (cas) can easily get out of all sorts of special pigeonholes (casiers) that the One sets up against
femininity; such as femme fatale (vagina dentata), a prostitute, a good girl, an innocent girl, a chaste woman, a
servant, a beauty, a saint, a witch, a bitch, a modern girl, a gold digger, an airheaded blonde girl, a heroine, a
single mother, girl crush, and so on.

We witness a radical feminine figure, when “a bitch” reads Plato’s Republic. Where is Esmeralda? She is in
between a problem child and a thinking girl.35

35
This chapter is based on the French director Laurent Cantet’s film The Class (Entre les murs) (2008).
 22

Mother

She quarreled with her son. Her daughter came home when the quarrel was about to get worse. They would
have hurt each other, as always, if it were not for the daughter’s effort to make peace. The irony was that it was
always the mother who would call her son and start arguing after he started living on his own. It was her; being
entitled, contaminated with the burdensome name of “mother.”

Freud defines “penis envy” as the structural core of femininity. There are three options for a girl who has just
found out that she does not have a phallus: neurosis, a masculinity complex, or normal femininity. In other
words, the Freudian woman has three options, such as repression of sexual desire, an obsession with a phallus,
and having a child as a substitute for the phallus. However, putting aside whether marriage and having children
count as normal femininity, there are some strange, even pathological aspects to normal femininity. In the case
of a married woman with a son, she can alleviate her primordial penis envy via the presence of her son.
However, it is not that simple. Freud states that “a mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation
to her son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human
relationships.”36 Sadly, however, there is no such thing as unlimited satisfaction. What actually occurs is an
expectation of unlimited satisfaction: “You are going to bring me satisfaction more intense than the one from
having a phallus, which was not possible in the first place.” Furthermore, there is no single relationship that is
free from ambiguity. The actual mother-son relationship is a very ambiguous one onto which the mother’s
ambition is projected. Only the mother’s expectation and projection may be left, which suffocates son’s
subjectivity. Having a son-phallus never guarantees an ordinary and normal way of life; instead, it sometimes
brings a life full of ups and downs. The mother-son relationship is one of the most fulfilling human
relationships, and at the same time, it can become the most toxic. A strange pathological element is embedded in
the way to normal femininity.

Lacan does not define penis envy as the essence of femininity, nor does he take motherhood for granted. He
rather points out that “the mother remains the contaminator of woman.” 37 As long as she remains a mother and
woman, how does motherhood contaminate her femininity? A standard reading of this quote lends to the
interpretation that a man unconsciously treats a woman as his mother, but the quote means something else when
it comes to the case of the mother discussed above. What exactly is this “contamination”?

Maternity is not a biological fact. It comes into existence in accordance with a paternal law that assigns a wife
the status of mother. The key factor of paternal law lies within the Name-of-the-Father, which a man is granted
in a family with his wife and children. Children can trace back their lineage which prevents them from falling
into abysmal mysteries of their sexual identity and ontological origin. It provides an answer to “an articulated
36
Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey, New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1964, p. 165.
37
Lacan, Television, p. 30.
 23

question—‘What am I there?’—about his sex and his contingency in being: namely, that on the one hand he is a
man or a woman, and on the other that he might not be.” 38 Also, there’s another signifier attached to her
husband, in addition to his name: oh-jeok (a Korean word literally meaning “five traitors” in the late period of
Chosun dynasty). In this case, however, oh-jeok does not refer to the five traitors (Je-sun Park, Ji-young Lee,
Keun-taek Lee, Wan-yong Lee, and Jung-hyun Kwon) who signed the Japan–Korea Treaty of 1905, nor does it
mean five main causes of national decay (chaebol [wealth clique in Korea], Congressmen, high-ranking
officials, generals, and ministers) that Ji-ha Kim, the democratic poet, listed. It refers to “Kyeongsan Province, a
firstborn son, Seoul National University, Samsung, and a self-made man.” Her husband embodies all five
qualities as the worst husband ever. He was born and grew up in a town dominated by strong patriarchal order
(therefore, it was mandatory for her to take care of her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, as the Korean
patriarchal order demanded), entered the most prestigious university in Korea, worked as an executive of a
conglomerate, and became a self-made man against all odds. Popular accounts satirize such men as the worst
husbands and point out their authoritarian and dictatorial nature. While femininity never fully compromise with
patriarchy, maternity may sometimes collude with patriarchy. Let us put aside how her mother-in-law bragged
about her son. The past is the past. Now, she keeps a lukewarm, fair relationship with her mother-in-law. Let us
also set aside the chances that she chose her husband and tolerated her mother-in-law’s boasting because of
monetary interest. It is the same old story of love turning into a contract of trade within marriage as social
convention. What we need to focus on is the fact that the core signifier that connects her maternity to her
husband’s paternity is “oh-jeok (five traitors).” Her femininity, which can never be fully signified, gets
contaminated by the maternal signifier, “oh-jeok” and this signifier heavily influences her son and the way she
treats him.

As many other Korean mothers did, she took intensive care of her son’s education matters. Her docile,
intelligent son was able to meet her demands; there was no sign of delinquency during his adolescence. He
entered a science high school and a prestigious medical school consecutively. Of course, it was difficult to tell
whether such an academic career was of the son’s will or his parents.’ With her son graduating medical school,
she expected her husband’s title to be upgraded from that of a conservative, rustic Kyeongsanian to a classy,
well-mannered Seoulite, and hoped for a family in which both parents were executives of conglomerates rather
than a husband who was self-made man with a mediocre family background. She thought that she could reach
out for another “oh-jeok” composed of “Seoul, a firstborn son, a prestigious university, a doctor, and an elite
family.” Her expectations have started to fall apart lately. Her son has been skipping his classes since last year
because of his girlfriend. After a brief encounter, it was not difficult to tell that her son’s girlfriend was never a
good match for him. “Break up with her. She is no good for you.” Her son could not understand his mother
calling his girlfriend “no good.” Her husband made a careful comment that their son was in the process of
finding the right match by going out with different kinds of girls, but she did not seem to be persuaded. Her

38
Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Écrits: The First Complete
Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006, p. 459.
 24

docile son became stubborn and never gave up on his will. A hostile relationship developed between the mother
and son, and the son started to live with his girlfriend. Worse followed; the girlfriend had gotten pregnant. She
would rave with fury simply imagining her son marrying his girlfriend.

In “Notes on the Child,” Lacan stated that “child as a symptom is in the position of answering what is
symptomatic. Symptom can represent the truth of family-couple.” 39 In psychoanalysis, truth appears as a
symptom. A child responds to family symptoms with their own and represents the truth of a mother-father
couple. Her son answered to the symptom of family structure embedded in “oh-jeok” by running away from
home and bearing a child out of wedlock. He also represented the truth about his parents in that “oh-jeok” was a
double-edged sword/signifier.

Furthermore, Lacan points out that child as a symptom has a direct relationship with his mother’s subjectivity
(her lack, desire, anxiety, etc.). The child gets deprived of a chance to develop its own subjectivity and becomes
an object invested with the mother’s desire, if her subjectivity overwhelms her child or paternal law fails to
intervene in maternal desire: “The distance between identification with the ego ideal and the portion taken from
the mother’s desire, should it lack the mediation which is normally provided by the function of the father, leaves
the child open to every kind of fantasmatic capture. He becomes the mother’s object and has the sole function of
revealing the truth of this object.” 40 Only the Name-of-the-Father could reveal the nature of desire intertwined
with law and indicate that desire is law. It limits desire, preventing it from excessive maternal jouissance imbued
with all kinds of pathological expectations and projections. This process did not take place in this family, and
the father remained a pathetic bystander in the mother-son relationship. Is it because the mother and the father
failed to play each of their roles properly? Or should we blame the signifier “oh-jeok,” which insidiously binds
mother and father?

In Seminar IV, Lacan states that “a child could be read as a metaphor of mother’s love toward father, or
metonymy of mother’s desire for an unobtainable phallus.” 41 Her son was allowed little room for his agency as a
subject and became nothing more than a metonymy of her desire. He was told to stick to a normative path of
life, without chances to develop his own subjectivity by experiencing crisis, failure, and going astray. Hi mother
said, “Do as you are told, it is for your own good”; “This is the reality.” This pattern has not changed too much:
“You would ruin your life if you marry that girl.” However, here comes a thing that discourages the mother’s
phallic love in the form of the son’s leaving his family and producing an unwanted grandson. Lacan points out
that a child’s substantive symptom in correspondence with parents’ truth could take various forms, including
fetishism, obstinate rejection, and a sense of guilt. She suddenly was reminded of a story about her friend and
her son, who shared a similar background with her son but was later caught taking upskirt pictures with

39
Jacques Lacan, “Note sur l’enfant,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 373.
40
Ibid.
41
Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire livre IV: La relation d’objet, 1956–1957, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994, p. 242.
 25

spycams. There is no fixed pattern for the way a child’s symptom emerges, but it always shocks and horrifies
the mother. However, some mothers skillfully handle children’s symptoms by taking an ingeniously perverted
approach. In a Korean TV drama, SKY Castle, Yebin’s mother was asked to do something for her children, who
stole snacks from convenience store and had a party. She answered, “It was not stealing. Yebin was just
relieving stress. It is like children’s fun, a compensation for them who suffer from school and academies all day
long. I can do anything if my children win the harsh competition and enjoy a similar living condition as mine.”
In fact, Yebin’s mother paid hundred times more than actual cost of the children’s theft and asked the store to
keep the theft secret and delete the CCTV footage. This proves that not all parents are stunned or shocked by
their children’s symptoms. There may be delinquent children and perverse parents. These parents covertly direct
children’s symptoms and take care of traces left behind. What option is left for the mother in our case?
Becoming a ‘a perverse parent,’ asking her son’s girlfriend to break up with her son and abort the baby, and
risking her son loathing his mother, just as Yebin loathes her mother after uncovering the conspiracy between
her mother and the convenience store owner? Does the maternal role lie in concealing a symptom with an even
sharper symptom in the name of love?

“Love is the source of all evil. … The love of the mother is the cause of everything.” 42 Love toward her son is an
uncontrollable, insoluble mystery even to herself, and therefore, she makes a phone call to her son and starts to
argue, as always. The maternal love originating from the evil carries a mystic, inexplicable aura. She might
blackmail her son’s girlfriend to abort the baby for the sake of her son’s future. Psychoanalysis states that this
act is neither mystical nor immoral. Mother is the other who can imbue her children with a certain taste, interest,
and orientation, based on her own lack and fantasy. This direction is not just one possible orientation but an
imperative task for the child. A mother’s desire itself is volatile, but it can leave a permanently unalterable trace
in a child. Her desire was contaminated by the signifier called oh-jeok, and her son lived as an object of her
fantasy—a fantasmatic object that oh-jeok, as the master signifier, created solely by repeating itself without
referring to other signifiers. The son’s unconscious consists of a series of signifiers including oh-jeok, if we take
the definition of the unconscious into account as a battery of signifiers determining the subject beyond the
intention of the ego even before the subject is born. However, some aspects of her son essentially create
dissonance with this signifier, oh-jeok. Her son, who used to be the object of her fantasy, no longer complies
with oh-jeok, and breaks into her reality through the invasion of the real. The son’s leaving home and bearing an
unexpected grandson reveals the symptomatic real uncurbed by the logic of oh-jeok. Now, the family has
encountered the real of the son, and yet the mother does not recognize her responsibility. Also, the cause in
which the mother is involved is an intractable cause that nullifies a classic thesis, “Effect is no longer valid
without its cause (ablata causa tollitur effectus),” an unclear cause that clouds awareness toward the situation, a
fatal cause that blocks any possibilities of communication, and a sublime cause called maternal love. Let us give
the son a chance for a word rather than recommending him to family counseling.

42
Jacques Lacan, Seminar IX: Identification, 1961–1962, February 21st, 1962 (unpublished).
 26

Thy mother does not knoweth thy deeds.

Hysteria

In 1952, hysteria was removed from the DSM-1 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), but it
keeps emerging in different forms. The DSM system takes the anti-Freudian approach, rejecting the focus on the
psychodynamics of drive and ego and mass-producing diagnostic codes. However, hysteria reemerges in the
DSM in various forms, such as chronic fatigue, frigidity, insomnia, depression, and fibromyalgia. Just as what is
repressed does not disappear but rather takes another form and returns, “deleted” hysteria returns as conversion
symptoms. How effectively can we deal with hysteria in a contemporary society where hysteria rebuilds itself
with numerous forms?

She was a brilliant girl. Her performance exceeded her parents’ expectations in various fields, including
studying, singing, drawing, and ballet dancing. She was a beloved star at family reunions who attracted more
attention than any of her cousins did. Her charm was so strong that it could even create an exception in a
patriarchal order. She could sit with her grandfather and enjoy beef tartar, a treat prepared only for grandfather.

She encountered a turning point in her childhood when her mother started running her own business. Unsatisfied
with her father’s earnings, her mother became a breadwinner herself. Her mother’s income was far higher than
her father’s due to the mother’s faithful work ethics and skillful manners as a merchant. Her mother started to
pay less attention to household chores. She still has vivid memories of eating noodles for a whole month, taking
care of her brother in place of her mother, and a messy house that was a sharp contrast with her friend’s home,
where her friend’s mother was a housewife. The mother set up an Internet café and asked her husband to
manage the business, believing that effort (to make money) never betrays. The father, however, was poor at
making money and went on a drinking binge. He was also discontented with his wife’s lack of household
efforts. This led to family violence. Her mother used to call her father “a useless man.” She still shivers in shock
when her mother says, “You are just like your father” during quarrels; it is obvious that the daughter of a useless
man was useless, too. However, when she looks back, it was always her mother who started quarreling. Her
mother was excessively aggressive to her father, who was neither capable of making money nor had the will to
do so. Such memories of her parents arguing still sting her. For Freud, the hysteric is a subject suffering from
unconscious memories that are traumatically constituted.

There were other painful and critical memories. Her mother’s unstable income caused confusion in her sense of
economy. If she spent $10, her mother sometimes would scold her harshly, and other times she did not make a
huge fuss about it. The mother’s volatile attitude, switching between outrage and condoning, can be regarded as
her jouissance. It was the kind of jouissance that destroyed a distinction between reasonable spending and
overspending. Insofar as the father’s function lay not in conflicting drive and law but combining them, her father
failed to limit her mother’s jouissance. It is still difficult for her to decide how to spend money; she found
 27

herself without enough money to pay gas, electricity, and phone bills after going on an impulsive trip and ended
up petitioning for bankruptcy.

She also brought up some other memories about her father. She once scored 95 out of 100 on a math test. At the
time, teachers administered corporal punishment to students who scored less than 90 to “encourage” them to do
better next time. The underlying principle was not about distinguishing “average” and “good,” but was about
“being punished” and “exemption from punishment.” Students’ motivation was driven not by encouragement
but fear; a few students, including her, were exempt from punishment. She showed her score to her father,
expecting compliments. However, he let her down by giving her a lengthy lecture on how to get a full score on a
test. He never acknowledged her achievement in scoring 95. Such emphasis on perfection might have resulted
from her father being coerced to make money beyond his capability.

There was also a more critical memory regarding her father. One day, he asked her to look after the Internet
café, so he could go and drink with his friends. When she visited her grandfather, she complained that she could
not focus on studying because of her father. It seemed like her grandfather reprimanded her father, who then
imposed much stricter, more twisted restrictions on her. He scolded her for not studying when he did not drink,
and told her to “go and rat to grandfather again” when he drank. The father got even angrier when she burst into
tears, and she had to rush to the bathroom, trying not to show her tears. Her father’s inconsistency left an
indelible trace on her.

When his inconsistency reached its peak, she barely listened to him. Father’s orders, instructions, and advice
became empty words. When he got hammered, he ordered his family members to cook noodle soup for him. Her
mother ignored his requests, and she also started to ignore them after she turned 17. Then, her father got a new
drinking habit; he started to urinate in a wardrobe when he was drunk. The odor was unimaginable. The
wardrobe in the bedroom turned into a toilet about two or three times a week. Her mother soon gave up cleaning
up the wardrobe and blankets inside. No one could enter the bedroom because of the odor. Around that time her
parents stopped sharing a room.

Lacan figured out that children are confronted with the intrusion of the psychotic real when their father
malfunctions, failing to regulate their mother’s jouissance and revealing inconsistencies between words and
behavior. There is a “paradox whereby devastating effects of the paternal figure are found with particular
frequency in cases where the father really functions as a legislator or boasts that he does.” 43 If a father functions
as a legislator instead of a representative, he causes hysteric resistance to the law in the best case and psychotic
anxiety in the worst case. Let us take a look at the case of a female analysand presented by psychoanalyst Marie-
Hélène Brousse.44 The analysand’s father was a devoted Jew who rigidly followed religious rules. However, he
43
Lacan, Écrits, p. 482.
44
Marie Hélène Brousse, “Hysteria and Sinthome,” in The Later Lacan: An Introduction, trans. Véronique Vorus &
Bogdan Wolf, New York: State University of New York, 2007, pp. 83–94.
 28

had affairs with other women during his entire life and introduced his non-Jewish lovers to his daughters. Such a
contradiction between holiness and adultery had been deeply embedded in the analysand’s hysteria. In our case,
she is also a neurotic, fully castrated subject, and the Name-of-the-Father has not been foreclosed in her
unconscious. However, it is worthwhile to note that castration is not singular but plural in terms of its operation
and consequence. This would imply that although we still maintain a structural distinction between neurotic
castration and psychotic foreclosure, some castrations have quasi-foreclosing effects, and some subjects fall into
quasi-psychotic catastrophes even if they are structurally neurotic.

Let us get back to her story. She married a little earlier than most of her friends did and asked her husband for an
abstinent lifestyle. “You should come back home right after work. You are allowed to spend time on your own
only once a week. You should handle some of house chores. You must spend weekends with your children and
wife.” Being drunk and losing control was the strongest taboo. In other words, she had a fantasy about a man
who could stay sober even after drinking. As Lacan states, “the image of the ideal Father is a neurotic’s
fantasy.”45 Psychoanalyst Rose-Paule Vinciguerra states that the hysteric “attempts to become the Other of the
One, not the Other for a man.” 46 One day, her husband returned home, intoxicated. The One should not fall into
stupor. She shaved her hair and told her husband; “You know what it means for a woman to shave her hair,
don’t you?” It was an act of hysteric resistance against her husband as the master. As Lacan states, “This is also
what the discourse of the hysteric questions the master on: ‘Let’s see if you are a man!’” 47 To her, a manly man
was someone who never drinks at all, or someone who is able to keep from drinking too heavily or stay sober
even after heavy drinking. She warned him that she would divorce him if it happened again. Shocked by her
anger, her husband stayed away from drinking for a while, but then made a huge mistake; he urinated on the
veranda after drinking. She was inexplicably shocked. Haunted by the image of her father urinating in a
wardrobe, she projected the image of her father onto her husband. It was unbearable, and she divorced him
immediately.

She was not prepared to earn a living because of a sudden divorce, but she did not want maintenance from her
ex-husband. In fact, she never expected it. She started to work at a luxury lounge bar to raise her children. She
put in her best effort, reminding herself of her experience of working in a service center. She thought the only
difference was between selling technology and selling her image. Her boss was satisfied with her, and her
income was stable. However, her satisfaction with the job did not last long. She was distracted by her female
colleagues at the bar. As Lacan ironically states with regard to hysteria, she became a man. She took a
masculine perspective of her colleagues, who were better than her in most aspects, including facial features,
skin, and body shape. Her narcissism crumbled. She was depressed, thinking that she was not the prettiest and
no one would love her. Such depression proves that there is no man and woman in the world of a hysteric; there

45
Lacan, Écrits, p. 698.
46
Rose-Paule Vinciguerra, Femmes lacaniennes, Paris: Éditions Michèle, 2014, p. 81.
47
Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 438.
 29

are only the pretty and the ugly. One of her colleagues caught her attention. She was the so-called ace of the bar.
Based on her beauty, knowledge, silver tongue, and taste, this colleague was better than her in any field she
could think of. She could not stop watching her. She observed how her colleague treated men and imitated it,
just as Dora was enchanted with Raffaello’s “Sistine Madonna.” The Woman does not exist. However, the
hysteric believes that a particular woman has a key to the feminine mystery and knowledge about the feminine
essence. What is at stake is an attractive woman who knows how to arouse men’s desire and jouissance. As
Lacan states, “The hysteric is interested, captivated by the woman insofar as she believes that the woman is the
one who knows what is necessary for man’s jouissance.” 48 Not long after, she was fired, as her boss was
embarrassed by her drinking habit. She drank more than her capacity one day, swore at a customer, and ordered
him to cook noodle soup for her, just like her father did.

Around then, she had a boyfriend. His biggest merit was that he did not have a drinking habit, not to mention he
had a fine job and was attractive. However, she felt numb whenever she slept with such a perfect man. To be
more precise, she felt sexual pleasure only when arousing him and lost her desire after beginning actual
intercourse. The desire of the hysteric is composed of pure lack. The hysteric wants to provoke the Other’s
desire whilst remaining unreachable to the Other. Lacan states, “Desire is sustained in fantasy only by the lack
of satisfaction the hysteric brings desire by slipping away as its object.” 49 The hysteric’s jouissance is composed
of dissatisfaction. She seduces her lover, but seduction only aims at pleasure as dissatisfaction. An unconscious
abhorrence toward sex is not the point here; the point is that the hysteric not only represses sexual jouissance but
also promotes the infinity of jouissance as absolute.50 Absolute jouissance could be achieved only by fantasy.
While the not-all makes a woman realize that the Other’s jouissance in its absolute form does not exist, a
hysteric like her is driven by fantasy toward an absolute jouissance. In this fantasy, her lover is not a man but a
god and she is the Sistine Madonna. There is no limitation to their pleasure. At this point, the issue of the father
arises, as the fantasy of absolute jouissance is supported by love for an idealized father. As Lacan says, “The
hysteric is sustained in her cudgel’s shape by an armour and that is her love for her father.” 51

She made a new friend recently. He is a psychiatry resident a little older than his peers. She sometimes has
conversations with him about her confusing existence, asking “Who am I?” “Do I want to become a wise mother
or a seducer?” “How could I be a stable mother to my children?” Would she take an ambivalent attitude toward
her friend, idealizing him as a doctor on one hand and criticizing him on the other for not fully understanding
her truth? Would she project an image of perfect masculinity onto him as she did to her father and ex-husband?
Or would she seduce and immediately reject him? She thus made her first contact with analytic discourse,
insofar as the analytic discourse is instituted through the subject’s desire to access her own unconscious
knowledge.
48
Lacan, SXVI, p. 387.
49
Lacan, Écrits, p. 698.
50
Lacan, SXVI, p. 335.
51
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIV: L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre, December 14th, 1976 (unpublished).
 30

Hysteria and psychoanalysis are distinguished but inseparable. They are two distinct elements and
interdependent of each other. In 1977—the eighty years after Freud founded psychoanalysis by studying
hysteria—, Lacan asked, “where have they gone, the hysterics of yester year? … What has replaced the
hysterical symptoms of yesterday?”52 Certainly, she does not have any remarkable symptom. However, the main
coordinates in her life, such as the quasi-foreclosing effect of her inconsistent father, her fantasy of an idealized
father, the identification with man, the pursuit of the essence of femininity, and jouissance composed of lack and
dissatisfaction proves that it is still valid to delve into the structure of hysteria. The logic of hysteria has been
fully operative and dominant throughout her life. Hysteria is not gone, but updated with more subtle and
insidious symptoms. Hysteria is constructed historically.

52
Jacques Lacan, “Propos sur l’hysterie,” Quarto 2, 1977, p. 5.
 31

Obsessional Neurosis

Freud reported on the topic of male hysteria, which provoked great opposition from his colleagues in Vienna.
For them, the case of a male hysteric was like a black swan; something that could never exist. Succeeding this
Freudian perspective devoid of gender stereotypes, Lacan also tried to stay away from general notion that
associates hysteria with women and obsessional neurosis with men. He states, “The hysteric is not necessarily a
woman, nor is the obessional necessarily a man.” 53 According to psychoanalyst Marc Strauss, there is no such
thing as “feminine obsessional neurosis.” There is “no other obsession than the one of the phallus, erected in the
stiff eternity.”54 Patricia Gherovici and Jamieson Webster, on the other hand, reports the case of a female
anesthesiologist who led a vigorous sexual life with various partners despite lack of self-confidence in her
appearance, but never had experienced orgasm and always had to pretend. From her case, they argue that
feminine obsessional neurosis starts to form when the donation of orgasm (what matters to the obsessional is
imaginary donation, not symbolic exchange) is combined with being a phallus. In this respect, a subtle
relationship between a woman and obsessional neurosis emerges. While it is true that the feminine not-all
escapes phallus, a woman could suffer from obsessional neurosis based on the logic of the phallus. These
reports allow us to articulate two points. First, when a woman who is not reducible to the phallus suffers from
phallic obsessional neurosis, her suffering would be qualitatively different from that of a man. Second, an
increase in the number of the female patients suffering from obsessional neurosis would be natural in
contemporary society, where the distinction between man and woman is blurred and the notion of “productivity”
emerges as a core value, unlike in the era of Freud. As Lacan points out, all fields of our civilization depend on
the productivity of the obsessional neurotic.55

She did not have any classes because it was Saturday. Still, she was heading to a public library. She was not
always able to fully focus on her studying, but she kept sitting at her desk. That was her way; sitting meant
studying. Some argued that effective concentration was a more critical factor and it was meaningless to just sit
there, but it all seemed like an excuse to her. She could not understand the emphasis on taking adequate breaks,
either. Her self-discipline and fixed routine were as powerful as the “fortifications of Vauban” (a star-shaped
fortification built by Vauban on the order from Louis XVI in the 17 th century). She claimed that there was no
other way of passing the exam but to sit at the desk.

It had been six months since she started preparing for the entrance exam to become a public officer. There were
about two hundred thousand others preparing for the same exam, but her true competitor was herself. She
pushed herself, her only enemy, to the extreme. She never allowed herself a single moment of waste, continuing
to study even on weekends, vacations, and holidays. Her target had been to pass this exam since the beginning

53
Lacan, SXVI, p. 386.
54
Marc Strauss, “On Female Obsessional Neurosis,” in The European Journal of Psychoanalysis, No. 2, February
2014. (http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/on-the-female-obsessional-neurosis/)
55
Lacan, SXVI, p. 337.
 32

of her studies. She had not given a thought to failing the exam. She had stuck to her rigid routine even before the
exam, and she would continue to do so after finishing it. Her life had always been a series of desperate efforts.
Lacan points out that the obsessional neurotic refuses to see herself as a master and that her jouissance only lies
in paying back the debt that is eternally renewed and never fully cleared. 56 The obsessional neurotic is possessed
by the jouissance of slavery. It is like losing a chance to actually enjoy music by being too obsessed with
collecting albums. She was certainly in the position of a slave (but far from being servile; rather heroic), not a
master. She continued to study to maintain her compulsive acts, not in an effort to pass the exam. The exam was
far from a means of obtaining a decent job or social recognition, but was motivation to support her obsessional
structure. Let us note that the German word “zwang (compulsion)” is present in both obsessional neurosis
(Zwangsneurose) and repetitive compulsion (Wiederholungszwang). Obsessional neurosis explains how the
subject overcomes the organism’s self-preservation drive and exceeds the limits of the pleasure principle.
Furthermore, as Freud comments, it reveals how devilish a psychic structure can become, and a true devil
inflicts aggression not on others but on himself (aggressivité). As Lacan states, “He [the obsessional] bases the
eternity of his fantasy on his own evacuation.”57

However, in this neo-liberal society, it is widely accepted that the genuine competitor is oneself, not others. In
particular, Korean society is referred as “a society of examination,” in that everyone takes the nominal fairness
of exams for granted, but even those who pass exams question its practical effectivity (does several score points
actually matter when it comes to practical work?). For a person preparing for an exam, a compulsive attitude is
not only viewed as a necessary habit; it is also glamorized as a shortcut to passing the exam, and this is where
obsessional neurosis is interlaced with social and ideological influences.

Let us return to her case. What is the context of her obsessional neurosis? Her mother passed away not long
after giving birth to her. She barely missed her mother, since it happened when she was way so young, or maybe
because of her caring grandmother. Her grandmother was more than a mother to her. She had become an
imaginary phallus for her grandmother, as the grandmother provided her with absolute love. Her grandmother
was metaphorically incestuous, not allowing her to grow up as an independent subject. In this regard, the
question of the Lacanian obsessional “Am I alive or dead?” could be translated into “Am I an object of my
grandmother or a subject of my desire?” Of course, we were all someone’s object once. What matters is whether
there lies a possibility to become a subject. Her grandmother was there wherever she went, holding onto her
granddaughter as her object. The grandmother responded to her demands immediately, meeting them even
before she expressed them. At the same time, the grandmother posed an absolute demand on her as
overwhelming as that of death. There was no room for desire or loss in her childhood. Instead, there were only
reward and punishments.58 The Other did not desire in their relationship; desire was reduced to demands.

56
Lacan, SXVI, p. 335.
57
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VIII: Transference, 1960–1961, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, Cambridge:
Polity, 2015, p. 206.
58
Patricia Gherovici, Jamieson Webster, “Observations from Working with Female Obsessionals,” in The European
 33

Control and regulation stepped in where uncontrollable desire was absent. When she started attending school,
her grandmother used to tell her that “sitting in front of desk itself is studying” and stopped making demands of
her when she spent time sitting at a desk. In this sense, her compulsive studying was a defense against her
grandmother’s jouissance. The subject chose to develop a symptom instead of being haunted by the lethal real.

Her symptoms emerged in a purer form when she was in high school, under the pressure of university entrance
exam. She was haunted by the idea that she would be too late to hand in the exam if she did not sit at the desk
long enough. She had become a genuine obsessional. We cannot simply label someone as obsessional for
spending all day cleaning; obsessional neurosis starts to emerge when the notion that one might get a lethal
disease if he or she does not keep the house clean enough gets combined with a compulsive act of cleaning. She
habitually masturbated whenever she was too overwhelmed by the notion of failing the exam, as overflowing
pleasure calmed her anxiety for a while and enabled her to stay focused. As we can see, the obsessional is not a
pervert and does not fall into the object of the jouissance of the Other. As an obsessional, she managed to obtain
her own jouissance. Of course, she always handed in her exams on time and could enter the university she
always wanted. Ironically, however, this success worsened her symptoms. Her symptoms were no longer related
to her grandmother’s old-fashioned tenaciousness but to her own ego, which in turn confirmed that the
grandmother was right. Sitting in front of desk is studying.

In addition, her father failed to function as a law limiting the grandmother’s jouissance. He was still financially
dependent on his mother as a son. Of course, he was a hard-working son. Fluent in Japanese, her grandmother’s
lifelong motto (or her master signifier) was “itsyoukenmei (いっしょけんめい),” which meant not simply
working hard but “risking one’s life for the best outcome.” Let us bring this signifier into the logic of the
obsessional who tries to protect oneself from desire based on lack and loss. The obsessional protects herself
from her unconscious desire, desperately working, cleaning, washing, checking, counting, and thinking. This
makes it difficult to let the obsessional put her card of the desire on the table, because the obsessional values
protecting her ideal ego more than acting upon her desire. What matters to the obsessional is not seeking or
fulfilling desire, but her ego defending itself from desire. Moreover, “itsyoukenmei” is a valid signifier even
though the discourse on “work and life balance” has become popular these days. Those who have experience
working in Korean companies as foreigners point out two main features of the Korean working culture. One is
hierarchical system, and the other is superhuman work ethics. Helping her husband, the grandmother ran a
laundromat and a dress shop at the same time, spending most of her life working in those shops. Nowadays, it is
not enough to simply work hard; we are asked to work hard and smart. However, she and her father are still
living in the era of economic hyper-growth. Was it because her grandmother was fixated upon paralyzing times
of the obsessional in the form of stiff eternity? Moreover, she always kept her belongings in pairs—two bottles
of water, two pens of the same color, two sanitary pads—she had to keep things in pairs. Odd numbers brought

Journal of Psychoanalysis, No. 2, February 2014. (https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/observations-from-

working-with-female-obsessionals/)
 34

her anxiety. Here, we could state that she was looking for a father (père) by making a pair (paire), which would
castrate her grandmother.

She had been suffering from gastritis. She was anxious about messing up her exam because of the pain on her
stomach, not to mention having a hypochondriac’s worry about her health. She made an appointment with a
psychoanalyst and requested help for her symptom of fixed idea (idée fixe). However, her analyst focused not on
an individual symptom but on overall structure. Certainly, Lacan once pointed out that a child with a fixed idea
would later become an obsessional.59 Let us take an example of a child having tantrums who is fixated on snacks
in a market. The child ignores the Other’s actual situation and tries to destroy the Other’s desire. However, irony
starts to emerge, as the very desire of the child is constituted by the desire of the Other. Destroying the Other’s
desire inevitably leads to the destruction of the child’s own desire. As revealed here, the point is not the fixed
idea itself, but what kind of meanings and functions fixed ideas carry. Fixed ideas are present in every kind of
psychosis, and psychoanalysis reveals under which condition fixed ideas were formed. In her case, the structure
of the superego causes her fixed idea.

Phenomenally, the obsessional could suffer from all kinds of anxiety, including anxiety about making mistakes
on exams. Structurally, the anxiety of the obsessional stems from the harsh accusations and judgments of the
superego. Note that the superego is distinguishable from paternal function. Paternal function could be referred to
as the symbolic father who guarantees the truth, whereas the superego is the violent and obscene father who
wields his uncurbed power in the imaginary. What commanded her to sit still was not her grandmother, father,
or teachers. It was her superego. Conforming to the gaze of her superego, she spent her time in front of a desk.
Her ego was condemned as a never fully hard-working child, and her subjective dimension with its metonymic
desire was inhibited. In Seminar XXIII, Lacan made an analogy between the obsessional and a frog who wanted
to make itself as big as an ox. 60 The baby frog who witnessed an ox told its mother that it saw a gigantic being.
The mother tried to become as big as an ox and finally inflated herself to death. “It’s particularly difficult, as we
know, to wrench the obsessional away from the stranglehold of the gaze.” 61 The gaze of the superego imposed a
morbidly radicalized obligation on her, and she had to fulfill it.

The duty the obsessional is obliged to fulfill often hinders the very process of psychoanalysis. The subject
eagerly participates in the analysis to deal with his or her symptoms, but at some point, analysis becomes
another duty and the unconscious of the subject does not reveal itself. Analysis slips into an obsessional ritual
and lingers without too much progress, failing to bring substantial change to the subject. Herein lies the
necessity of scansion (séances scandées). In one analytic session, she tried free association on fixed ideas and

59
Jacques Lacan, Seminar V: Formations of the Unconsious, 1957–1958, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell
Grigg, Cambridge: Polity, 2017, p. 379.
60
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII: The Sinthome, 1975–1976, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Adrian Price,
Cambridge: Polity, 2017, p. 9.
61
Ibid.
 35

fear, which she thought of as her core symptom. At that moment, the analyst suddenly called it a day. It
surprised her as something alien to her obsessional regulation. It was a moment of an unexpected advent of the
Other’s enigmatic desire. While she was thinking “Why wouldn’t he allow me to keep talking? Why does he
just dismiss the session like this?” she suddenly was reminded of some memory with a strong feeling of
ambivalence. This is clinically notable, given that the obsessional’s way of remembering past unpleasant events
is defined as isolation, which means the memory of representation but not of affect attached to representation.

In the next session, she talked about the memory she suddenly remembered from the last session. She once
nagged her grandmother to buy her a doll in a market. Her grandmother left her alone, similarly to the analyst
suddenly dismissing the session. She was desperately looking for her grandmother. Then, the grandmother
triumphantly revealed herself. At that moment, she did not know the exact word for her feeling, but it must have
been a mortifying sense of defeat. The grandmother’s reward and punishment mechanism was far from the
unbiased symbolic rule, but was rather an imaginary game in which one cheats another, just as she disguised the
pleasure of masturbation by manipulating an image of hard-working girl. With this memory, she encountered an
enormous hatred on her grandmother contrasting her thankfulness for her grandmother. Her love for her
grandmother was more of a reaction formation of hatred. Freud considered ambivalence a core structure of
obsessional neurosis, and Lacan stated that true love leads to hatred. Following Freud’s interpretation that the
obsessional are basically over-civilzed people who repress aggressive drives and neutralize hatred with love,
Denise Lachaud asks, “Who better than the obsessional could state loudly what every speaking being repressed:
in the beginning was hatred?” 62 Insofar as “true love” (la vraie amour) takes a feminine form, a woman knows
that true love must pass through an abyss of hatred. She hates, therefore she is (elle hait, donc elle est). She still
had a long way to go in her analysis, but she had taken the first step. In the next session, combining doubt and
ambivalence—two major elements of obsessional logic—, she stated, “I trusted my grandmother, but on the
other hand I never could.”

62
Denise Lachaud, L’enfer du devoir. Le discours de l’obsessionnel, Paris: Denoël, 1995, p. 320.
 36

Secretary for a Schizophrenic

A report of the schizophrenic in Chung-Ju brandishing a knife had broken out. The suspect was refusing to be
hospitalized, and his father called the police for forced hospitalization. Then, the schizophrenic used his knife
against police officers, injuring some of them. It only had been a month since an incident in which another
schizophrenic committed arson and murder in Jin-ju. An announcer stated that social anxiety was getting worse
as the schizophrenic committed a series of violent crimes. Such news made her more anxious than anything else;
she experienced a jolt of dismay whenever she encountered news about the schizophrenic.

Her husband was an art dealer. He could make more than $1000 a day when he had a fine deal. At that time,
$1,000 was a huge amount of money, but she was only allowed a small portion. However, finances were not a
main issue. Her husband wandered here and there to make deals. She barely saw him and was far from
developing a close relationship with him. He got hooked on booze, women, and gambling; at least he was not
addicted to drugs. Her husband hardly took care of her, even when she was pregnant. She always wondered—to
be or not to be? Obviously, that meant whether to continue marital life or not, but it would have meant “to live
or not to live” to the child she was carrying. Does a fetus have the ability to distinguish a metaphor from
verbatim? A termination of marital life could have been interpreted literally as a chance of death; or maybe she
was unconsciously thinking of literal death. She once told her husband to come home with the woman he was
having an affair with. It was her most extreme solution for bringing a father back to her children. The adulteress
was a fair woman; she even cooked for the adulterer and adulteress, then she reached her limits. She literally felt
that living this way was killing her. Around that time, her husband collapsed and never stood up again. She still
tells her friend that she was able to survive because her husband was gone. A zero-sum game takes place for
some couples in which one has to go away for the sake of the other’s survival.

She became a widow in her early 40s and worked hard to raise two sons. These sons were quite different from
each other. The first focused on studying. However, finding him studying in his room, she turned the light off
and told him not to. Was this self-defense stemming from costly school tuition fees? He told her that he heard
things, but she did not really mind. He eventually won a scholarship and entered a national university. After
graduating, he was working in an office. He has occasional month-long holidays because of his working
schedule. The two brothers quarrel with each other, as the second son still does not really understand his
brother. The second son went through a tough adolescence. He was far from a model student, but managed to
get a job in a small company. However, he spent his salary within a week and asked his mother for money for
the train. Both sons were in their thirties, but neither of them wished to get married. Now, she is taking care of
two men after getting over one man who passed away. One of them is more disturbing—the schizophrenic one.

A fetus or a baby who has not gone through socialization and language acquisition is a bundle of impulses, a
pure concentration of life energy. By gaining a self-image, this life energy achieves unity for the first time. This
 37

image brings a basic order to a series of inconsistent impulses. A child who does not have full control over his
or her body is enchanted with the image of itself in the mirror and misidentifies the image with itself. This is a
formation of ego through a mirror stage. In Freudian terms, a child transits from the autoerotic stage full of
impulses to a narcissistic stage in which an ideal ego forms. However, in this process, an acknowledgement of
the Other is necessary. A mother tells her child, “That is you,” with a loving gaze while the child looks into a
mirror. Such a loving gaze provides a fundamental groundwork for narcissism. An ego is able to love itself only
when the Other’s gaze guarantees that it is lovable. Here, a mother, the very first Other, serves as a symbolic
point of ego-ideal, which lays the foundation for an ideal ego.

If this symbolic means is not achieved, a child becomes “an undesired child.” 63 An undesired child is a
biological product who has not gone through a process of symbolization. Alternatively, we could call it an
organism abandoned in a box. There is a baby box in a church located in Gwan Ak-Gu, Seoul. More than 1,500
babies have been left in the box, where there is a quote inscribed: “Though my father and mother forsake me,
the LORD will receive me (Psalms 27:10).” Is God able to receive something that is not seized by image nor
signifier? An undesired child stays in the pre-mirror stage, lacking a buttress that shapes and supports love
toward its image. Lacan states that the true meaning of autoeroticism is a state jumbled up with a as the object
of the drive. Therefore, autoeroticism lacks “self”—there is only a flow of drive that does not discern the
interior and exterior of the self. At the autoerotic stage, “It is not the outside that one lacks, as it is quite wrongly
expressed, it is oneself.”64 Furthermore, Lacan connects autoeroticism with the fantasy of bodily fragmentation,
which is a major symptom of schizophrenia, and points out that this fantasy originates from the relationship
between a mother and a schizophrenic. “What the schizophrenic’s mother voices regarding what her child had
been for her when he was in her belly [is] nothing more than a body that was conversely convenient or
cumbersome, namely, the subjectivization of a as sheer real.”65 Let us remind ourselves of what the first son had
to hear when he was a fetus. “To be or not to be. What I am supposed to do with this baby alone.” Here, the
relationship between a mother and a fetus turns into that of a host and a parasite. The real turns up where desire
is lacking. It is difficult for a parasite to form a self. Even if it manages to do so, the parasite will suffer from
psychotic anxiety, depersonalization, and hallucination. This is how she shaped her first son’s future, to some
degree.

If only she would have paid close attention to him when he told her that he heard things for the first time, but
she was struggling too hard to make a living. It was only when her first son entered university that household
finances became stable. Then, it became clear to her that there was something wrong with her son. He heard a
voice shouting “Die!” repeatedly. She tried countless remedies. Her brother asked her to bring the first son to

63
Lacan, SV, p. 241.
64
Lacan, SX, p. 118.
65
Ibid., p.119.
 38

church, insisting that it was a devil making him sick. A fortuneteller charged her thousands of dollars for an
exorcism. Her son stopped her and suggested going to hospital, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The auditory hallucination (“Die!”) the first son is suffering from should not be simply taken as a word. In
Lacanian terms, it is a signifier within the real. Signifiers are supposed to form relationships with one another,
creating a signifying chain. However, the schizophrenic’s signifying chain is broken, causing them to form a
relationship with the thing. To the schizophrenic, a word invades a subject like a thing, far from replacing and
representing the thing. The locus of speech is supposed to cleanse objects from jouissance, but that does not
happen to the schizophrenic. Instead, he is seized by a fatal feeling of desubjectivization provoked by the
jouissance of the Other. As there is no distance between words and things, neither are jouissance and the Other
distinguished. The schizophrenic real is where words do not substitute objects and the Other still contains
jouissance. Everyone else relates with the real through the lens of discourse. On the contrary, the schizophrenic
“is specified by being caught without the help of any established discourse.” 66 He faces the real without any kind
of mediation, but what we call society is also based upon the real. This basis, however, is always denied by the
repression of the neurotic and the denial of the pervert: “This real provokes its own misrecognition, indeed
produces its systematic negation.”67 However, this negation, which takes the forms of defense, detour, or
evasion, does not take place for the schizophrenic. He lives in the real and is kept alive by the real. Whilst
everyone else is imprisoned by discourse, he is genuinely free within his madness. In Korea, Clauses 1 and 2,
Article 10 of the criminal law applying to crimes committed by mental patients state that those who have a weak
ability to discern what is right and wrong should go unpunished or their sentences ought to be pleaded down.
Let us add the following paradox. In case of schizophrenia, what is at stake is an exceptional state in which
things are discerned too clearly, not the inability to discern.

By the time the Sewol Ferry disaster took place in Korea in 2014, the first son was suffering from another kind
of auditory hallucination. He heard voices crying out for help. He wanted to visit the place and work as a
volunteer, but could not because his mother stopped him. Most people interpret a disaster within a boundary of
discourse, no matter what kind of perspective they take—ranging from criticizing the absence of systems for
disaster response, deploring the incompetence of political control tower, and sneering at politicizing a certain
event to expressing being weary of condolence. Her son, however, was excluded from such discourse. He
relived the incident, hearing the voices of victims, and had to become a savior for them, just as the psychotics in
The 388 in Quebec (an psychoanalytic center helping psychotics live sustainably within local society) relived
the fear of the 9/11 incident and were sure that they were somehow related to the terror. 68 Is this a delusion?
Lacan points out that everyone is delusional. How can we approach this thesis of universal delusion? An
ultimate defense for protecting the real—namely, the Other of the Other—does not exist. The Other exists only

66
Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 474.
67
Lacan, “Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste de l’École,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 244.
68
Jon Mills, David L. Downing, Lacan on Psychosis, New York: Routledge, 2019, p. 136.
 39

symbolically, not really, but still we build up a defense against the real by relying on the Other. We are
delusional because we are relying on the existence of the Other, which is absent at the level of the real, and it
functions as a buttress to live within a society full of discourses. Everyone believes that they are awake, but they
are dreaming. Her son too, is delusional. The only difference is that he talks about victims who no longer exist
and yet ask for his help. Delusion is universal; the only difference between the son and the others are the
attitudes and distance from the real. In this regard, schizophrenia is proof of the irreducibility of the real and our
defense against it. Let us remind ourselves with a stern warning from Jacques-Alain Miller for psychoanalysts.
“Before the madman, before the delusional, do not forget that you are, or were, an analysand, and that you, too,
spoke of what does not exist.”69

Due to constant medication, cooperation from family, and above all, his will to get over his illness, her son
began putting effort into finding the right dosage to lead a better life. By excluding medication that made him
dizzy or sleepy, he could do his job without trouble. She was relieved after her son returned from a several
months-long business trip, but she still had to pay close attention; he could get worse at any time. In reaction to
a series of crimes committed by the schizophrenic, the media proposed a more systematic program for caring
and supporting schizophrenics. However, she could not just sit and wait for institutional support. Also, her son
was neither violent nor isolated from society, as more severe schizophrenics are, and he had to find a way to live
better with his illness. Then, what means are left for them?

Let us take a nodological approach to psychosis. Psychoanalysis will help the son work on a more stable
subjectivization of the real. In the nodological clinic, the significance of the symbolic wanes, though it was be
the key concept for Lacan in the 1950s. A subject’s knot will collapse and trigger the onset of psychosis if any
rings among the imaginary (body image), the symbolic (the unconscious), or the real (jouissance) fall apart. For
James Joyce, the issue was the fall of the imaginary, and for Shreber, the fall of the symbolic. For her son, it was
the fall of the real from the knot that caused auditory hallucinations. Psychoanalysis’ job should be, therefore,
stabilizing the structure of the subject by integrating meaning, phallic jouissance, and the Other’s jouissance. It
also has to focus on how to fix and supplement the errors within the knot, and the means for this could be

69
Jacques-Alain Miller, “Ironic Clinic,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 7 (2001), p. 21.
 40

practically anything, including exercising, hobbies, work, love, or learning. What can she do to help her son
work through this process of sinthomatic subjectivization?

Psychoanalysis leads the subject of desire, who learns how to deal with his or her structural lack. “Desire merely
subjugates what analysis subjectivizes.”70 To be the subject of desire, one has to experience one’s desire being
accepted by others. This is critical to the schizophrenic, who has to set desire as a limit against the flood of
jouissance. The first son once asked her to go on a family trip. She regretted saying, “Trip? Nonsense. Stop
saying nonsense and focus on your work.” Certainly, it is not best to attempt to fulfill every single desire (it is
rather dangerous!), but isn’t it possible not to denounce a signifier charged with a trait of desire? “The real tells
the truth, but it does not speak … . The symbolic, for its part, supported by the signifier, only tells lies when it
speaks.”71 She thought of her past, her family, and her son, whose real tells the truth of the family and the
society with his body. She promised herself to faithfully register her son’s signifiers of desire. This “secretary”
shared the common goal with a psychoanalyst: “What I want to achieve is that the patient be heard in the proper
manner at the moment at which he speaks.”72 She was now trying to say, “You wish to go on a family trip,”
even when she could not actually go on a trip. She repeated the signifiers of desire coming from her son,
returned them to him, and let the signifiers circulate between them. Even though those signifiers were lies, they
helped symbolize the real breaking into the son’s subjectivity.

Now, she has another job; this one is not for breadwinning. She is a secretary to a schizophrenic.

70
Lacan, Écrits, p. 520.
71
Lacan, SXXIV, February 15th, 1977 (unpublished).
72
Lacan, Écrits, p. 32.
 41

Cosmetic Surgery Addiction

She just woke from surgery. It felt a little more tiresome but she was used to the pain. It would get easier to
breathe after recuperation. This was her third nose job. She checked the schedule for re-operation on her breasts.
It would be her seventh time. She had many reasons for operations, such as inflammation, contracted muscles,
damaged prosthetics, and too enlarged breasts. This time, she wanted smaller breasts with a more natural shape.
Nami’s (ナミ) breast size was F, not J, though. She had four surgeries on her eyes for the double eye lid, upper
and lower epicanthoplasty, and ptosis correction. She had another operations on her forehead for replacing
prosthetics with a smaller one. She had the facial contouring, operation twice. It was done on her cheek bone
only, but she had to have a re-operation due to having caved-in. She had liposuction on her thighs and waist. In
Nami’s case, her unique body shape came from a dramatic contrast between her breasts and waist rather than the
breasts themselves.

Many persist on the short-sighted perspective of plastic surgery. For those who have had plastic surgery, they
tend to think, “Just one more nose job would make me look perfect,” despite others’ comments that it is their
unique appearance. There are two cases for plastic surgery: one is having a slight touch on the eyes or nose and
the other is having a “full tune-up.” Irony comes into play herein that those who belong to the former do not
need to have plastic surgery because they already look fine. However, if they have to have “a slight touch” on
their eyes or noses, then they must have surgery on their bones, shaping the whole face. According to the
cosmetic surgery system, it not only imposes unnecessary operations, but also encourages a “full tune-up.”
Patients are eventually led to having more operations than they expected. It is hard to quit once started and
highly addictive. The result of surgery might not be as effective if muscles still worked like before the surgery.
Then, a reoperation is necessary for maintaining constantly collapsing body shape. Of course, a large amount of
time and money is needed for doing so. About six months are required for jaw reduction, eye, and nose job but it
takes up to a year including the recuperation period. It would be ridiculous not to have enough time for driving
or money for gas after purchasing a Porsche.

However, others have more serious motivations for cosmetic surgery than a mere desire to look a little prettier.
For those who suffer from depression and social phobia because of their appearance, a “full tune-up” becomes
“life tune-up.” At this point, cosmetic surgery is imbued with such existential meaning that it becomes a means
of correcting a faulty life and eventually exceeds psychoanalysis. It easily nullifies the satirical message
embedded in John Lennon’s song “Crippled Inside.” “We can dress up and tell lies for the whole life, but we
cannot hide our crippled selves.” But a single operation could bring a life-changing chance. This becomes more
significant when one considers how femininity does not allow the binary opposition of being and appearance.
Looks and characteristic are no longer distinguished from one another. Along the same line, Lacan invents a
new signifier called “para-being/appearing (parêtre).” Being (être) and appearance (paraître) are intertwined
with each other. There is an element of truth in an old masculine prejudice: “Pretty ones have pretty character.”
 42

Despite these effects, the risk of addiction still exists. An intense desire for “just one more time” could be
formed by chance no matter how trivial the initial motivation is. A desire of reoperation could be analogized
with the use of methadone and its side effects. Methadone is a chemical substance for treating heroin addiction,
but patients can experience addiction to methadone. A means of overcoming “crippled inside” could actually
trigger crippledness.

Addiction to cosmetic surgery instantiates metonymic structure. Each reoperation becomes meaningful in a
series of efforts to reach an ideal beauty and directs something more perfect to the patient. However, can “a little
more perfection” be achieved? Furthermore, how can we accept the fact that we are attracted to perfection even
though we know there is no such thing? What is the psychic logic of addiction? Lacan states, “the desire of man
is hell in that it is hell that he is missing!”73 Addiction is sometimes regarded as perversion as it contains
jouissance, which transgresses the limits of desire. Still, we could delve into addicts’ desire toward cosmetic
addiction in accordance with the neurotic structure. Neurosis is a failed perversion. An addict fails to reach hell,
while the pervert succeeds. An addict resides in limbo, hoping to find a rainbow of ultimate satisfaction, which
could be found in the deepest place in hell. Someone who is going to have a jaw reduction surgery—an
operation that guarantees the most dramatic change—is likely to extract molars and damage nerves in the chin
during the operation. He or she also might find it difficult to chew for at least six months even after getting over
the period in which he or she has difficulty breathing. In some other cases, patients experience severe weight
loss and a suicidal impulse. A mirage about seeking the rainbow is what actually enables addicts to overcome all
those side effects. An addict thus resides in limbo. He or she walks a thorny path in limbo, craving heavenly
hell. As Éric Laurent states, what addiction aims at is actually death, 74 not a worldly object or perfect beauty.
Addiction is a path of asceticism aiming for salvation as death. If the death of Antigone is resistant, the death of
an addict is martyr-like.

The structure of desire is socially formed because man’s desire is the desire of the Other. However, the Other
exists only symbolically, not really. The Other embodies the social ideal of a perfect body, face, and skin.
Although a field of plastic surgery regards symmetry as an eternal standard of beauty, every form of beauty is
historically constituted. In 1980s and 1990s, a typical western beauty like Shin-hye Hwang or Hyun-jeong Koh
was considered to be an ideal beauty, as the whole society yearned for western culture. In 2000, a v-shaped chin
came into fashion, which made jaw reduction operation popular. In 2010, as yearning for western culture waned
and the natural look became popular, a combination of eastern mood and western body shape became trendy.

The structure of desire is technologically driven. The double eye lid operation was originally intended to help
patients open their eyes easily and widen their vision. Nose jobs were developed for relieving septal deviation.
73
Lacan, SXXII, February 18th, 1975 (unpublished).
74
Eric Laurent, “From saying to doing in the clinic of drug addiction and alcoholism,” in Almanac of Psychoanalysis,
1, p. 138.
 43

Jaw reduction was for correcting malocclusion and cleft lips. Anyways, we are now living in an era where
plastic surgery as medical science and as aesthetic are no longer distinguishable. Thus, the intensity of addiction
is proportionate to technological evolution.

The structure of desire is financially stratified. In the past, it was common to have plastic surgery after
graduating high school. However, these days some from the upper class bring their middle schoolers to a clinic
and carefully set up a long-term plan for minimizing the risks of plastic surgery. When they have operations
early, they are more likely to recuperate quickly. Thus, the ideology that appearance is a matter of not only
charm, but also power is passed down to a younger generation. “My sweet children, success comes for only
those who have both academic and beauty capital.” There is no place for plastic surgery victims to come into
play here. There is a division between those who can overcome the side effects with the aid of capital and those
who cannot.

In sum, addiction to cosmetic surgery is not just the issue of desire, but a complex problematic where social
ideal, technological evolution, and economic class are intertwined. As Marie-Hélène Brousse points out,
addiction could be a sign that the world is becoming more and more feminized, since femininity stands for a
limitless jouissance. 75 While addiction is masculine in that it is attached to a certain object (alcohol, drug, game,
sexual object, body, etc.), it is feminine in that it aims for an unlimited satisfaction. Furthermore, if addiction is
a sign for the feminization of the world, then addiction to cosmetic surgery would be the feminization of
addiction.

How could she come to feminize addiction rather than subjectivizing femininity? Her height was 172cm and her
weight was about 52kg. She even had a job offering to work as a fashion model, but her height always had been
a huge stress to her. She felt uncomfortable with others paying attention to her anyways. She kept only a
minimum number of friends and acquaintances. She did not have a close friend. She did not have any particular
dream after graduating high school, but she had a certificate for Photoshop so that she could get graphic
designer job. Her colleagues talked about her quirks a lot. She was inarticulate in her speech and did not make
eye contact with others, but she still had her own little world. She relieved stress by playing online games. She
spent money on Battleground. She did not have trouble with her parents, either. In fact, she even gave her
parents some money when they moved to a new house. That said, she never had a deep conversation with them,
which was a deep-rooted family culture. Her family members did not really have conversations with each other
and simply focused on their work. She did spend money on games, but she never spent money on alcohol,
traveling, or fashion. The rest of her money was spent for plastic surgery. She was not interested in a romantic
relationship, either. A rich man once asked to be in a sugar daddy relationship with her. She rejected it right
away. She was planning to have several more reoperations for her eyes, nose, and breasts. She was still young,
so she still had chance in trying to become Nami.

75
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo21OKX7q84&t=233s
 44

Addiction does not belong to a single category in psychoanalysis as it does in psychiatry based on the DSM.
Addiction is a phenomenon. What matters is a structural diagnosis because addiction plays a different role in
each structure (neurosis, perversion, and psychosis). For those who experience neurosis or perversion, addiction
functions as supplying additional jouissance to fill up the lack. For those with psychosis, addiction is a
makeshift for controlling overflowing jouissance. In other words, a primary trauma could pre-exist, and then,
“jouissance defined as what always returns to the same place” 76 (addictive jouissance) revolves around and
patches up the psychical hole that trauma punctured. While addiction within the neurotic or perverted structure
functions as a means of managing the symbolic lack, psychotic addiction attempts to cover the real hole. While
the subject in the former case suffers from the unbreakable circulation of satisfaction, emptiness, and guilt, those
in the latter case construct a closed, stable system of meaning.

She was raped when she was thirteen years old. She came back home after it happened. Her mother was home,
but she did not say anything. Neither did her mother. Would it have been different if her mother had noticed
something wrong and talked to her? An unarticulated, unsymbolized trauma punctures one’s mentality. To fill
up the everlasting anxiety this hole triggeres, an ideal image could be exploited. That was how she met Nami in
the Japanese animation One Piece and became friends. Since those who share similarities (semblable) could be
friends, she continuously underwent operations to resemble Nami’s body image. At this point, an image is no
longer illusional. Rather, it brings a real effect. Lacan states, “the imaginary is not in any sense the illusory … I
grant it its function as real.” 77 Once a subject is drawn to addiction the effects of the image supports, he or she
cuts off every kind of social tie except for some few that helps to stay in addiction (she sometimes gets
counselling about her life from the coordinator at the plastic surgery hospital). Ńestor Braunstein points out that
addiction is a-diction: an absence of diction. 78 Lack of conversation leads to lack of intimacy and social
withdrawal follows. Inversely, when addiction comes into play, there is less room for words to take part in. It is
a vicious circle.

How can we break from this vicious circle? Reality testing or cognitive correction—persuading her by saying
“You are not Nami”—have limitations. Above all, her trauma must be symbolized. It is not appropriate to lead
her to the so-called adaptation to reality (what is the normal or proper level of cosmetic surgery operation?),
since reality works in concert with fantasy. The 12 steps addiction treatment program also has a drawback in
that it is based on the coercive logic of authority and norms.  The addict must, “come to believe that a power
greater than himself could restore him to sanity.” 79 Moreover, a binary division between sanity and insanity does
not take a subject’s singular life and characteristics into account.

76
Lacan, SXVI, p. 212.
77
Lacan, Écrits, pp. 607–608.
78
Ńestor Braunstein, La Jouissance: Un Concept Lacanien, Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1992, p. 257.
79
Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th ed. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001, p.
59.
 45

Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, suggests a unique form of bond between analyst and analysand to symbolize
trauma. “Psychoanalysis has a consistency different from that of other discourse: it is a bond of two [un lien à
deux].”80 A bond in psychoanalysis symbolizes the hole in the real, such as the lack of a sexual relationship or
the trauma of sexual violence. If addiction to cosmetic surgery is a symptom that fills the hole, the analytic bond
of two allows the subject to explore the hole. Psychoanalysis changes the way an addict relates to trauma by
allowing him or her to experience a bond of two. Of course, one should keep in mind that there is no facile
causality between the trauma of being raped and addiction. Every trauma is always and already a complex
trauma beyond the correlation between trauma and fantasy. It is impossible to find an exact cause and effect in a
subject’s life history. In 1895, Freud and Breuer wrote that psychological injury is like an alien agent that keeps
harming the body even after it entered the body long ago. 81 However, what worsens the problem is that it
changes its form and shape and works in concert with other intra-psychic agents.

This is it. We cannot say more since she was refusing to be in a psychoanalytic bond. In short, addiction to
cosmetic surgery was the way her unconscious talked and the way she was defending herself from the traumatic
hole. “The unconscious, in short, is that we speak … all alone. We speak all alone because we never says
anything but one and the same thing—except if we open ourselves to a dialogue with a psychoanalyst. There is
no way to do differently than to receive from an analyst something that disturbs the defense.” 82 A speaking
being with the unconscious talks alone, about the same thing all the time, without realizing what he or she is
defending. Would she accept the invitation of psychoanalysis sometime in the future? How could an analyst
mildly and rigorously step into her defense mechanism? In the Preface to the English edition of Seminar XI,
Lacan writes that he is engaged in an urgent case and adds, “I write, however, in so far as I feel I must, in order
to be on a level [au pair] with these cases, to make a pair [la paire] with them.”83 At least, we would not tell her,
“You are not Nami” or “You are not Nami’s friend.” Rather, let us simply ask her: Did not Nami herself open
her mind and promise to be Luffy’s friend?

80
Jacques Lacan, “The Third,” in The Lacanian Review: Get Real, 07, Spring, 2019, p. 87.
81
Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, “Studies on hysteria,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, ed. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, p. 6.
82
Lacan, SXXIV, Jan. 11st, 1977. Unpublished.
83
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1963-1964, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1981, p. ix.
 46

Manic Depression

About twenty years ago, when she could felt nothing but confusion, she received her first psychiatric treatment
due to her boyfriend’s recommendation. He witnessed his father suffering from depression, thus he was aware
of mental illness to some degree. She married her boyfriend and had two children, but her marital life was not
smooth. When they were divorcing, her husband told her that he still did not understand why they had to
breakup. Though now she knows. It was neither her nor his fault. In fact, there was  no one to blame for their
divorce. It was actually her aggression she showed when she was in a manic episode. Can we blame a symptom
then? Maybe we should only focus on the very effort of dealing with the symptom.

Later she visited a psychiatric hospital because she found it difficult to complete daily tasks such as brushing her
teeth and feeding her children. She had been diagnosed with manic depression earlier, in her late twenties. The
clinics she had tried before only provided her superficial treatment. They would ask her how was she doing and
explain briefly about the medication. That was all. This manual-oriented treatment was understandable since
psychiatry was a discourse based on an objective set of data and knowledge, which sutures any incidence of
subjective truth. However, this doctor was different. He gave her a proper counseling. While she was talking
about her constant conflict with her mother, she told him that she could not understand why she was so different
from her brother even though they shared the same parents. Her brother spent his money sensibly and had no
difficulty dealing with his impulses, but she could not do the same. She brought up the memory of her mother
scolding her for taking some cash scattered about the room and buying candy with it. Her sense of guilt
worsened by making comparisons with her brother. She stated that her brother was also old enough to
understand the concept of money. However, he withstood his impulse and did not take money. The doctor
replied, “Be more precise.” Her brother was not with her. He was actually sitting next to the mother when she
took the cash. Also, the doctor pointed out that there was nothing wrong with the very desire for buying some
candies. She realized that it did not necessarily mean that she and her brother grew up in the same environment,
even though they shared the same parents. She could free herself from guilt to some degree after bursting into
tears.

She read the book, A Toxic Parent, with the doctor’s recommendation and slowly grasped the possible impact
parents have on children. She decided not to take the same path of her mother and read similar books
thoroughly. She could expand her perspective through reading, but practicing in reality was another thing. She
was so accustomed to her mother’s parenting method that she felt nothing but awkwardness when trying other
methods. Parenting children was the biggest problem. When they were infants, feeding them and putting them to
sleep were enough. However, as they grew, she felt the necessity of emotional parenting and realized in despair
that she did not receive proper emotional parenting. She started to read A Toxic Parent not to become one, but
she found herself already “intoxicated” by improper parenting. She thought that it was her children who would
suffer the most from her manic depression.
 47

Let us take a look at the case of the actress Patty Duke (1946–2016) who authored A Brilliant Madness: Living
with Manic-Depressive Illness. She started to suffer from manic depression when she was nineteen, with an
acute depressive episode. She was stuck in bed and crying, cut off from all sorts of social interactions. It was a
kind of sorrow without a specific reason or a target to mourn. Then, she stayed in a more balanced state of mind
for several weeks, and then a manic episode began with a sense of uplift. She felt full of potential and was able
to do anything. She spent money far beyond her budget. Patty Duke admits she abused her children during that
period.

Like Patty Duke, she also beat her second child in a manic episode. She swore to herself not to make the same
mistake again. Unfortunately, her second child was diagnosed with childhood depression. One day, the child
whined, “I don’t want to go to school.” Then, she told the child, “Everyone else is going to school, what if you
are the only one remaining stupid? Just quit school then!” For her part, this was just a provocation, but her son
welcomed it as reality and did not go to school for a week. It is true that making comparisons with others,
negatively impacts an individual, but eliminating others totally and remaining in a state of isolation is also
harmful. Her son was in a state of lethargy without any desire toward the world or will to make up for a sense of
lack, without any hope that there was a solution for the lack somewhere out there. Faced with her own manic
depression and her second child’s depression, she told herself, “I, myself, have to become happy.” She could not
simply prevent passing down the same tragedy to her children, but she had to spread a sense of happiness
among them. That was how her struggle against manic depression started.

Her first goal was to quit taking the medicine, since it was difficult to control the dose of medicine, and the side
effects, such as a speech disorder and visual hallucination, were severe too. She took sleeping pills to keep her
sleeping hours the same during a manic episode after realizing that the intensity of hyperactivity during manic
episode was proportionate to the intensity of lethargy during the depressive episodes. She also went hiking for
an hour everyday and exercised to improve her strength. She stayed away from shopping not to give herself a
chance to overspend at all. She told the doctor it was so difficult to do her everyday tasks such as taking the
subway, arriving to work on time, and paying bills. Then, the doctor told her that all these difficulties stemmed
from the same reason, and this point helped her. Realizing it was for the sake of her vanity rather than her
children, she quit her position as a president of the parents’ association in school. She then focused on her
children by making and keeping rules for everyday life, such as cleaning their rooms and spending pocket
money.

Ten years had passed since she was diagnosed with manic depression. She was enjoying a much more stable
life. It was easier for her to catch the subtle switching between manic and depressive episode. By taking an
appropriate dose of medicine, she could cope with an acute manic symptom such as heart palpitation, insomnia,
and the flight of ideas. The period and the intensity of the depressive episode has reduced. Furthermore, she had
 48

become strong enough not to be influenced by negative thoughts the depressive episodes triggered. She did not
focus on simply quitting taking medicine, but she took a minimum amount of medicine only when it was
necessary; a practice of self-directed recovery. When she visited the doctor who diagnosed her with manic
depression ten years prior, he was surprised to find that she had been dealing with her symptoms only with
sleeping pills.

The history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry reports that manic depression has been categorized as
schizophrenia. Kraepelin coined the term “manic depression” and distinguished manic depression from
schizophrenia, but was not sure of the exact boundary. Some patients with manic depression suffered from
hallucinations, which was a standard symptom of schizophrenia, and some people with schizophrenia
experienced the repeated pattern of extreme hyperactivity and depression. Ernest Jones also thought that manic
depression did not exist. The first patient with manic depression who Jones and Otto Gross treated turned out to
be a schizophrenic. Freida Fromm-Reichmann, who conducted a research on manic depression in 1940s was
also skeptical about Kraepelin’s taking of manic depression as a single entity. In this regard, she was thankful
that she had been correctly diagnosed with manic depression since there were many out there who did not even
know that they had manic depression and struggled with inexplicable suffering.

Then, how could psychoanalysis address her case? Let us approach this in two aspects. One is about the object
and the other is about the Other. Lacan states that, “what is at issue in mania is the non-function of a and not
simply its misrecognition.” 84 In the case of hysteria, the object a, which is simultaneously constructed within the
symbolic and not reducible to the symbolic, is being extracted from the subject, and the subject addresses it
through the imaginary. However, when it comes to mania, the object a is not extracted (non-extraction). The
object a does not function as a lost object, rather it overwhelmingly exists. This is a clue for explaining the
various manic symptoms: hyperactivation of senses, surging impulse on sex and buying, and megalomaniac
confidence. If the object a is being extracted, such upliftness fades and the subject loses interest in almost
everything, which means that the manic episode has ended. However, ironically many subjects with manic
depression report that the manic episode brings some distinctive jouissance to the subject. While a sense of
mania is powerful enough to destroy one’s life, one misses the overwhelming intensiveness mania brings after
one’s symptoms have eased. One is thus given a task to mourn for the absence of something sweet and fatal.

Let us move on to the problem of the Other. To her, the most important Other is her mother. Her mother refused
to visit the hospital with her even though family support and communication was necessary for treating manic
depression. It could have been difficult for the mother to accept that her daughter was suffering from mental
illness—a daughter who used to be a talented and ambitious girl. Conversely, it was enough for her to witness
her daughter failing to enter a prestigious university and going through a divorce. Like medieval doctors or
some contemporaries ignorant of mental illness, she simply considered manic depression as laziness (accidie).

84
Lacan, SX, p. 336.
 49

She was disappointed to find her mother blaming her “laziness,” from whom she had expected support. Taking
Fromm-Reichmann’s concept of “schizophrenogenic mother,” was her mother “a manic-depressionogenic
mother”? It was useless to tell her mother that it was not a matter of attitude or will. In some respects, some
people’s ignorance, including her mother’s, about manic depression was understandable. For those unfamiliar
with manic depression, it would be difficult to appreciate the subject’s lethargy especially after witnessing the
subject’s hyperactivity. It would have been difficult for her mother to cope with her daughter stealing her credit
card and endlessly buying things. On the other hand, her mother brought her back home when she divorced her
husband and had nowhere to go. Her mother also gave a helping hand whenever she had trouble raising a child
as a single mother. To her, mother was simultaneously a dominating Other and saving Other. She still fell into
an awkward silence when she went driving with her mother, but she secretly counted the days until her mother
returned when her mother left home for a while. As Reichmann points out, does the Other of the person with
manic depression remain as ideal, whereas the Other of the person with schizophrenia remains as deficient?
Perhaps one would become the most hostile to what one takes as one’s ideal. This is how a complicated
love/hate relationship formed between the mother and daughter.

Darian Leader comments that over-proximity to the Other could be a core cause for manic-depressive disorder
as it is for schizophrenia. 85 If we are too close to the Other, the relationship most likely has a tragic ending. We
would come to believe that the Other is persecuting or mistreating us, and the Other would think the same.
Without a clear distinction between the subject and the Other, it is difficult to discover who is at fault and who is
going to take responsibility. Someone with melancholia thinks, “It is my fault,” and someone with paranoia
says, “It is your fault.” In the case of someone with manic depression, one is suffering from ambiguity, which
hinders one from clarifying where the responsibility lies. Such ambiguity brings a continuous dissonance to the
relationship with the Other. It is not surprising that money issues always had been the biggest trouble between
her and her mother. It was difficult to discern how much she borrowed from her mother exactly and how much
she paid back.

The conflict between her and her mother dramatically reduced after she paid her debt and had a decent career.
Still, staying with her mother remained a tricky task. When her mother expected too much of her children’s
academic achievement and hurt their motivation and confidence, she saw herself in her children. However, she
tried to be a refuge to her children instead of blaming her mother.

She brought up the memory of participating in a society for people with manic depression that was held in a
hospital. She wondered why most of the patients were so unwilling to fight against their sickness, trying to
avoid any changes and never practicing essential rules for care. Life always has been chaos to her, but she never
gave up. She found a way to live with her manic-depressive disorder and took all the responsibilities that

85
Darian Leader, “The specificity of manic-depressive psychosis,” in Lacan on Madness: Madness, yes you can’t, ed.
Patricia Gherovici and Manya Steinkoler, New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 137.
 50

stemmed from it. At that point, she was about to deal with the cause of her symptoms, namely, the relationship
with the Other. How was her effort to separate from the Other in an unharming way going to end up? Could the
mother and the daughter coexist even after the separation? As she struggled with the problem of the object,
could she be as brave to struggle with the problem of the Other? Indeed, we can count only the process of
subjectivizing the symptom, not the symptom itself. In this regard, she is the unyielding David fighting against
Goliath of manic-depressive disorder.
 51

Anorexia

She was planning next week’s diet. It needed to be exact. However, no matter how carefully she calculated
things failed her like they did the other day when she was waiting for her package delivery before going to
academy. The delivery man had gone to the wrong place and the package was damaged. She could not go to
academy as she planned. She could not cope with her plans going wrong. She felt like she was going to die if
she did not eat something. She devoured enough calories for five days right away. Then, she did not eat for five
days. Life was difficult for her.

Two clinical points can be drawn from this anecdote. The first is a general one: with anorexia, there is a
correlation between austere self-control and excessive eating. This correlation is due to the structure of the drive
where one extreme can be inverted into the other extreme. It can be also explained by how drive is neither solely
corporeal nor psychological, but a pressure acting on the border of body and mind. The correlation cannot be
explicated by the conservative logic of body, but by the impact of the malleable logic of the mind on the body. It
is in this context that the predicate “nervosa” and “anorexia” were combined together in the 1965 Goettingen
International Symposium. Anorexia is not a matter of under-nutrition at the level of biological function; it is a
problem of interaction between mind and body. The second point is related to holophrasis in the light of
Lacanian clinic. Lacan considered holophrasis as an embodiment of psychosis and psychosomaticism in a
linguistic form. Insofar as the speaking being is not a master of language, but an effect of the signifier, the gap
between the two signifiers constructs the subject. However, in holophrasis, two signifiers, which are minimally
required, are absent, and the gap between these signifiers is absent, too. A single signifier repeats itself without
referring to other signifiers, far from forming a structure of a signifying chain with them. If the subject
encounters the gap between signifiers, he or she immerses into an overwhelming jouissance. The only refuge for
the subject who failed to construct the symbolic is the indulgence in lethal jouissance.

Her binge-eating episode that day exemplifies the logic of holophrasis. What is unique in her case is that
holophrasis is operative at the temporal level. A smooth process of receiving a package, checking the package,
and going to the academy on time is a single entity of holophrasis, not one composed of separate signifiers. No
gaps are allowed among those signifiers, which means that no modifications are allowed on schedule. However,
as her plans went awry, a gap emerged among those signifiers. Her unconscious structure could not cope with
this unexpected gap. Similarly, she also became mad and went on a binge when her mother forgot to prepare her
dinner as planned. A gap between the plans, between each meal was unbearable to her and she relied on the
jouissance of binge-eating to react to the gap. As her unconscious followed the logic of holophrasis, the binge-
eating episode was her own way of dealing with the gap among signifiers.

Therefore, we need to be careful not to define the subject’s eating habits as “eating disorder” according to a
standard, statistical norm. Instead, psychoanalysis observes that her anorexia and binge-eating episode is not a
 52

disorder, but a solution. The subject never gives up on her own solution-symptom easily. The subject
loves her symptoms, as Freud points out. This implies that an analyst should stay away from trying to alleviate
or remove the deadly symptom too hastily. The harder the analyst tries to remove the symptom, the stronger the
analysand’s resistance becomes. The case of Ella’s anorexia that Claude-Noële Pickmann reported is
exemplary.86 Her symptoms faded away unwittingly as the Oedipal scene with her father had been instituted and
her mother’s superegoic gaze (her mother always made her finish everything on her plate) had been reminded.
One day, Ella found herself enjoying her meal naturally and comfortably. Only the construction of a symptom
can genuinely deconstruct the symptom.

She shared both similarities and differences with Ella. Both of them suffered from a mother taking care of them
too much. When a mother satisfies her child’s every need, the child desperately tries to separate need from
desire. As a result, the child is endowed with hysterical desire, which targets the dissatisfaction. As desire is
based on lack, the subject protects the space of lack to explore her desire. A subject with anorexia rejects food,
and yet she eats “nothing.” In other words, the subject consumes signifiers that revolve around this “nothing”
(e.g., a thoroughly planned diet, calculated calories, changing weight, etc.) As a living organism’s desire can be
satisfied by consuming various food, the desire of a person with anorexia is fulfilled by “nothing,” which never
can be filled by any kind of food. Furthermore, by eating nothing and rejecting food, she and Ella rejected the
gracious (m)Other’s threatening care. The difference between her and Ella was that while Ella’s mother was
obsessed with food, her mother was obsessed with schedules and plans. Because of her mother, there was no
such thing as “killing time” in her childhood. She had to stick to the schedule as if she was still going to school
even though it was her vacation. She did everything on time: waking up, grabbing breakfast, going to academy
and the library, and then sleeping on time. As she was deprived from the concept of “killing time,” she could not
have the concept of “spare time” either. Everything was accomplished as planned, as always, as her mother’s
will. Shortly, it became her own will as well as an overwhelming shackle on her life. While her friends found
their life in high school difficult because of tight schedules, she found it rather comfortable since everything
went according to the schedule. However, an unplanned event took place one day. She went on a group blind
date with her friend. She liked a man and fortunately her friend liked the other man. Two couples were formed
as if it was planned. However, after several dates, the man cut off her. She later found out via SNS that her
friend and the man were going out. She was not shocked when the man stopped talking to her, but she indeed
was when she saw a picture of them. Far from feeling betrayed, she deeply pondered the difference between her
and her friend. She thoroughly went through her friend’s SNS account. Her friend was skinnier than her. She
drew a conclusion: I need to lose weight.

This was how she started suffering from anorexia. Her target weight was 40kg. She restricted her diet and
calculated the calories of each meal. She measured her body weight before and after eating. The scale was like a
86
Claude-Noéle Pickmann, “Suppléance by the Symptom: A Case of Anorexia,” in European Journal of
Psychoanalysis: Feminine Pathologies, trans. Stephen Haswell Todd, vol. 2, no. 1, 2015 (https://www.journal-
psychoanalysis.eu/suppleance-by-the-symptom-a-case-of-anorexia1/).
 53

court. It was not her measuring her body weight, but it was the scale summoning her. Whenever her weight was
satisfactory, she took a selfie and uploaded it on her SNS account. She was flattered by the compliments on her
skinny body. Then, the selfies on her SNS had become her identity. She indulged much more in her selfies than
in those of her friend. At this point, a call for ethnopsychiatry emerges. We are now living in a society where the
authority of images overwhelms the signifier’s power, where supreme images circulate and people excessively
identify themselves with those images. Even chefs prioritize the look of food, not the taste and flavor. It was
true that her friend’s picture, or to be precise, her interpretation of and fantasy about that picture influenced her
significantly. However, that picture was gone and her selfies dominated everything. Her friend’s picture was an
accidental trigger, but her selfies were a foundation supporting the symptom, because it had become even harder
to give up on the symptom since her selfies attracted others’ attention. She needed to stay as she was. While the
scale’s judgment made her temporarily despaired though ultimately reassured her, an image’s power made her
helplessly oscillate between hope and despair. A man whom she went out with complained about her
underweight body, but she never cared. The image of her skinny body had been deeply libidinized and
phallicized. She produced pleasure from the image of her skinny self and was able to find from it the meaning of
her existence.

Then, her symptom took a new turn. As selfies and anorexia worked in pair, a new pair came into the play,
which were mukbang (a video clip of a person eating food) and a binge-eating episode. She encountered the
mukbang on YouTube when she went on a binge because of a messed-up plan. The YouTuber devoured 10,000
calories in just two hours. She would have found it gross, but the YouTuber somehow attracted her attention
maybe because she was on a binge-eating episode too in that moment. The YouTuber was never a fat person.
“Skinny ones are skinny by nature. It is innate.” What drew her interest more was the number of subscribers to
her channel. The YouTuber had more than ten thousands subscribers. She would eventually understand those
YouTubers stayed in shape by throwing up after the show. They preferred soft-textured food like cake and ice
cream because it is easier to throw up. They have puffy eyes because of the lack of nutrients from constantly
throwing up. Even the Ministry of Health and Welfare decided to regulate mukbang, considering that the socio-
economic expenditure for obesity takes up to almost 9 trillion Korean won. Ignorant of mukbang’s negative
sides, she came up with an idea. She decided to become a YouTuber whenever she was on a binge-eating
episode. She wanted a side job anyways. She wanted to turn her sense of guilt about binge-eating into an
opportunity of making some extra money. At first, she also took mukbang as a phenomena in the effort of a
younger generation who is suffering from loneliness to get a vicarious satisfaction by acquiring the feeling of
having a meal together. However, she figured out that a much more diverse audience was watching mukbang
after getting more subscribers. Among those subscribers, some had anorexia like her. She got a message from
one of them. He told her that his symptoms did not get better despite the aid of clinical treatment, but he was
encouraged by watching her mukbang. It was ironic for her to find out that an anorexic could alleviate his
aversion against food by watching over another anorexic’s binge-eating episode. She was already aware of the
existence of other anorexic too, but it was her first time to actually meet and talk to an anorexic subject albeit in
 54

online. She felt a strange sense of fellowship and solidarity. He might also suffer from a binge-eating episode
like her. She quickly replied to the message. She told him her story and the reason why she could not upload
videos on a regular basis. She received a reply. “You do not have to stick to plans. Things always slip out of our
hands easily.” It was the first time someone told her that it was okay not to stick to plans. A word from an
anorexic influenced another anorexic like an analytic interpretation. Her frame of fantasy behind her anorexia,
“everything as planned,” had been shaken for the first time. For now, it is difficult to expect how this moment
will lead to her fundamental recovery from anorexia.

In sum, her symptoms constituted by the factors such as the structure of holopharsis, the hysteric desire against
her mother’s demand, and the enchantment with the image of her skinny self could have become more ego-
syntonic and reinforced insofar selfies supported the anorexia and mukbang supported the binge-eating episode.
In addition, her anorexia was not extremely severe, so it might not necessarily have brought her to the aid of
clinical intervention. She could have been suffering silently and consistently from her mild, yet insidious
symptoms, throughout her entire life, without a chance for change. Then, an unprecedented signifier arrived to
contend with the symptom and suspend its integration into her ego. Let us repeat the signifier that seems
insignificant (insignifiant/un signifiant), nevertheless has the significant potential to subvert her fantasy.  

You do not have to stick to plans. Things always slip out of our hands easily.
 55

Orgasm

The feminine orgasm illustrates well how there is no essence of woman; rather, woman exists as a singularity. A
woman might confuse orgasm with sexual arousal because of the ambiguous boundary between them, which
makes her consider wetting as orgasm itself, while most men clearly distinguish erection from  orgasm. A
woman might explore the boundary of orgasm and squirting (female ejaculation). Different women have
different preferences of vaginal orgasm and clitoris orgasm. Orgasm is also under the influence of various
factors including both corporeal and psychological ones. Orgasm is likely to be triggered by factors such as
having smooth communication with a partner, a feeling of being loved, and romantic mood, but some women
might find themselves puzzled after experiencing orgasm with unattractive partners. If the feminine orgasm is
not a subject to be defined or classified, how can we deal with the problem of a singular woman’s specific
orgasm?

She liked to make love with her boyfriend. However, she was uncertain whether she actually found it sexually
pleasing. Maybe it was, or maybe not. She liked it anyways. She experienced her first orgasm with her current
boyfriend. She had pretended to be aroused with her ex-boyfriends. They did not seem to understand her body’s
mechanism, as if their sheer interest was ejaculation. This implies that some of sexual performances are
masturbatory, far from being masterly. She could not understand the boasting attitude of men after sex. Lacan
says that, “phallic jouissance is the obstacle owing to which man does not come, I would say, to enjoy woman’s
body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ.” 87 Of course, there are some biological
females who indulge in phallic jouissance just like there are some men who are haunted by the Other jouissance.
She had a friend who had a strong sexual appetite. She would not live without men for a single week. To this
friend, men were just a chunk of flesh. Some may ask; how could she claim men as flesh? However, what
matters here is “chunk” rather than “flesh.” Every sexual drive is a partial drive. There is no drive which targets
the entire body (what targets the entire body is image). When the drive comes into existence in the form of
phallic jouissance, it reduces the partner’s body into a bundle of flesh, organs, and bones. Her current boyfriend
was not obsessed with phallic jouissance, but her orgasm still remained a mystery. Maybe she was still
pretending to be aroused. Her boyfriend sometimes asked her whether she enjoyed it. He thought that he gave
her more pleasure when she sweated more than usual. She answered that she did enjoy it, but she was not
perfectly sure whether it was “that” good. Was it the genuine orgasm? Her boyfriend even said, “You look
pretty when you get aroused and come.”

Then, why did she tell her boyfriend that she enjoyed it? Not to let down him? To purse a smooth relationship
with him? Was she afraid of losing him if she revealed her frigidity? She was sure that she was not that hysteric.
However, she was also sure that she had been pretending to enjoy with her ex-boyfriends. Of course it had not
been real and this time it was real. No, she still could not tell whether this one was real. She was still pretending.

87
Lacan, SXX, p. 7.
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One signifier provides a clue here. While Greeks used the word “phallos” to refer to the phallus, Romans used
the word “fascinus.” Note that fascinus can be related to both sexes. For the relation between men and fascinus,
one could think of Roman generals who hung the figure of a penis onto their chariots to show off their triumph.
For the relation between women and fascinus, let us note that the word “fascinus” is also related to the English
word “fascinate.” Women’s pleasure is what enchants and fascinates men. It could be something more than
pleasure. She could put aside her uncertainty on her authentic pleasure and attempt to become a woman who has
the ability to provide a perfect and integral jouissance. Here, a man gets pleasure from the phallus, while a
woman becomes the phallus itself and even subordinates the man. Let us bear in mind the Lacanian
asymmetrical distinction between the masculine and the feminine; it is meaningless to argue which sex is more
superior, insofar as the boundary of the two sexes is drawn between being and having in the asymmetrical way,
not between the have and have-nots in the symmetrical Freudian way. A man possesses the phallus but cannot
become one. A woman lacks the phallus, but she is the phallus.

Then, does this mean that she gave up her feminine jouissance to become the phallus? Did she give up the
original right of women to fit herself into a man’s fantasy? A woman who participated in Piera Aulagnier’s
lecture Jouissance–A Woman’s Right said that, “I ask if my jouissance is a simulacrum, a false semblance; yet
the pleasure I feel is real. … The most authentic thing about myself is a lie, though this lie is what has always
seemed to me the truth par excellence.” 88 Maybe she could be involved in the illusion of becoming an almighty
phallus by simulating pleasure. However, the phallus is not enough to fully explicate her orgasm. Her orgasm,
or what she considered as orgasm, slips away from the logic of phallus. It rather obeys to the logic of
semblance.

People say, “You pretend to know things (tu fais semblance de savoir).” However, semblance does not have
such a negative connotation like deceit, trick, or cheat. Lacan associates semblance with Aristotle’s concept of
mimesis. For the ancients, the core value of their aesthethics was a mimesis of nature, as an act of imitation.
However, mimesis is not reducible to a simple imitation. Mimesis is a performance that takes place during some
process, far from a mere imitation of an existing model. Psychoanalysis is not a scam not because the analyst
occupies the position of authentic truth, but because the analyst occupies the position of performative
semblance. The analyst uses semblance strategically to capture and mobilize the analysand’s jouissance imbued
with anguishes, misfortunes, and regrets. In the transferential situation, the analyst becomes a mother, a father, a
lover, and at the same time none of them. The analyst is the semblance of the object a which encourages the
analysand’s unconscious discourse, represents the residue of the analysand’s jouissance, and helps the analysand
to desire anew based on his or her subjective truth. Such a performance is playful and strategic as much as it is
risky and tough. Nevertheless, only this function of occupying the place of the object a “allows him to preserve

88
Silvia Lippi, “Questions sur la simulation,” in Recherches en psychanalyse, 2010, no. 10, pp. 257–266.
(https://www.cairn.info/revue-recherches-en-psychanalyse-2010-2-page-257a.htm)
 57

stable and permanent all the fictions that are most incompatible with what is involved in his experience.” 89 In
addition, the semblance is more ethical than deceitful. It is rather more deceitful to claim that analytic discourse
is the only discourse involved with the authentic real, because there is no single discourse that is not related to
the semblance. “That the psychoanalyst should pretend or make semblance, as if he was there in order to let
sexuality work well … is fully acceptable. … But what is annoying is that he ends up believing it, and then this
freezes him completely.”90 When the analyst distorts the real as the impossible that does not work, is enchanted
by the fantasy that a harmonious sexual relationship exists, or projects one’s narcissistic ego onto the semblance,
then the analytic process fails. Analysis goes awry when the analyst believes that he or she exerts some positive
influence on the analysand because of his or her contribution. The analyst must keep in mind that he or she is a
mere semblance, not an analyst.

She deploys this logic of semblance in a bedroom, not in a consulting room. Similar to how the analyst as the
semblance of the object a could cross the border of truth and lie back and forth, she freely roams the boundary
of “genuine” orgasm and pretention. She uses semblance to reach orgasm, not to become the phallus. She brings
forth joy from in-between genuine orgasm and pretending orgasm, putting aside the pleasure of satisfying her
boyfriend. In Seminar XIII, Lacan defines orgasm as the emergence of jouissance. 91 In Seminar XX, he clarifies
that jouissance could be achieved only through semblance. “Jouissance is questioned, evoked, tracked, and
elaborated only on the basis of a semblance.” 92 Semblance blurs the distinction between satisfaction and
unsatisfaction, pleasure and unpleasure, authenticity and fake, truth and lie. Some may state that she was
suffering from sex frigidity, but she never was. Frigidity occurs because of defending anxiety on an excessive or
scarce jouissance. However, she had reached her own jouissance. She was not worried about the intensity and
amount of jouissance. Rather, she encountered the essential uncertainty of jouissance.

Men tend to be obsessed with “a genuine pleasure” whether it is his own or his partner’s pleasure, ejaculation or
twitching. Don’t men think of the fusional One within their strong confidence on “a genuine pleasure”? Don’t
they dream of the imaginary sexual union, ignoring there is no such thing as a sexual relationship? As men aim
at “becoming one (faire un),” she aimed at “becoming semblance (faire semblance),” trying not to become one.
Orgasm cannot make us one no matter how fantastic it is. Rather, we should invent each other’s jouissance,
remaining vigilant against the illusion of becoming one. Her orgasm revealed both the impossibility of a sexual
relationship and the possibility of subjective jouissance based on this impossibility. Now she was trying to
explore this possibility.

89
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XV: The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967–1968, March 27th, 1968 (unpublished).
90
Jacques Lacan, “Du discours psychanalytique,” in Lacan in Italia 1953–1978. En Italie Lacan, ed. G. B. Contri,
Milan: La Salamandra, 1978, p. 41.
91
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis, 1965–1966, April 27th, 1966 (unpublished).
92
Lacan, SXX, p. 92.
 58

Some claim that sex is an art. In which aspect is sex an art? In terms of sharing each other’s feeling? In terms of
vigor and position? Of knowledge and technique? Of the frequency and intensity of orgasm? Her sex is the
performance art of semblance.
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Between-Two-Deaths

She was heading to the hospital as always, where her father was hospitalized. Entering  the intensive care unit,
she found her father getting an injection. She felt sorry for the nurse giving the injection to him. Tormented by
physical pain and psychical breakdown, her father had always been a difficult patient to take care of. Even she
could not cope with her father sometimes. She held herself to the hope that her father would be able to move to a
nursing hospital when he would get a little better.

An old man who was hospitalized right next to her father had passed away lately. She had sometimes talked to
the old man’s daughter. They had soon become friends, maybe due to a big thing they shared in common—
taking care of father. ‘It is easier said than done,’ they would tell each other. At the old man’s funeral, she
looked at her friend’s face and found something more than mere sadness. It was the ironic feeling we get when
we inevitably have to give up what we truly want to hold on, an ambiguous feeling that life has neither
betrayed nor supported us. She said to the deceased man’s daughter, “We will not have any further chance to
talk to each other. It has been great to know you.”

Freud took note of the similarity between a hysteric and a carer. The hysterics (Anna O, Dora, and Elizabeth)
analyzed by Freud had one thing in common; they realized that their calling was to take care of their sick father.
Hysterics commit themselves to achieve their faithful image by trying to fix what is  broken. To become a being
that fills the Other’s lack—that is the ultimate wish of hysterics. But this has a limitation. Prolonged nursing
takes away chances to look back on oneself and triggers the suppression of feeling, eventually leading to
retention hysteria (hystérie de rétention). She (in our case) stayed calm no matter what happened, did not go to
the hospital when she was sick, and met her father’s picky requirements. Is she a retention hysteric?

In the case of Elizabeth, her father told her that he considered her not as a daughter but as a son or a friend. She
appreciated her father’s words. She rejected a marriage proposal since she did not want to lose a tie to her father
by marriage. Elizabeth’s father was strict to her sisters but lenient on Elizabeth, who was much younger than
them. When Elizabeth was nursing her father, she fell in love with a man. He was an orphan and deeply revered
Elizabeth’s father. He even followed advice of Elizabeth’s father on his career path. Elizabeth’s love was able to
come into existence since she could share her father’s phallus with her lover. But the logic of the phallus cannot
make a father and a lover the same person. Despite her unconscious strongly equating two people, they could
not be the same person. One day, Elizabeth’s lover asked her to go to a party for a brief refreshing and she
accepted his suggestion. But her father suddenly got worse the next day. She felt a strong ambivalence between
the joy from the party and the guilt toward her father. She was struck with a traumatic encounter with her
father’s weak phallus and a narcissistic injury in that she was the one who worsened her father’s sickness.
 60

She (in our case) did not have a lover. She had abandoned the hope of having one. Actually, it was her situation
that forced her not to be in a romantic relationship. It was already too much for her to pay the hospital. She
barely managed not to rely on private loans, but she had been juggling debts with credit cards. She had thought
about having an illegal job to support her father. She would not stop supporting him, no matter how hard she
would be blamed by society and its morality and laws because of her illegal job.

Let us refer to Sophocles’ Antigone. When Creon enacts a decree banning the burial of Polynices, Antigone
claims that the worldly law cannot negate the heavenly law, which is is not encoded but is everlasting. So she
buries the body of her brother Polynices against Creon’s decree. But she has to pay for what she has  done.
Creon does not kill Antigone. Instead, he locks her up in a cave and makes her starve to death. Therefore, the
core of this tragedy lies “between-two-deaths” (entre-deux-morts). Antigone’s brother is physically, but not
symbolically dead. He is symbolically un-dead because Creon has banned a symbolic ritual to bury, mourn for,
and commemorate the dead. When Antigone buries him, he comes to be integrally dead. On the other hand,
Antigone is symbolically dead because she has been expatriated from the city, but she is still alive physically.
She is delayed in a life yet to be dead—a living dead body. Antigone declares, “I am dead and I desire death.” 93
Does she desire death just because she cannot live alone in a socially isolated cave? Antigone already knows
that she will have to pay for what she is going to do, but she does not compromise on her will to bury the body
of her brother. This is why she embodies the psychoanalytic ethics and never give up on the subjective desire,
even if it goes against social norms. This desire is supported not only by her love toward Polynices as a unique,
irreplaceable being (unlike spouses or children, who are replaceable beings) but also by her desire toward pure
death or the second death. It is not a mere suicidal impulse wishing for physical death, but more of a desire to
remain as a residue, resisting the symbolic law. It is worthwhile to note that Weismann—whom Freud referred
to for conceptualizing the life drive and death drive—divided life into two parts: the dead and the
undead. Antigone’s desire is to become undead within the symbolic law, irreducible to the symbolic law despite
the heavy cost of biological death.

She (in our case) used to think, for some people, the desire of death is already part of their life. Still more, what
does it mean to make a choice in accordance with the heavenly law? Heaven had gone away long ago.
Sacrificing life for nursing someone about to encounter immediate death would be like divine punishment rather
than filial piety. She did not even want to be acknowledged by her father. He seemed to take her effort for
granted. She told herself that she was not a good daughter over and over. She realized that there lay aggression
in every kind of altruism. She also found the biggest difference between Antigone and herself. People were
attracted to Antigone because of her “unbearable splendor,” “an image that possesses a mystery which up till
now has never been articulated.”94 Her image frozen in the boundary between life and death was ironically
enchanting. Antigone was a reigning beauty who transgressed the boundaries of the symbolic and came closer to
93
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis
Porter, New York: Norton, 1992, p. 281.
94
Lacan, SVII, p. 247.
 61

the threshold of the real. Unlike Antigone, she did fit into any image of splendor, mystery, and beauty. The only
image that haunted her was hospitalizing her father in a nursing hospital, leaving, him and living on her own.
Why was she fixated on this image?

She always panicked when she was reminded of her mother’s death, which remained a permanent scar and
destructive loss to her. She remained absolutely helpless when facing her mother’s death. She sometimes
thought that if she had been strong enough, then she could have taken care of her mother. Her mother had raised
children while struggling with her father’s violence, even rejecting divorce and staying with her children. For no
reason, this image of her self-sacrificial mother overlapped with the image of her self-centered father. In fact,
one could state that she was actually taking care of her mother, not her father. By nursing her father, she was
trying to make up for the loss of and say proper farewell to her mother. Day after day she struggled against the
death drive while staying outside the boundary of the social law to prevent the reoccurrence of traumatic loss.
Everyday constitutes the real to her insofar as “the real is the impossible to bear.” 95

Since he had fallen ill, her father had been left with her, as her sisters had given up on him. She would kill her
mother twice if she were to follow her sisters. When her father got hospitalized in a nursing hospital, she would
be able to fulfill what should have been done for her mother. This is why she sacrifices love, beauty, happiness,
and her dream, hovering between her mother’s traumatic death and her father’s possible death. The nurse has
come to give an injection to her father. She has another day in-between-two deaths, which is different from in
Sophocles’ tragedy; having nowhere to ask for help, she sticks to her deadly will not to make the same mistake
again.

95
Jacques Lacan, “Ouverture de la section clinique,” Ornicar?, no. 9, 1977, p. 11.
 62

Split

Anyone who has crossed the Mekong River should know that a lengthy route from Beijing, to Gonmyeong,
Laos, and Thailand is not as overwhelming as the silence of the Mekong River.

Would she have crossed the border of China and North Korea if her father had not passed away? She crossed the
border in her early 20s. She intended to make some money and return home, but she ended up living in an
unfamiliar farm in Shenyang, China, for a couple of years. The documentary film Madame B directed by Jae-Ho
Yoon portrays the story of a North Korean female defector who later becomes a broker by herself. She classifies
several Chinese men who purchase North Korean female defectors according to the following categories: the
ones with a single parent, the poor ones, and the physically disabled ones. Regarding the last, she states, “And
then... you know, there are some worse ones than the physically disabled.” There is no way for us to figure out
what kind of man she is referring to. However, the movie indicates “mental disorder” by inserting an extra
subtitle. Psychoanalysis is supposed to deal with “the worse ones” according to her classification.
Psychoanalysis traces how a normal person has become one of “the worse ones” and tells that person that he or
she still has a chance to decide what kind of life he or she wants to live. As a matter of fact, it is not the case that
a normal person turns into a lunatic by some horrible incident. Who could dare to call oneself normal or to draw
a boundary between the normal and the abnormal? Humans are naturally sick animals with intrinsic mental
illness (maladie mentale), as long as they misrecognize the reality with an imaginary ego and are determined by
the surprising Other of the unconscious. It is not the case that there are some mentally retarded people and that
the rest of us are ordinary. Rather, the mentality itself is ill and pathological. There is no fundamental difference
between the normal and the abnormal in the sense that all are struggling with their own mental illness. Everyone
is mentally-ill, struggling to subjectivize his or her own problematic life.

Was it because of her young age? The man she was sold to was an exceptional one according to Madame B’s
classification. He was a rich farmer, so to speak, and did not have any problem feeding himself. There was
nothing wrong with his parents too. But it did not take long for her to figure out that he was already married and
that he even had a daughter. It was just that his wife was gone. Only the daughter was left in the family. The
man easily gave up on an effort to bring his wife back and decided to bring another woman instead.  Let us note
that the worldly logic stipulates that men cannot marry if they do not have enough money but that they can
marry more than one woman if they have enough. However, one cannot call it a double marriage. The marriage
between her and the Chinese farmer was illegal, or more precisely, beyond the legal and the illegal. She was
neither a concubine nor a second wife. She was a kind of ghost who managed to get a pass card by bribery. Was
her South Korean passport able to eliminate her status as a ghost, then?

She gave birth to a baby soon after. The baby was a substantial being that erased her status as a ghost, even
though she did not invest her desire in the baby. Her parents-in-law also treated her properly, maybe because the
 63

baby was a boy. She needed to work arduously, but it was bearable because she did not have to starve. She
thought of her mother who would be starving in North Korea, but she tried to cope with it. She could not cope
with her husband’s having an affair, though. She left her baby and crossed the Mekong River with other women
who were in a similar situation.

Life in South Korea was fair enough. She could barely eat rice served in a jail in Thailand as it seemed
undercooked. She was able to eat proper rice after arriving in South Korea. She still vividly remembers the
smell and the texture of rice. She also brought back the memory of an interrogator’s accent and look. In North
Korea, she had been taught that the South invaded the North first in the Korean War, but South Korea says the
opposite is true. In both countries, all the smart people were in charge of important jobs, but South Koreans
were much more calculative and diplomatic. She was still in touch with her mates from Hana-won (an institute
for educating North Korean defectors), one of whom was a man who majored in computer science at Kim Il-
Sung University. He begged her to hit anywhere but his head, saying that he had only his smart brain as a means
of breadwinning. How stupid that was.

She can never go back to the past, but she still does video chats with her child in China sometimes. The child
used to cry for his mother a lot, and she used to visit home once every several months with clothes for her boy,
flying all the way from Seoul. Then, she was caught with the idea of inseparable relation. When the child was
crying and looking for his mother, the child’s grandparents soothed him by saying that his mother was gone for
work. At least she was not a ghost from North Korea for her son. She was a proper mother who was too busy
winning bread. The child would be able to get Chinese citizenship. Her son was lucky enough to be born in a
rich family to get citizenship, but tens of thousands of stateless babies have been born between Chinese fathers
and North Korean defector mothers. In an Indian river, people burn dead bodies and place some money next to
them for their afterlife. Then the money falls into the river, and some children live on that money. They are
called “children of God,” since they take money that was originally offered for gods. There are children of God
on one side of the world and children of ghosts on the other. Does that mean that both of these groups are not
the children of human beings?

Her mother was still in North Korea. She had not had a phone call with her mother for a while near the border.
Technology enabled her to escape from the political power for a while, but then power reigned again with the
aid of technology. There were plenty of CCTVs on the border of China and North Korea. She could not tell
whether it was still possible to make a phone call. She sent some money to her mother via a broker several
times. She actually had a chance to return to North Korea when she was living in China. Now that chance is
gone. She wanted to bring her mother and younger brother to South Korea, but her mother wished to stay in the
North. She had been dreaming the same thing for a while. In the dream, she was standing on a road that breaks
into three directions. She was being chased by someone, had nowhere to hide, and did not know where to go. It
was as if her mind itself was split into three pieces.
 64

Freud dealt with ego-splitting. Ego is split under a conflict between demand from drive and prohibition from
reality. On one hand, ego is under the influence of drive, which it is obliged to bring satisfaction to. On the other
hand, ego realizes that it could be exposed to substantial danger if it continues to seek pleasure. For example, a
young boy pursues pleasure from masturbation and at the same time experiences the threat of castration from his
parents. In such a case, ego finds a solution to attain partial satisfaction while not putting itself in danger. But
this solution also has a cost; which is a split in ego. This split is never possible to stitch up; it could get even
worse. Ego’s integrative function is profoundly significant, but it does not always work efficiently or smoothly.
A split necessarily emerges at some point.

Lacan presents the divided subject. The subject is not a master of language but simply an effect of a signifier
(＄). It temporarily appears and disappears between two signifiers, as what one signifier represents to the other
signifier is the subject. Furthermore, the subject is not born as a subject from the beginning. It used to be an
object of the Other’s desire. The subject is only born when it no longer remains an imaginary being—when it is
offered the space of desire through symbolic castration. But the subject attempts to fill the void triggered by
castration. Furthermore, the subject misunderstands desire, a pure lack which cannot be filled under the
condition of the metonymic chain of signifiers. The subject thinks that it can go back to its original, integral

form only if it retrieves that thing it has lost. This is what is called the fantasy ( ＄ ⋄ a). The subject is expected
to traverse the fantasy by analysis and experiences an irrecoverable structural split.

Here is another split that lies intrinsically within women. A woman straddles two forms of jouissance. She
enjoys not only phallic jouissance related to castration and language but also enjoys the jouissance of the Other
beyond phallus. She does not say a single word about this jouissance. We cannot fully grasp the way she feels it
and what kind of knowledge she has about it. All we can do is infer it analogically with help from several
mystics. Furthermore, a woman is also dualized in terms of a person she is forming a relationship with. On one
hand, she relates with a male partner as the phallus (La → Φ). On the other hand, she also relates with the hole
of the symbolic (La → S(Ⱥ)). A split in whom to form a relationship with is closely relevant to the split of
jouissance. A woman enjoys phallic jouissance via her partner and at the same time enjoys the Other jouissance
via the hole of the symbolic. We cannot speak of this hole, but just show it apophatically.

In sum, the integration of ego seems to be uncertain, the division of the subject is structural, and the split of
women is beyond articulation. Could psychoanalysis provide ways to live with splits by classifying each kind of
split? Is psychoanalysis a kind of schizoanalysis in this aspect?

Her mother is in North Korea, her child is in China, and she is in South Korea. The road split in three in her
dream may represent the very split within herself. She had a friend who had a similar life experience but who
later moved to Canada because she could not adapt herself even to South Korea. It is hard to tell, but she seemed
 65

fine. Is that because she had chances to bring her family to Canada? At least her friend did not dream about a
road split in four. Compared to her friend, her unconscious was constituted by a threefold split. Was the split
more geopolitical rather than psychoanalytic? Could psychoanalysis give a proper explanation of her by the split
of ego, the subject, and the woman? People label her as a North Korean “defector,” but she is far more
defected from herself than such a signifier could estimate. She is a witness of an unprecedentedly split subject
incapable of being analyzed.
 66

Act

Love often fails, because it fails to produce the One. A sexual relationship is an act of failure because it does not
allocate jouissance to each sex evenly. The unconscious belongs to failure, because it only appears and
disappears as a slip of tongue or a parapraxis. What the analytic work focuses on is also failure, because the
truth of a subject starts to reveal itself in a negative way when free association stops and memories start to
become unclear. However, there is one successful and accomplished act that psychoanalysis barely can shed
light upon—suicide.96 For those who take their lives as a dead end or suffer from unbearable pain more severe
than death, death is regarded as a success with its inexplicable irony. And it is more difficult to speak of suicide
than of death because while a dead man is silent, a suicide nullifies speech.

“Could you just send me to Hawaii?” Her request to study in the US had often been ignored due to strict
Confucian values ruling her family which did not allow daughters to be highly educated. Both of her parents
said that it was absurd for an unmarried woman to study abroad. Then her mother came up with an idea. What if
she got married and then studied abroad with her husband? A life with a partner could be a path to a fulfilling
life. However, some partnerships destroy life itself, and this destruction happens so slowly and steadily that life
can disappear all at once.

She actually had a boyfriend already. Both of them were majoring in English literature. They were able to spend
hours just talking about novels. They overcame the distance between their two cities by writing letters with
quotes from classic literature. However, the man was not so devoted to the relationship. She found out later that
he could not boast of himself since he was nothing more than a university student. Nor was she brave enough to
inspire her boyfriend to be more devoted to the relationship. She broke up with him and had a blind date
arranged by her parents. The partner was the cousin of her neighbor. The neighbor arranged this matchmaking
because she appreciated her kind nature. But personality is not the single most important quality that accounts
for successful matchmaking. The father of the man had been working in finance, which had brought him
economic affluence, but he had nothing to show off other than his son. Her sister and brother were then
attending a medical school and a law school. A deal was set around money, family, studying abroad, and a
perfect bride. However, she did not find the man attractive at all. He was very different from her ex-boyfriend.
Her mother persuaded her by saying, “Your wish was to study in the US. You can do so if you marry him.” Her
brother stood against the mother, warning that she should not marry a man with such family. She did not know
what to do. After all, she was a shy and taciturn person and did not know what else could be done. She got
married at the age of twenty five and moved to the US to study. Ironically, her family spent $8000 for her
marriage. The amount was enough to cover the costs for the first year of a PhD degree program. Her mother
would come to regret spending that money on marriage instead of education.

96
Jacques Lacan, Je parle aux murs, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011, p. 31.
 67

A sexual relationship is impossible, but discourse can make an impossible relationship necessary by creating a
perfect match. A perfect match comes within a greedy and blind deal made by both parents. If the interests of
those involved are met, even the worst couple can turn into a perfect match. This is how a discourse tries to
overcome the impossibility of a sexual relationship, but it is doomed to a structural catastrophe. As everyone
knows, it is a huge challenge to fill the gap of a sexual non-relationship, even with love. A marriage without
love is, needless to say, a much tougher challenge.

Things did not work out on their honeymoon. She did not bleed for their first sex, and the husband was
outraged. They visited an ob-gyn, and she was found to be a virgin without bleeding. However, it was obscure
whether her husband’s unconscious accepted that explanation. Studying in the US was satisfying, but her
married life was a disaster. Her husband was extremely violent. She once forgot to unplug a hair straightener
and went to class, after which her husband threatened her and burned her neck with the hair straightener. She
gave birth to a son but forgot to feed him and change his diapers when she was concentrated on reading. The
husband blamed her for her indifference. They were both students, but she was the one in charge of all the house
chores and babysitting. The husband’s family covered all the costs for them, which could be why he dominated
over her. At some point, she felt uncomfortable spending money from her husband’s family. She asked her
mother to send all sorts of household items to her, trying not to use the money from her husband. Her mother’s
prophecy that she would study without financial difficulties had missed the mark in this way. The husband also
had an affair with another woman. She wandered the school campus to find her husband. Five years passed in
this way. She received her PhD degree first, returned to Korea, and was hired as a university lecturer. Her
husband returned to Korea the year after, and they became a commuter couple. At this point, anyone around her
could tell that she was mentally unstable. However, no one truly supported her. After she visited her mother-in-
law or her husband, she murmured meaningless words with eyes out of focus. When she had a family reunion,
her husband yelled at her in front of her parents and siblings for forgetting to take his toothbrush, to which she
just froze. Sometimes she wandered streets after midnight for hours and hours and returned home at dawn. The
father inflicted physical punishment on his 30-year-old daughter for going out at night, believing such should
not happen for a decent wife and mother. She accepted her father hitting her without a single word, as she had
done when she was a child. Her in-laws said that she had been mentally ill before the marriage. Some relatives
recommended her mother to bring her to a psychiatric hospital and have her treated. However, it was an era in
which receiving psychiatric treatment was considered a clear sign of demonic madness. She could not receive
any kind of treatment after all. Who had a right to call her a mad woman? Others recommended going to church
and having faith. She went to a Catholic church and was baptized, but even the holy Bible failed to reach her
mind. If she had been able to take antidepressant medicine or become immersed in faith, would she have been
saved? From the psychoanalytic perspective, both options are equally limited. The former is the logic of
manipulating an object, and the latter the logic of imbuing the subject with pre-established meanings; both might
have ended up having no consideration for her subjectivity.
 68

Since they were a commuter couple, she stayed with her parents and taught students on weekdays. She did not
have to pay full attention to taking care of the baby since her mother gave a helping hand, which gave her some
free time to continue with her research. She could refresh herself whenever she taught students and read books.
This means that she should have been able to secure some degree of freedom and a chance to recover from
depression. However, she could not grasp this chance. Maybe this inability was because she had to spend two
days a week with her husband. At this point, a definition of depression emerges, that being a state of mind in
which two days of custody could ruin five days of freedom.

About three months later, she wandered streets at night alone again. When would she be able to put an end to
this? She had to end it by herself. She left a short note after she returned home: “I am just an obstacle to
everyone in the family. I have to leave.” Then she jumped to her death from an apartment rooftop. The
American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) committed suicide with her head stuck in an oven, leaving a note
saying, “Please call a doc….” Her major was American literature. Was she aware of Plath?

How do her life and Plath’s share similarities and differences? Plath had a series of several attempts at suicide,
including overdosing on sleeping pills and rushing into a running car. As Alfred Alvarez, who was inspired by
Plath’s suicide and eventually wrote The Savage god—A Study of Suicide, states, “suicide, in short, was not a
swoon into death, an attempt ‘to cease upon the midnight with no pain’; it was something to be felt in the nerve-
ends and fought against, an initiation rite qualifying her for a life of her own.”97 Such sense of death as a rite of
passage stems from the death of Plath’s father, which happened when she was nine years old. To Plath, an adult
signified a survivor—namely, an anonymous Jew who survived a mental concentration camp—and every
survivor was obliged to redeem the debt by death. In her case, this obligation originated from her drive to
reunite with her father. As she writes in her poem Daddy, “At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to
you. I thought even the bones would do.” 98 Another work of Plath titled The Bee Meeting makes the narrator
into a sacrifice by overlapping descriptions of the meetings of beekeepers and spells upon death. A noteworthy
fact is that Plath’s father was an expert in bee research. While a failure to symbolize her father’s death triggered
her passage-to-the-act of the reunion with her father, her compulsive writing was a desperate trial to symbolize
her father’s death.

On the contrary, she did not have any chronic sensitivity with regard to death nor did she have trauma of losing
her father. She never wrote, spoke, or thought about death. Above all, she only tried it once, and once was
enough. It was a successful act with only a single trial. Moreover, compared to Plath, who quit her job as a
professor to seek her true self, she did not struggle in any form to find her true self. She always obeyed and
never looked for things of her own. The only similarity between Plath and her would be that they could not fit
into the role of a wife and mother. It was worse for her than for Plath. The relationship between Plath and her

97
Alfred Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990, p. 34.
98
Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 36.
 69

husband Ted Hughes was “a question not of differences but of intolerable similarities.” 99 She, however, did not
share any similarities with or have any major differences from her husband. What was left there was only an
aimless obligation. Moreover, for Plath, the birth of two children served as a signifier of her femininity. But she
did not invest any phallic desire in her son, and the son did not make a special connection with her maternity.
Her son was more of a soft, pooing organism. She as a woman could not fit into the roles of a wife and mother,
but she was never be able to give up those roles and eventually tore herself from them. Plath wrote, “And I have
no face. I have wanted to efface myself.” To Melanie Klein, suicide is a means of removing bad objects and
keeping good objects. Plath brings new criteria to the division between good and bad objects. That is what
Lacan considered as a core of a Freudian object—an absent object (“no face”). To her (in our case), suicide is an
act of effacing an absent face. We could even state that she wanted to re-efface a less-than-absent face. Was it a
face that could not go to Hawaii without any support, or a face with an irremovable burn mark? “This is the
suicide, then, this anonymous success … ”100

Suicide requires a differential clinic. In Plath’s case, suicide was a compulsive one, a coming-of-age celebration
that needed to be overcome. Also, there could be a schizophrenic suicide as a physical enactment of
depersonalization. In her case, she committed a melancholic suicide. The melancholic subject identifies himself
or herself with an obstacle. Such identification initiates a radical act. Every radical act transforms the subject,
and the life of the subject is divided into pre-act and post-act phases. But suicide erases the post-act phase by
eliminating the subject. Suicide is a catastrophic success. It overcomes limitations of the symbolic and hits the
bull’s-eye of the jouissance of the Other, which is not localized and invades the whole body. Suicide is also a
delict. In suicide, a relict faced with a dead end pushes its own dereliction by committing a delict. Such self-
dereliction is a challenge against not only natural and social taboos but also the divine law. The Catholic Church
used to ban burying the bodies of suicides, thinking that those bodies could contaminate other ones in a
cemetery. If the dead are sinners, then a suicide is a sinner who contaminates other sinners. From the perspective
of the Church, which proclaimed the holy command “Thou shall not murder,” a suicide is a worse sinner. A case
of murder remains a secular sin because the death of the victim could be interpreted as the will of God. God’s
will has an infinite potential to be interpreted in endless ways. On the other hand, committing suicide is a
subjective determination to escape the holy will. It is a challenge against the God and breaches the holy will
through absolute self-determination that is not governed by rules of the god.

Her family still has a photo of her in which she was a bright and innocent woman at the age of twenty-four. She
would sometimes go on a blind date with mini bags and clothes borrowed from her sister-in-law. However, she
seemed to forget everything when she was reading books. When she got married, she received a fair amount of
wedding presents, but she did not show any interest. She once said, “I like this Celine bag—a gift from my
sister-in-law—more than any other luxurious wedding gifts.” Freud took every kind of suicide as a murder—a

99
Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 30.
100
Here I am rephrasing Sylvia Plath’s sentence “This is the sea, then, this great abeyance…”
 70

murder of an internalized object by killing oneself. What did she kill? She was not the kind of person who can
kill an internalized object, not to mention an external one. She was a woman without law, a woman who
ironically proved the point where law stumbles by over-conforming to law. Facing the real manifested through
her act, both the divine law and antidepressants lose their words. And psychoanalysis falls into silence too.
 71

Sisters

In 1933, two sisters working as maids in the Lancelin mansion in Le Mans were frustrated because the fuse of
an iron that was fixed just two days ago had broken again and had caused a power failure in the entire mansion.
They had to fix it before Madam and Lady Lancelin came back, but they did not know how. As they panicked,
Madam and Lady Lancelin came back. Madam Lacelin shouted even before the sisters went down the stairs to
greet her: “What have you done, you idiots!” While Madam Lancelin continued to scold them, the elder sister
claimed to be quitting her job and leaving the house with her sister. This provoked Madam Lancelin’s anger,
and she tried to hit the elder sister. At that moment, the fuse of the sisters’ lives had broken too.

Was the sisters’ destructive reaction because of Madam Lancelin’s extreme way of checking sanitation: wearing
a white glove and swiping furniture? Or was physical violence more difficult to endure than verbal violence?
The sisters murdered Madam and Lady Lancelin viciously with a hammer, a knife, and a tin bottle. The sisters
said, “Now it is done properly/now it is clean! (En voilà du propre)” The maids who used to sweep dust on the
floor now swept their masters. When the younger sister came to Lancelin to work as a maid, the elder sister gave
her a few notes. She had to say, “Yes, Lord,” “Yes, Madam,” “No, Lord,” and “No, Madam” only. She was not
to call Lord or Madam Lancelin by their last name. There were three types of masters: the real masters, the one
whom others thought to be a master, and the one who believed himself to be a master. Of course, the sisters’
crime was cruel enough to horrify all sorts of masters.

Lacan defined the sisters’ crime as paranoiac murder in the article he submitted to the surrealistic magazine The
Minotauros (Le minotaure) in 1933.101 According to Lacan, paranoiac murder has three features: a cognitive
delusion of becoming an important figure or being persecuted, an aggressive impulse and subsequent attempt to
murder, and a chronic, gradual completion of delusion. Furthermore, Lacan introduced two different
perspectives on psychotic structure. One takes psychosis as an effect of innate and genetic defects. The other
argues that there are three phases of psychosis: an experience of disturbed perception, a delusion which the
subject creates to give a rational explanation of this experience, and a criminal act triggered by delusional
conviction. Lacan then suggested a new approach to supplement these two perspectives. According to Lacan,
social relationships and relational tension play a significant role for all three phases of psychosis. For instance,
an aggressive impulse is expressed not independently but through the interaction with social contexts such as
revenge, approval by an ideal figure, atonement, or self-punishment. Therefore, the logic of delusion (delusion
is much more logical than we think) as the true motivation for murder is not explicated by the crime itself. The
logic of delusion requires a far more elaborate analysis, disentangling multiple threads, including social tension.

101
Jacques Lacan, “Motives of paranoiac crimes: the crime of the Papin sisters,” unofficial translation by Russell
Grigg, pp. 1–6 (“Motifs du crime paranoïaque: Le crime des sœurs Papin,” in De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses
rapports avec la personnalité, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975, pp. 25–28).
 72

Let us set up a hypothesis to deal with the complex context of the sisters’ murder. Their crime is a result of
numerous intertwined relationships—an enactment triggered by the entanglement of not only social but also
imaginary, symbolic, and real relationships.

First of all, an exclusive bond between the two sisters comes into play. This bond was formed within some
context. The parents of the sisters did not love each other; needless to say they did not want any children. Every
child who is not inscribed with the signifier of parental desire feels that there is an abysmal shadow cast upon
his or her existence. Such children ask, “Why was I born?” Furthermore, the sisters’ father was suspected to
have sexually abused his first daughter (the sisters were his second and third daughters), and their mother was a
cold and oppressive person. The sisters were brought to and raised in an orphanage after their parents got
divorced. The first daughter cut ties with her siblings by becoming a nun, so the two sisters were only left with
each other. This exclusive bond between them was enhanced after they started working for the Lancelin family
together. They would just stick to each other even in their days off. Lacan diagnosed the sisters with a delusion
shared by two (folie à deux), writing, “True Siamese souls, they formed a world that was forever closed.” 102 In a
delusion shared by two, a delusion from an active individual is passed down to a passive individual, and so they
start to share the same delusion. The sisters shared almost everything with each other. Even the contents of their
statements written separately after the crime were found to be similar. The elder sisters started to work for the
Lancelin in February 1927, and the younger one did in April 1927, but the former stated that she started to work
in April 1927. There was not a slight distance between the sisters, and they over-identified with each other so
intensely that they were almost like Siamese twins. The elder was the younger, and the younger was the elder.

Many relationships overlapped in this exclusive bond between the sisters. It is notable that a delusion shared by
two usually occurs among couples. The elder’s statement “I must have been the husband of my sister in the
former life” is something more than a delusional comment. Never having experienced any kind of romantic
relationship, they shared an incestuous sexual relationship. The elder despaired similarly to a man after a
breakup because she was put in a separate jail. She was able to meet her sister again because of her abnormal
behavior, and she ordered her sister, “Tell me you want me!” In this regard, the elder was a husband or a male
spouse, and the younger a wife or a female spouse. Just as those of numerous couples do, the relationship
between the sisters expanded to a protecting relationship. The elder sister pledged to protect the younger one
after finding out that she had been sexually abused. Furthermore, they visited the mayor (maire) of Le Mans in
August 1931, pleaded that they were being persecuted, and asked for their mother (mère) to be deprived of
guardianship of the younger. The elder was in a sense like a knight striving to emancipate her sister from her
mother’s guardianship.

The exclusive tie between the two also contained a mother-daughter relationship. Not long after working at the
Lancelin, the younger of the sisters missed her mother, so they visited their mother. The mother asked the elder

102
Ibid., p. 6.
 73

sister if she was okay because she did not seem well. The sister replied coldly, “Why do you even care? You
never did when we were young.” As the elder sister loved and protected the younger one, she was trying to
compensate for her own lack by giving her sister maternal love that she had lacked. She saw the image of herself
begging for love when she looked into her unhappy sister. When her sister got happier, she could enjoy the
image of herself having found a refuge from the lack. The elder sister had to become a mother—and the younger
a daughter—in order to set up this imaginary relationship.

There is another symmetrical relationship that gives insight on this mother-daughter relationship: the
relationship between Madam and Lady Lancelin. Let us delve into the way the sisters related with Madam and
Lady. After cutting a tie with their biological mother in October 1929, the sisters called Madam Lancelin
“mother.” When they ran into their biological mother in a market, on the other hand, they called her “madam.”
This maternal transference in which the sisters projected their feeling toward their biological mother onto
Madam Lancelin was intense to the extent that the sisters had smoothly cut ties with their biological mother.
Since they already had a substitute, the absence of the mother did not matter at all. However, this transference is
critical in that their hostility to Madam Lancelin’s order to do house chores again (encore) grew larger as their
demand for maternal love, signified as “More!” (encore) got more intense. In the case of Lacy Lancelin, her age
was similar to the younger sister’s, so they could have become closer despite their distinct class statuses, but her
presence had always provoked the elder sister’s jealousy, and this enhanced the elder’s obsession with the
exclusive relationship between the two sisters. In addition to this triadic relationship based on passionate
jealousy, the three women were also involved in a real relationship via their bodies. The sisters and the lady
were all menstruating when the crime took place. The sisters cut off flesh from the lady’s hip in an act of mixing
sexual blood and deathly blood, which implies the presence of an intertwined relationship between sex and
death (which is necessary among sexually reproductive beings). Furthermore, the sisters stopped menstruating
after committing the murder, which presents a case of psychosomatic irregular menstruation. Here, one may
witness an entanglement of the victim and the murderer.

Let us also examine the quadruple relationship including the two sisters and Madame and Lady Lancelin. Lacan
mostly focuses on the elder’s situation (“Down what long and tortuous path was she obliged to travel before the
despairing experience of the crime ripped her from her other herself?” 103) and takes the sisters’ crime as the
elder’s responsive attempt to relieve her suffering from persecution delusion. As she succeeded in this attempt at
relieving her pain, legal punishment was acceptable and welcomed. In fact, after the crime, the sisters did not
run away and stayed together in the room. They also refused to reduce their punishment. This proves the
correlation between self-punishment and paranoia. In sum, the attacker turned out to be a sufferer, and as the
sufferer/attacker relieved her own pain by causing pain to another, the sufferer/attacker willingly accepted
punishment. For the elder sister, murder was a reaction that freed her from her pain, and in this way she was
separated from her alter ego—her younger sister. Here, we can ask the following question: if the elder sister’s
103
Ibid., p. 6.
 74

pain is the imaginary and yet brings forth the real effect, is this imaginary pain then mediated by the symbolic
frame?

Lacan writes that “the sisters mingled the mirage of their malady with the image of their mistresses. It was their
own distress that they detested in the couple whom they brought into an atrocious quadrille.” 104 Let us delve into
what Lacan left unclear: the distinction between the dyad mirror relationship between the two sisters (as in terms
of the younger sister as the elder’s alter ego) and the quadruple mirror relationship among the sisters and
Madam and Lady Lancelin. One of the unique characteristics of this murder is that the sisters extracted eyeballs
of Madam and Lady Lancelin. The sisters at this point were no longer servants. They were the new masters who
had come to castrate the previous ones. What distress of their own would they never have wanted to see from
Madam and Lady Lancelin? It would not have been simply a mirage-like imaginary pain, as Lacan mentioned.
Instead, it would be more of the symbolic and real pain structured by the master-servant relationship—the pain
coming from their miserable reality that the ideal image of Madam and Lady Lancelin paradoxically highlights.
The deprivation the sisters experienced from Madam and Lady Lancelin taking care of each other was not
simply the result of a lack of affection or an imaginary alienation. Statistics shows that the servant class had
unusually high rates of suicide or mental illness compared to other classes. After the murder, the elder said, “I
wanted to own their skins and let them have ours instead.” The idea of exchanging skin is imaginary in that the
contour created by skin forms the body image as one’s ego. More importantly, though, let us note that the only
items that the sisters allowed themselves were luxurious clothes and that they still could not have closed the skin
gap between the Lancelins and themselves, no matter how luxurious their clothes were. In order to truly close
this gap, the bodies that caused it had to be really destroyed, not just imaginarily exchanged.

The French society brought forward many different opinions on this crime. The extreme rightists put an
emphasis on the point that society is not a clinical laboratory where an attacker turns into a victim. The extreme
leftists called for thousands of maids to unite with workers and join in a class struggle. Specialists belonging to
the Ministry of Justice underlined the sisters’ guilt. Sartre and Beauvoir, who initially viewed the murder as an
instance of class struggle and the sisters as victims of a problematic social system, finally admitted thirty years
after the crime that their assertion was way too narrow, after reading materials on the sisters’ delusion shared by
two (folie à deux). For our part, taking into account that Lord Lancelin did not have any proper conversation
with his wife or daughter, let us confirm the following psychoanalytic point: where words are absent,
accumulated tension shall return in the form of real destruction.

In sum, there are numerous relationships entangled with one another in the sisters’ crime, including an exclusive
dyad relationship, a couple relationship, a protection relationship, a mother-daughter relationship, a triad
relationship, a psychosomatic relationship, a dyad mirror relationship, and a quadruple master-servant
relationship. If paranoia refers to a mind (nous) that stands outside (para), then can we not draw a simple

104
Ibid. p. 6.
 75

conclusion that the network of intertwined relationships brings forth delusion as a mind standing outside?
Sometimes such simplicity seems so complex in our lives. Maybe this nexus of simplicity and complexity would
be what the younger sister called “a mystery of life.” The names of the sisters were Christine Papin (1905–1937)
and Léa Papin (1911–2001(?)).
 76

Ravissement

Artists always have surpassed psychoanalysts through their artworks and prepared psychoanalysts’ paths
beforehand because art is what creatively reconstructs the remains of jouissance we lost. Therefore, according to
Marguerite Duras, the act of literature is “to use writing to get access to many things still hidden in the depths of
my blind flesh as a newborn in the first day, inaccessible to writing.” 105 Here emerges Lacan’s homage to The
Ravishing of Lol Stein, written by Duras. Duras already had been aware of Lacan’s teaching without Lacan,
which makes Lacan state that his homage presents how “the practice of the letter converges with the workings
of the unconscious.”106 If literature is a practice of letters, then psychoanalysis delves into the unconscious
through the practice of signifiers. However, the later Lacan weaves the symbolic and the real more closely, and
the signifier and letters start to intertwine with each other. Therefore, letters are the place where literature and
psychoanalysis meet one another.

Whereas signifiers operate within a system of difference, letters are based on the solidity of identity. Signifiers
reveal themselves within a chain of structure, while letters appear via an act of writing. Paradoxically, however,
writing accompanies erasing. Specifically, writing erases an object. Furthermore, it erases the concept attached
to that object. Writing, in its purest form, emerges when a specific reference and its concept disappears. In this
context, Lacan coins a new term called “lituraterre.” Literature is an act of erasing (liturra) a specific object and
its concept, and this act of liturra takes place littorally. A littoral is an ambivalent and flexible border in which
sea and land keep distinguishing and overlapping themselves. They are clearly differentiated and simultaneously
constantly break the boundary between each other. The relationship between knowledge and jouissance is just
like that of sea and land. Knowledge as a segmentation of signifiers and corporeal jouissance are both
distinguished and intertwined in a littoral where liturra happens. Lastly, let us remind ourselves of the concept of
litter as a Joycean transformation of letter. Letters are produced by language but relates to remainder irreducible
to language or waste carrying jouissance. In other words, letters do not carry an actual, specific object in reality
but a segment of the real that deviates from language after an object is killed by language. In short, lituraterre
implies that literary writing is involved with liturra, littoral, and litter. In sum, lituraterre implies that the
operation of letter is erasing, it takes place in a littoral of knowledge and jouissance, and letters are accompanied
by remainders of the real. Then, literature as lituraterre does not represent the reality; rather, it shows the
remainders of the real. As Lacan asks, “the rim of the hole in knowledge, isn’t this what the letter outlines?” 107
Therefore, psychoanalysis should read literature as a practice of letters literally. Yet, here, the word “literally”
does not mean that there is some pure and straight meaning embedded within letters. Rather, it means that we
should read literature with consideration of the effects of signifiers being amplified by letters in the forms of
puns, neologisms, ambiguity, obscurity, and equivocation: “The fact that the letter is the proper instrument for

105
Vinciguerra, Femmes Lacaniennes, p. 121.
106
Jacques Lacan, “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” in Autres Écrits, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 193.
107
Lacan, “Lituraterre,” in Autres Écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 14.
 77

the writing of discourse does not make it improper for designating a word that is taken for another, or indeed by
another, in the sentence, and thus for symbolizing certain signifier-effects.” 108 Letters symbolize the effects of
signifiers, and these effects mean that any sort of play may happen. Letters represent the fact that signifiers
necessarily trigger obscurity. Letters induce a new, unsettled, and open-ended reading that is neither intended by
an author nor projected by readers, “Literally, with all of its obscurity!” This would be the properly
psychoanalytic reading of literature.

From its very title, Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein (Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein) prompts a reading open
to ambiguity. First, the signifier “ravishing” (ravissement) itself has two opposing meanings. On the one hand, it
refers to rapture, delight, and ecstasy. On the other hand, it means robbery, kidnapping, and pillaging. Secondly,
the word “de,” translated as “of” in English, can be both subjective genitive and objective genitive. Therefore, it
could be ravishing that Lol experiences and simultaneously, it could be ravishing that happens to Lol. Thirdly,
Lol’s full name is “Lola Valérie Stein.” Lol is a nickname without “a” from “Lola” and is an alphabetically
symmetrical name. Topologically, Lol substantiates doubled space with the point of reversal (point de
renversement).109 Her figure is like a Klein bottle, a bottle whose entry and exit, and external and internal
surfaces, are not distinguished. (Therefore, Jacques Hold’s comment is correct: “To know nothing about Lol
Stein was already to know her. One could, it seemed to me, know even less about her, less and less about Lol
Stein.”110) Finally, taking into account that the word “Stein” refers to “stone” in German, it would be easy to
associate a woman stiffened with the pain of a breakup with a stone.

Lol is robbed (ravissement) of her fiancé Michael Richardson by Anne-Marie Stretter in some ballroom in T.
Beach. Needless to say, this was because of the rapture (ravissement) between them. Richardson comes back to
Lol after the first dance with Stretter. But he does not after the second dance, and they disappear together. A
notable fact here is that Lol does not show any sign of pain. Is this because she is too shocked? But what matters
here is not the intensity of the pain but her incapacity to suffer.

Before looking into the incapacity to suffer, we must refer to Lol’s subjective history. No events can be dealt
with without knowing how the subject appreciates them. Some other subjects might have reacted in a
completely different way. (For example, Lol just smiles when Richardson implicitly requires her to save him
from Stretter, but other subjects would not do the same.) What matters is the subjective knot, rather than the
event itself. When she was little, “there was already something lacking in Lol.” 111 She is strangely incomplete
and softly indifferent. She does not seek friendship or pleasure and never sobs as a teenage girl would. Lol is an
anonymous woman, without any characteristics. She is not in her place, no matter where she goes. She is a

108
Ibid., p. 14
109
Lacan, “Hommage,” in Autres Écrits, p. 191.
110
Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, trans. Richard Seaver, New York: Pantheon Books, 1986, p. 72.
111
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 3.
 78

woman of absence and silence: “Something kept her from being, in Tatiana’s words, ‘there.’” 112 After the
incident, Lol talks about herself, saying “I don’t understand who’s there in my place.” 113 Let us take another
look into Lol’s name. When a woman named Lola is not there (là), she becomes Lol. Lola without “la” is Lol. In
psychoanalytic terms, “not being there” means an incomplete castration, which reveals itself through her affect,
her body, and her way of loving. For Tatiana, “it seemed that it was in this realm of her feelings that Lol Stein
was different from the others.”114 After being robbed of Richardson, Lol obsessively looks back on the incident,
as if she is reconstructing the end of the world in a pure time. Obsessive thinking isolates one signifier from
another and from its associated affect. Then, that signifier becomes a jail for the obsessional, and the affect
becomes hidden. Later, this affect returns to the subject in the form of pathological ambivalence, just as how Lol
tells her new lover Jacques Hold, “I don’t love you and yet I do.” 115 Signs of her insufficient symbolic castration
also can be found in her corporeal aspect. Castration enables a subject to own his or her body. As we refer to the
parts of our body as “my eye” or “my stomach,” we can own our body only by cutting our undifferentiated body
into pieces with differentiated signifiers. With the aid of castration, we relate to our symbolized body as a source
of charm or pain, rather than to meaningless flesh as a biological organism. To Lol, owning a body through
symbolic castration had not taken place integrally; rather, “She is still asking herself where this body ought to
be, where exactly to put it, so that it will cease to be a burden to her.” 116 Lastly, an incomplete castration brings a
way of love based on lethal passion and a narcissistic image. Tatiana doubts Lol’s exceptionally frantic passion
toward Richardson. What Lol practices in her dull, insipid marriage with John Bedford is nothing more than
“the soliloquy of some absolute passion whose meaning remained unrevealed.” 117 Insofar as passion is a
combination of love and death, it is no coincidence that Lol and Richardson’s love has “the odor of dead
love.”118 Lacan also grasps the narcissistic aspect of Lol’s love. Her love relates to “an image of the self in
which the other dresses you and in which you are dressed, and which, when you are robbed of it, lets you be just
what underneath.”119 Lol’s love is like a tailored piece of clothing for her ideal image in a dyadic relationship
with her imaginary other. It is a kind of love that turns one’s head from a naked body, wears invisible clothes
even when naked, and is blind with its eyes wide open. In sum, Lol’s subjectivity is characterized by incomplete
symbolic castration, and its signs are present in three dimensions: affect, body, and love.

Let us return to the problem of incapacity to suffer. Suffering is indispensable in a situation in which one’s
beloved changes his or her mind and one’s love is under threat and suddenly lost because it can prevent a
subject from falling into a complete catastrophe. 120 Numbness is a sign more dangerous than suffering. In this

112
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 3.
113
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 127.
114
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 3.
115
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 159.
116
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 163.
117
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 24.
118
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 40.
119
Lacan, “Hommage,” in Autres Écrits, p. 193.
120
Irrmann, Lacan à l’École des Femmes, p. 120.
 79

regard, Lol’s problem is an absence of suffering, rather than an excessive pain. She lacks the ability to be
heartbroken. She loses her words because the symbolic does not function properly concerning suffering. At this
point, Duras takes a critical step forward. Lol loses her words because she relates to hole-words, and hole-words
are nothing more than an abject object. What Lol is looking for is “a hole-word, whose center would have been
hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words would have been buried. It would have been
impossible to utter it, but it would have been made to reverberate. … By its absence, this word ruins all the
others, it contaminates them, it is also the dead dog on the beach at high noon, this hole of flesh.” 121 What, then,
would be an instance of Lol’s hole-word or hole of flesh? Following Apollinaire, Lacan presents a signifier that
is absent from Lol’s unconscious, a signifier that Lol cannot speak due to her incapacity to suffer: “I feel
sadness” (Je me deux). Interestingly, as the ancient French word “douloir (doleful)” is used in a recursive way,
obscurity—as an effect of a signifier symbolized by letters—emerges again. “I feel sadness” (Je me deux) could
be also read as “I am dividing myself into two” (Je me deux).

Over time, Lol seems to go through her pain by escaping her numbness and indifference. However, some pains
can be overcome, but some others still remain at a dead end. Lol accidentally runs into a man after the incident
—to be precise, she encounters a man’s gaze. He is nothing like Richardson, but she finds Richardson’s gaze
within his. She is sure that the man’s gaze is Richard’s. The man’s name is Jacques Hold, and he is in love with
Tatiana, Lol’s friend. Lol makes love with Hold at the Hôtel des Bois, where Richardson swears his love for
Lol. Simultaneously, Lol habitually peeks at Hold and Tatiana making love in a rye field nearby the hotel. Thus,
the knot of the triad relationship repeats itself. The first one is among “Richardson–Stretter–Lol,” and the
second one is among “Tatiana–Hold–Lol.” There is a significant difference between them. In the first triad, the
new couple instantly excludes Lol from their relationship. This immerses Lol in a certain fantasy in which
Richardson takes Stretter’s black dress off. Lol cannot accept that she was excluded from that moment. On the
other hand, in the second triad, Lol takes part in the moment when Hold takes Tatiana’s dress off. Here, Lol is
far from excluded; rather, she participates actively in the scene, albeit at a distance. Lol also dissuaded Hold
who wanted to break up with Tatiana and he eventually took part in Lol’s scheme. “I belong to a perspective
which she is in the process of constructing with impressive obstinacy, I shall not resist.” 122 If Lol had been
petrified by her lover being ravished in the first triad, she enacts her fantasy and organizes a scene of ravishing
in the second triad. She is like a “mirror which reflected nothing and before which she must have shivered with
delight to feel as excluded as she wished to be.” 123 But Lol is not a voyeur here. In other words, she is not a
subject who projects a fetishized gaze onto the Other. She does not impose the gaze but rather becomes the gaze
as an object. This object makes Hold anxious, deceives Tatiana, and ruptures their dyadic romantic relationship.

121
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 38.
122
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 122.
123
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 113.
 80

Lacan deals with the split between eyes and the gaze. Eyes are involved in scientific perception, whereas the
gaze is related to libidinal investment. The eye is a physical organ belonging to a subject, but the gaze is a real
object that is separable from the subject. While the subject perceives an object with his or her eyes, the subject
also becomes the subject of desire as he or she lacks the object of her gaze. Due to the operation of the gaze, we
are far from perceiving things equally; rather, we persist in our biased perspective. As the old saying goes,
“beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Furthermore, the gaze is an invisible stain that disturbs the smooth surface
of a perfect image. The gaze looks at the subject even before he or she takes a look, but the gaze is located
where it remains invisible, as “Tatiana does not see the dark spot in the rye.” 124 Thus, the equation “Lol = object
= gaze = the dark spot” is formed. As the rose is without “why” (Die Rose ist ohne warum), any lovelornness
would be without a “why.” Similarly, Lol would not have any reason to lie on a rye field: “She was still there,
there in that field, alone in that field in a way she could never reveal to anyone.”125

Insofar as ravissement is involved with love, love is not a stage for two but a game for the triad and a variation
of a love triangle. Although there is no such thing as the subject of love but rather victims of love, 126 we still can
tell a victim from a perpetrator within a love triangle. In Lol’s case, however, she is a victim and simultaneously
a perpetrator. A victim who loses her lover because of rapture kidnaps the love of the other. The third party
orchestrates the triad relationship as a stain. Then, how much has Lol recovered from her pain from breaking up
with Richardson? Regarding this point, it is wrong for Hold to think “she can tell me anything.” 127 Lol cannot
talk about everything because the brokenhearted subject lives with the insurmountable real. Lol might claim that
she is afraid of being dumped again, but no matter how many words she gets back, the hole in a hole-word never
can be filled. In this respect, Lacan points out that we should take Jacques Hold’s attitude—the pathos of
understanding (“I understand your pain for the sake of your treatment”)—with caution. As Lacan states, “Lol is
not to be understood, she is not to be saved from ravishment.” 128 The subject never can be understood or saved
when she is incapable of suffering and is possessed by the aftermath of ravissement. Duras implies the same
thing in her writing. Lol can talk about whatever she wants, but “she does not talk of Tatiana Karl .”129 It would
be impossible for Lol to talk about Tatiana, who actually is excluded from triad relationship because of Lol
herself. Would Tatiana then go through what Lol had gone through? Tatiana incarnates the real, about which Lol
cannot talk and Lol is still sad. For Lol, “feeling sad” (“Je me deux”) is equivalent to “splitting herself into two”
(“Je me deux”). Lol is split into a perpetrator and a victim. She can remain as a perpetrator insofar as she is a
victim living with an indelibly painful breakup. Let us pose the following formulation by making use of the
obscurity of signifiers: insofar as Lol is Lola, Lola rolls a roller of ravissement. In this roller, a perpetrator and a
victim are rolling around, constantly shifting their positions.

124
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 56.
125
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 114.
126
Jacques Lacan, Seminar IX: Identification, 1961–1962, February 21st, 1962 (unpublished).
127
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 180.
128
Lacan, “Hommage,” in Autres Écrits, p. 195.
129
Duras, The Ravishing, p. 180.
 81

At the end of Duras’ novel, Lol, “this wounded figure, exiled from things, whom you dare not touch, but who
makes you her prey,”130 is still lying on the rye field. She is a dark spot, an invisible blind spot, a gaze disturbing
the surface of image, an inevitable third party in love who can be excluded or lead the triad relationship, a
victim and a perpetrator in love triangle, a proof showing that being a third party can be both miserable and
sweet, and on top of all, an opaque stain of unsavable ravissement.

130
Lacan, “Hommage,” in Autres Écrits, p. 191.
 82

From Refusal to Annihilation

Some women can refuse a man’s proposal.

Some women can refuse society’s demand.
And some other women refuse existence itself, bringing forth annihilation.

In accordance with Lacan, we can find such negativity from Sygne, the protagonist of Paul Claudel’s historical
play Host (L’Otage). Her refusal is so far-reaching that it opens up an abyss.

In 1812, Sygne was a woman in her thirties. She was a successor of the Coûfontaine family, which lost its
wealth and power during the French Revolution. Her parents were executed right before her eyes in 1793, when
Jacobin reigned with terror. Her cousin George went to England, but she chose to remain in France and tried to
recover the former glory of her family. Time had passed, but she still devoted her life to bringing back her
family’s honor. As Lacan mentions, this may be not just because of her stubborn characteristic but also because
of some mystical bond with the Coûfontaine estate.

In the beginning of the play, George returns to France with some old man. George tells Sygne about his life in
England, full of ups and downs. His wife betrayed him, and his two daughters died. George and Sygne come to
realize that they are the last two survivors of their family. Then, Sygne says, “Coûfontaine is here” (Coûfontaine
adsum) (This phrase is inscribed in their house sigil as if it were a family motto, and Sygne orders her servants
to place it in front of the stage.) At this point, what had been lying dormant between Sygne and George emerges.
Does love not happen as an intrinsic caprice, regardless of classification or genealogy? For Sygne and George,
familial love (storge)—which usually refers to an attachment of parents to their children—overlaps with sexual
love (eros). Such interlacing of storage and eros would not be something incestuous. It would have been  natural
for Sygne to become a mother-wife for George and for George to become a father-husband for Sygne when no
other members were left in the family. “Would you consent to wed me, cousin?” “Let me take an oath like a
new knight! O my Lord! My elder brother!” This is how they swear their love to each other. As the play
progresses, the old man George brings from England turns out to be the Pope, who represent, God’s will on the
earth. George helped him escape from jail under Napoleon’s reign and protected him.

In Act Two, the third main character, Toussaint Turelure, joins the play. Turelure represents the revolutionaries
on the surface, but in fact, he is an opportunist who was interested only in seizing more power. His
characteristics would be taken as loathsome to the majority of audience. Notably, he contributed to the downfall
of Coûfontaine family in 1793, including the execution of Sygne’s parents. To make things worse, he proposes
to Sygne in a threatening way after finding out that both George and the Pope are hiding in her house. He says
that he has been in love with her for a long time and that he will harm the Pope and George if she does not
accept his proposal. Sygne laments her situation to a confessor, Badilon: “I must call him my husband, this
 83

beast! I must accept him and offer him my cheek! But that I refuse! I say no! Even if God incarnate should exact
from me!”131 Accepting Turelure’s proposal obviously means destroying what Sygne genuinely wanted to
reconstruct—namely, her family’s honor—not to mention betraying the solemn oath with George. Without
pushing her to any kind of option, Badilon reminds Sygne of the following point: if she rejects  the proposal,
then the father of all the Christians would be in the hand of the enemy. Despite her saying “no,” she eventually
accepts Turelure’s proposal with some inexplicable mixture of resignation and decision.

Lacan observes that what matters here is not some ironic power of religious values that Badilon and the Pope
represent. It was not her life that she sacrificed (in fact, she already did so for her family) but rather her own
existence. Sygne overcomes the limit of “the second death.” In other words, she gives up not her biological life
but her symbolic existence granted by the signifier Coûfontaine. This is the first difference between Antigone as
the heroine of an ancient tragedy and Sygne as the heroine of a modern tragedy. Antigone acts according to
heavenly law, which commands her to bury her brother, even though it is against earthly law, succumbing to her
own Até. On the contrary, Sygne rejects the very law that guarantees her existence, not to mention the joy of
love with George.

Act Three takes place two years after Turelure’s proposal. Napoleon has been exiled, and Turelure is
attempting to revive the royal regime by obtaining sovereignty over the outskirts of Paris. In fact, he wants a
puppet king over whom he can take control. Furthermore, he demands that George hand over all of his family’s
wealth and authority to Turelure’s son, and he designates Sygne as his deputy. George accepts his demand but
decides to kill him and shoots Turelure. Turelure also shoots George, and George consequently dies, but
Turelure does not because Sygne jumps to protect Turelure.

There are two versions of the final scene of the play, of which the second is more intriguing, which Claudel
wrote for the performance of the play. In that version, Sygne refuses a series of demands. She refuses Turelure’s
demand to forgive him. She refuses to see her son. She refuses Badilon’s demand to be a soldier of God.
Turelure says here, “Sygne! Stand up and say ‘adsum’! Coûfontaine adsum! Coûfontaine adsum!” She tries to
stand up but collapses. The play ends with her empty eyes.

According to Lacan, her act is an “absolute dereliction, being abandoned and sorely tried by the divine powers,
and a decision to go all the way in what at this point hardly deserves to be called a sacrifice.” 132 Why does she
throw herself to protect Turelure? One thing for sure is that she does not follow the phallic logic of “Turelure is
my husband after all, so I must protect him.” Sacrifice mostly is aimed at some phallic cause, whether it is
loyalty to family, devotion to justice, or worship to God. However, Sygne’s sacrifice is incomprehensible, which
nullifies the cause of sacrifice and punctures sacrifice itself. It goes beyond meaning and law. Sygne eventually

131
Paul Claudel, 1911, “L’otage,” Théâtre, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1965, p. 268.
132
Lacan, SVIII, p. 277.
 84

remains silent to the signifier “Coûfontaine adsum” to which she devoted herself, which Turelure has taken
over. By annihilating herself through betraying her family and love and becoming Turelure’s wife, Sygne
represents the real, in which the symbolic signifier of “Coûfontaine adsum” radically fails. At the verge of her
last breath, she represents an absolute “No.” It is a kind of “No” that escapes from the binary division of “Yes”
and “No.” It is the enigmatic “No” sticking out from the network of signifiers.

Here is another major difference between modern and ancient tragedy. Just before Sygne protects Turelure, her
face twitches. This means that she exceeds the beauty that the victims of Sade or Antigone never lost despite
their suffering. Sygne goes beyond beauty, as the final boundary against abject objects and lethal jouissance.
Jouissance means not just death overwhelming life but an excess of undying life. The grimace of life (grimace
de la vie), signaled by yet-to-be-dead Sygne’s twitching face, distorts beauty much more radically than
Antigone’s grimace of death (grimace de la mort) does, as signaled by her dead tongue. While ancient tragedy
does not challenge beauty, Sygne exceeds beauty, not to mention the boundary between good and evil.

The last difference between modern and ancient tragedy is that Sygne neither pleads to God to accept her soul
nor sacrifices herself as a scapegoat for God. Nobody would know how Badilon’s words influence Sygne or
what leads her to marry Turelure. She is not tormented by tests from God. Rather, she proves that God is dead.
There is no longer the omnipotent being who would bring misfortune to us and save us from it. She “goes much
further than the misfortune of Job and his resignation. Job is weighed down by misfortune that he has not
deserved, but the heroine of modern tragedy is asked to assume responsibility for the very injustice she abhors
as if it were a jouissance.” 133 This jouissance is correlative to a father’s incompetence. The Pope in the play
represents the father of all Christians and the spokesperson of God. Yet, he merely repeats meaningless, invalid
doctrines and obsolete commandments. The father-pope’s conservative “No” remains within the boundaries of
the old-fashioned symbolic, whereas Sygne’s abyssal “No” penetrates into the ruin of that boundary. God is
dead, and the father is impotent.

In Seminar XIII, Lacan spends four lessons covering Claudel’s trilogy. He ironically points out that Claudel
does not have an advanced idea about what a woman is. However, Lacan immediately adds that Claudel’s other
work Break of Noon (Partage de midi) is a prominent exception and that the female protagonist Ysé embodies
the qualities of genuine femininity. She represents the real woman, or a woman as the real. She is something
impossible. Yet, there is no essential difference between Sygne and Ysé because both of them reveal the point at
which the limits of signifiers are challenged. It is just that Ysé pushes a little further on the function of “Ver-” in
Sygne’s refusal (Versagen). Annihilation emerges if one pushes refusal further.

Ysé says, “I feel a temptation in myself. … And I pray that this temptation does not come to me, for it must not.
… Understand what race I come from! Because a thing is bad, because it is mad, because it is ruin and death and

133
Lacan, SVIII, pp. 302–303.
 85

perdition for me and everything, isn’t it a temptation to which I can hardly resist?” 134 Therefore, if Ysé claims
that a woman needs her husband and she also needs a man to guide her, this is for the sake of protecting herself
from self-dislocation, terrible freedom, and lethal annihilation. As the play progresses, Ysé betrays three men.
The first one is her husband, De Ciz, who understands nothing about her. The next one is Mesa, who seeks the
absolute. Lastly, we have Almaric, who helps her to reject Mesa but eventually is betrayed. Ysé tells Mesa, “I
exist alone and here is the world repudiated, and what use is our love to others? And here are the past and the
future renounced at the same time. I no longer have family and children and husband and friends … But what
we desire is not at all to create but to destroy.” 135 Therefore, Colette Soler’s interpretation of Ysé’s betrayal is
adequate in this point: “She certainly does betray, but not one object for another, one man for another; instead
she betrays all the objects that respond to the lack inscribed by the phallic function.” 136 Betraying one’s partner
to be with another one and repeating this kind of betrayal are in accordance with phallic logic—namely, the
game between the symbolic lack and the object that is supposed to fill the lack. On the other hand, Ysé’s
annihilation means the total destruction of the rules of the game between the symbolic lack and objects. It breaks
any form of bond and subverts the existing phallic values (children, husband, family, nation, world). It is
addressed to the real abyss, not to a symbolic lack.

What clinical lessons can we get from Sygne’s refusal and Ysé’s annihilation? As Lacan points out, women’s
desire (jouissance, to be exact) vividly comes into existence in the tragedy of Euripides. Ironically, however,
Euripides is accused of being misogynic. Did he not try to bring loathsome feminine madness under the control
of writing and eventually fail to control the untamable feminine jouissance? Analysts would be equally
embarrassed and hesitant when encountered with the real brought by Sygne’s refusal and Ysé’s annihilation.
These women suggest the following clinical task: “All our difficulties come down to the following: we must
know how to occupy its place [the signifier Φ’s place] inasmuch as the subject must be able to detect the
missing signifier there.”137 The analyst does not provide normalizing signifiers or ideal images to those women
suffering from a lack of signifiers. Rather, the analyst’s task is to stubbornly secure the clearing where the
search for the lost signifier can begin, no matter how the clearing is narrow and perilous.

134
Colette Soler, What Lacan Said About Women: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. John Holland, New York: Other
Press, 2006, pp. 16–17.
135
Ibid., p.17
136
Ibid., p.18
137
Lacan, SVIII, p. 268.
 86

Polyamorist

In Seminar SXXI, Lacan states that marriage and love are reciprocal duperies but that women are not duped by
them.138 Yet, as the title of Seminar SXXI implies, the non-duped are neither wiser nor more discerning than the
duped are. Instead, the non-duped wander around (les non-dupe errent). How did she who was not duped by
love end up wandering around?

She cannot even think of the idea of cheating. She believs those who betray their lovers should be deprived of
their rights to be in the romantic world. Because of this attitude, she repeatedly feels guilty every time she finds
herself attracted to other men when she had a boyfriend. She just gives up and ignores those to whom she was
attracted. It was like a seed that failed to bear fruit. She could have enjoyed the fruits if only it was planted
properly. Yet, most of her romantic relationships end with the presence of some charming new guy. After all,
she is left with only two options: being bound to a sterile seed or cutting down the tree to plant a new seed.
Choosing between these options wears her out. She always suppresses her desire to meet someone else.

One man acknowledges her with a light attitude. While others find it uncomfortable whenever she expresses
desire toward male celebrities (“I want to go out with them. It is my lifelong wish”), he finds her desire
interesting. Maybe it was because he was sure that she would eventually return to him. Or he knows that she is
attractive to other men too and loves her because of it. They are devoted to their relationship. They try not to get
bored of their relationship; they try to make it into an art. Nonetheless, she still must let go of the men to whom
she is attracted. She inexplicably becomes lonely and sorry for throwing seeds away repeatedly. In any case, she
has a relationship with him for four years through constant struggles.

One day, she goes her favorite bar. A man and a woman are sitting next to her. After talking to them for a while,
she finds that they are cousins. She starts drinking with them. Both of them seem well mannered and well
educated, which makes her even more interested in them. Then, the woman leaves the bar not too after. She
really enjoys talking to the man. They leave the bar too and look for some another place to have more
conversation. The man suddenly kisses her while they are still on the street. She is flustered but also drunk. She
allows herself to become immersed in this situation. Her motto falls apart at this moment—a light kiss is okay,
but making out is cheating. He tells her, “Do you want to come to my home?” She is tempted. When would she
have another chance to hang out with such an awesome guy? She really wants to accept the invitation, but she
still feels like she has to tell him. “Actually, I have a boyfriend.”

At the moment when she tells him that she had a boyfriend, she hopes that he tells her, “It  is okay. I don’t
mind.” She thinks the man would have taken care of the consequences by saying so. It must be taken into
account that her self-repression has almost reached its limits. She has been looking after the same tree for four

138
Lacan, SXXI, Novemver 13th, 1973(unpublished).
 87

years, and she has succeeded in picking fruits, but she has had to throw away too many seeds to do so. She feels
like giving up all of this. Yet, her last bit of honesty makes her confess that she actually has a boyfriend. Against
all of her expectations, he gives her the cold shoulder. “You have a boyfriend?” He hails a taxi and gets away.

Still intoxicated, she walks to home alone. She is haunted by inexplicable misery. She cheated on her boyfriend
since she did not reject the stranger for a chance of having new relationship, and simultaneously he is gone
because she is honest. Her affair is only a half success, and an honest confession results in her being dumped.
She breaks her own conviction on romantic relationships and betrays her boyfriend. She would not have been
that miserable if only she had just went after the man without saying anything.

Sobbing and plodding alone, she makes a phone call to her friend of fifteen years. How long do I have to live
like this? Why can’t I fall in love with just one partner? Others do not seem to have this kind of problem. Her
friend tells her about the concept of polyamory and suggests that she might be a polyamorist. She hangs up the
phone and searches the Internet. She is excited, with a faint hope. “This is exactly the way I am. Why haven’t I
heard of this before?”

She watches the Korean movie My Wife Got Married the next day. She easily finds herself in the female
protagonist’s shoes. “This is the way. This is how I live my life.” She later realizes that numerous
monoamorists, especially male monoamorists, identify themselves with the male protagonist and call the female
protagonist a “bitch.” However, polyamory is her salvation. A singular, unprecedented signifier sometimes
opens up a brand-new field. She is free from a sense of guilt for the first time. Yet, comprehending the concept
is one thing, and practicing the concept is another. What is she supposed to do with her boyfriend of four years?
He does not seem to accept the idea of polyamory, no matter how tolerant he is. She still takes a chance and tells
him. To her surprise, he calmly states that he is already aware of her sexual inclination to meet more than one
partner. He tells her that it is enough for him to be with her, and allows her to have other partners. This becomes
her second salvation.

Yet, it is not easy to practice polyamory. She must go through trial and error. She confesses her identity as a
polyamorist to whom she is attracted, and two of them immediately stopp dating her. Identifying herself as a
polyamorist is one thing, but practicing polyamory successfully is another. Later, she realizes that most male
monoamorists admit that they are willing to have more than one partner, but they cannot just allow their partners
to have other male partners. To those male monoamorists, it is a devastating incident for their partners to go out
with someone else. Anyway, she cannot achieve a meaningful relationship with those two men. She breaks up
with her boyfriend because of them and meets her boyfriend again after breaking up with them. She is single
now. She breaks up with him not because of polyamory but because of other issues.
 88

Although she is sure of her identity as a polyamorist, she still has not experienced an actual polyamorous
relationship. It is difficult to meet a proper partner. It would be perfect to find an attractive polyamorist, but she
has to convince monoamorists about herself in most cases. According to her, monoamorists and polyamorists
take different perspectives on romantic relationships. Monoamorists get hurt when their partners meet someone
else, thinking that they are not good enough for their partners. Polyamory hurts monoamory as much as
castration hurts narcissism. Most people cannot accept the fact that they cannot be a perfect, all-encompassing
match for someone else because they think it is devaluing themselves. They understand it logically but never
accept it full-heartedly. On the other hand, she thinks, “I am deserved to be loved by you. And you are also
deserved to be loved by someone else, just like I love you. So I want to open up a chance for it. I cannot let
ourselves bound to each other.” All affects are formed according to the worldly law. And in this world,
compersion is taken as a bizarre and strange affect. How could it be so bizarre to watch our lover being happy
and joyful with someone else, and share his or her happiness? She wishes for a compersion to be settled between
sympathy and love. She practices polyamory not to grasp an exclusive relationship but to form an irreplaceable
bond, to know and love someone deeply. Furthermore, she wishes that others would take a poly-friendly
perspective on love and relationship, putting aside whether they actually practice polyamory.

What would she end up with, she who has not been duped by monoamory? Lacan suggests that it is better to be
duped by the unconscious than to wander in the real, but she chooses the latter. To her, monoamory is a kind of
fabrication that closes up an opportunity for a community based on compersion to come into existence, as if
marriage is a fabrication that makes sexual non-relationships exist. 139 Some expect that the future society will be
teeming with various kinds of partnerships. It will resemble a community in which the possibilities for love have
no limits upon the sex and number of partners. As a member of this unknown community, she is to become the
subject who encourages the advent of this community.

139
Lacan, SXIX, p. 10.
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Feminist

Let us delve into the dynamics of feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis within the context of historical change
in feminism.140 Second-wave feminism accepted Lacanian psychoanalysis in 1970, the time when women’s
liberation called for triggering social reform. Feminists viewed Lacanian psychoanalysis with ambivalence,
criticizing and disputing it and simultaneously taking it as a useful analytic tool for approaching the issues of
subjectivity, sexuality, femininity, ideology, and psychical power. Both Luce Irigary and Julia Kristeva were
close to the Lacanian school, but they branched off from Lacanian ideas by criticizing phallocentrism (in
Irigary’s case) and distinguishing semiotic materiality from signifying symbolism (in Kristeva’s case). On the
other hand, Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose pointed out that Lacanian psychoanalysis provided meaningful
insights for analyzing the patriarchy, Oedipal family structure, and phallic norms imposed on femininity. One of
the most controversial issues in the ambivalent relationship between second-wave feminism and Lacanian
psychoanalysis was the concepts of phallus and symbolic order. Some feminists still questioned the validity of
Lacan’s idea of phallus even though it represented a signifier of lack, which transposed Freud’s biological,
anatomical penis onto the symbolic and linguistic plane. To those feminists, the phallus is a concept revealing
the fact that language, culture, society, and philosophy understand femininity only in relation to masculinity, far
from shedding light on the singularity of femininity. Furthermore, this doubt has a solid basis. For example, in
Some Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality, Lacan states, “Images and symbols in women
cannot be isolated from images and symbols of women.”141 A woman in this context is defined as a being who
internalizes the external image of herself from the perspective of masculinity, discourse, and norms. The images
and symbols of women formed externally turn into the natural, essential images and symbols residing within
women. Furthermore, Lacan in this period related feminine sexuality to “representation” and claimed such
representation conditions the practice of feminine sexuality (this is impossible for later Lacan, because
femininity instead comes closer to the real, beyond representation). However, it is also the case that some hints
appear in Some Guiding Remarks, which will be used later to articulate women beyond representation. For
instance, Lacan designates men as “supporters of desire” and women as “appellants of sex,” and links female
sexuality to jouissance beyond castration and signifiers. However, Lacan still emphasizes phallic mediation. For
instance, consider the following phrase that prepares for the point in Seminar XX that women form a unique
relationship with otherness: “A man serves here as a relay so that a woman becomes this Other to herself, as she
is to him. … Everything can be attributed to a woman insofar as she represents the absolute Other in the
phallocentric dialectic.”142 Women do not fall into men’s Other in the sense of the relative Other. Rather, women
are the absolute Other, in the sense that they become the Other for both men and themselves. Interestingly,
Lacan interprets women’s absolute otherness in terms of the ambiguity of signifiers. Women follow the logic of

140
This chapter relies on the following source for discussing history of feminism. Kirsten Campbell, “Political
Encounters: Feminism and Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” in Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics, ed.
Samo Tomšič, Andreja Zevnik, New York: Routledge, 2016, pp. 233–252.
141
Lacan, Écrits, p. 613.
142
Lacan, Écrits, p. 616.
 90

Heteros (different). Yet, “the Heteros, by being declined into the Hetera, is etherized, or even hetaerized.” 143
The genuine Other does not become stuck in otherness but plays a variation on otherness itself. Heteros
duplicates itself into deuteros. Women constantly change themselves, staying away from their previous selves
sometimes by dissipating into air like ether or other times by becoming Hetaira (professional courtesans of
ancient Greece). Women embody an absolute difference that advances from the signifying difference between
man and woman. However, note that men still play a mediating role for women to be the absolute Other. In
other words, in order to claim femininity beyond the phallus, we must set the very presence of a phallus as a
premise or condition. Moreover, the later Lacan does not abandon the concepts of phallus and symbolic
castration, although one still must consider the following points. First, the phallic function introduces a lack to
every speaking being, regardless of biological sex. Second, the phallic function in its essence is contingent,
although it seems necessary on the surface. Third, the emphasis is put not on “phallus” but on “function.” Quite
ambivalently, the later Lacan admits that there is no anti-phallic thing in the unconscious, as much as he
acknowledges that the unconscious is the real. This is where a heated debate between Lacanian psychoanalysis
and feminism arises. The former observes that the phallic and the beyond-phallic work in different contexts,
whereas the latter aims to deconstruct the phallic in order to achieve the beyond-phallic. At this point, it is
necessary to read the following phrase from L’étourdit closely. As loyal as Lacan is to the Freudian cause
concerning phallus and symbolic castration, Lacan distinguishes himself from Freud by taking a different
approach to femininity: “Contrary to him [Freud], I will not impose on women the obligation of measuring by
the yardstick of castration the charming girdle [gaine] that they do not raise to the signifier, even if this
yardstick helps not only the signifier but also joy [pied].”144

Let us address five points. First, symbolic castration contributes to sexual pleasure. In other words, the sexual
pleasure of a speaking animal is far from a natural need but rather is a denaturalized abyss. Second, unlike
Freud, Lacan rejects a reductionist approach to femininity based on symbolic castration. Third, a shoehorn is
located within the signifier, whereas a girdle (gaine) is “a beyond-signifier.” Fourth, it is important to draw all
possible conclusions from the signifier “girdle.” Notably, “girdle” is often mistranslated as “sheath” or “corset,”
which has a significant impact on the reading of the phrase. If it were a sheath, then women simply get to fit into
men’s standard as a sheath is made to fit to the sword, protecting, decorating, and encompassing the sword. If it
were a corset, then Lacan falls into a suspicion of tacitly supporting women’s oppression, which the anti-corset
movement in South Korea resists. There is an obvious difference between a girdle and a corset. The latter
confines the bodily movement due to its rigid structure. Furthermore, both upper-class and working-class
women wores corset to hide their pregnant bodies. In the girdle’s case, however, contemporary women wear
girdles to support their pregnant body and strengthen themselves in activities. In this respect, both mistranslated
terms fail to grasp Lacan’s intention to emphasize femininity beyond masculine norms. Yet, the problem still
remains even when we adopt the correct translation of “girdle.” Because both girdles and corsets are used for

143
Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 467.
144
Ibid., pp. 464–465.
 91

aesthetic purposes to correct one’s body posture, they are not innocent from “aesthetic labor.” In the girdle’s
case, it is particularly problematic because it is qualified by an adjective—“charming (charmant)”—and the
second meaning of “gaine” is “restraint.” This implies that even a girdle fails to serve as a device with which to
secure freedom, rather than to be ideally beautiful. Lastly, we can suggest a speculative question regarding this
point. Both masculine imposture and feminine masquerade are not problematic by themselves, but their effects
sometimes are suppressing. Then, what exactly is the state in which neither a shoehorn nor a girdle is needed?
How can we reconstruct a sexual order free from deception and mask? From these five points, we can draw a
conclusion about the relationship between second-wave feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. An obvious
tension exists between Lacan, who let the freedom of feminine jouissance by not measuring “a charming
girdle,” and the feminists, who stay alert to the self-oppressive aspect even in “a charming girdle.”

Third-wave feminism in the 1990s emphasized on minority identity, diverse sexual preferences, freedom of sex
and consumption, and the motto “The personal is political.” This made third-wave feminism disharmonious with
Lacanian psychoanalysis, which focused on theoretical analysis on discourse, an empty subjectivity, two
sexuated positions, and “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” Then, fourth-wave feminism was
initiated in the late 2000s, within the expansion of global capitalism, the spread of social media, increases in
sexual and cultural diversity, the fall of patriarchal power, a neopatriarchal trend, gender equality in the home
and workplace, gender sensitivity, and the Me-Too movement. Fourth-wave feminists started to seek ways to
make a productive reference to Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to invent a new political form. At this point, an
irreducible difference between feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis is acknowledged; simultaneously, a
controversial interaction between them is deepened. On the one hand, while feminism involves social reform by
participating in political issues, Lacanian psychoanalysis emphasizes subjective transformation by dealing with
clinical issues. On the other hand, they collaborate to set up a common critical mind with which to examine
individuals and society, and the psychic and the discursive, following Freud’s theme of “individual analysis is
group analysis” and Lacan’s theme of “every individual is subject to the master discourse.”

We have been going through the historical context in which Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism were
articulated. Yet, this historical context is only relevant to the Western world. What about the case of Korea? In
Korean society, where pre-modernity, modernity, and postmodernity coexist, there might be a more complicated
relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism. Here, let us clarify the following point. First,
pondering upon the dynamics of Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism in the Korean context is possible only
when every feminist situation upon which feminist thoughts and practices are grounded is analyzed without any
prejudices. Just as women exist only one by one but not universally, feminist situations exist only one by one. A
woman asks a question in this context.

She has a friend who carries in with an uncalculating romantic relationship, which is rare in our society, where a
woman’s beauty is traded equally with a man’s decent job as a lawyer or doctor. Yet, her friend cannot go on a
 92

date without putting on makeup even though they have been going out for several years. How should this couple
approach her symptom of “no makeup, no date”?

Another one of her friends had a job interview recently, during which the interviewers asked her questions like,
“Do you have a boyfriend? Are you going to get married? Then when? If you get married, would you have a
baby?” What kind of socio-political change is necessary to make a fair job career path and raising children
compatible in her life?

Her aunt, who was a department head in a major corporation, handed in her resignation both willingly and
forcedly. She was an alpha girl and a workaholic. She devoted herself to the company, completing numerous
projects successfully. Yet, she never could get a promotion for several years in row, and the company sinuously
suggested that she resign with an unconvincing reason. Her aunt’s only hypothesis was it was because of the
“glass ceiling.” Isn’t it too harsh for her to be a victim of glass ceiling after having lived in a house with such a
low ceiling?

Her acquaintance, who was working as a nurse, had a four-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son. Yet, her
husband was indifferent to looking after their children. He simply waited for the children to grow up a bit more
so that he could enjoy being a friendly father. What is the concept of “joyful childrearing,” which is as
oxymoronic as sweet medicine, coffee without caffeine, and love without risk? If there is no such thing, then
how could she turn her husband, “a grown-up son” into a responsible father?

She joined her mother’s social gathering one day and found a very interesting tendency amongst those middle-
aged women. They barely talked about femininity; instead, they focused on topics involving a phallic title.
Someone’s son passed the bar exam, some other’s daughter got plastic surgery and looked much prettier, some
city’s real estate prices had surged, someone’s husband was bankrupted, and so on. At that moment, she
suddenly could find a brand-new comprehension of an old-fashioned phrase: “Women are the most powerful
enemies of women.” How could she suggest a topic that is free from phallus to those women, who were so
unfamiliar with feminist perspectives?

Some feminists suggest the necessity of counter-violence by expressing hate toward sexual minorities because
some sexual minority men also share the phallic power, which encourages misogyny and degradation of women.
She once quoted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s words—“Poor men are exempt from a privilege of the rich, but
they still enjoy masculine privilege”—to her friend who was worried about the counter-violence which would
worsen gender conflict. Yet, she asks simultaneously, “How could we find a way to practice an intersectionality
and achieve broader solidarity?”
 93

One day, she found Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata in a second-hand bookstore and looked through it.
Lysistrata, the female protagonist, is an unprecedented political subject who brought peace to Greece by urging
all Greek women to go on a sex strike to end the long-lasting war between Peloponnesus and Delos. Lysistrata
embodies many messages, including a caricature of masculine and warlike realpolitik, a possibility of sex as a
means of bringing peace to a community rather than as a means of seeking pleasure, being loved, power and
wealth, and the truth that love is much more interesting than war is. She asks a question: how could this message
contribute to feminism’s search for alternative politics?

Marie-Hélène Brousse points out that the truth of feminism lies within an ironic transformation of otherness into
sameness and that psychoanalysis provides feminism with this truth. 145 She claims that insofar as a myth is
defined as “the attempt to give an epic form to what is operative through the structure,” 146 feminism is one
attempt to narrate the war between the two sexes in terms of power dynamics and to grant an ideal otherness to
the real void in the Other. Here, she asks whether this myth came into existence in the most dramatic form from
within the Lacanian school. Can we not witness the regrettable example of how loyalty to the cause of
psychoanalytic discourse as the real void is often reduced to imaginary and sectarian group logic, in the fact that
“the beautiful Lacan (la belle Lacan)” was blindly worshipped as “the label of Lacan (label Lacan)”? If both the
Lacanian school and feminism have failed to escape from this dilemma, how could we deal with it?

Lastly, she asks the author. Considering that Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism have their own independent
fields, feminism can bring out a question by tracing Lacan’s text from an internally critical perspective, rather
than by imposing the feminist insight upon the text externally. For instance, she points out that in Seminar XI,
Lacan claims Sygne is a character who embodies the fact that the master is actually alienated from freedom—
even a master like Sygne must choose death to achieve true freedom. 147 Was the author really unable to handle
the nuanced point in which the logic of tragic rejection and the logic of alienated master are intertwined for
Sygne as a singular woman? The book repeatedly omits the subject from its sentences, which represents the
author’s symptom of failing to become a woman. Then, how devoted is the author to every woman’s
unconscious truth and the subjective real?

145
Marie-Hélène Brousse, “Feminism With Lacan,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 5, nos. 1&2, Spring/Fall,
1991, p. 126.
146
Lacan, Television, p. 30.
147
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964–1965, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981, p. 219.
 94

Capitalist Machine

It was 2 A.M. Another day had passed. She was worn out. She had five lectures. She had become even busier
during the vacation season because of new students from overseas. Summer was a rush season not just for the
liquor business but also for the private education business. She had to strike while the iron was hot. She once
was an instructor teaching GRE in a private academy: “Parsimonious. So, how do we get to memorize this? I
taught you last time, remember? Think of a grandmother saying ‘digging (pronounced as ‘pa-seo’ in Korean)
ground does not bring you money.’ She is a ‘parsimonious’ grandmother. Here goes another one—a
grandmother eighty (pronounced as ‘par-sip’ in Korean) years old (pronounced as ‘meo-geon’ in Korean) is
parsimonious.”

Before starting her own business, she worked in a large private academy for several years. She just focused on
teaching her students passionately but then became a victim of fraud. It was the director’s scam that she used to
think was a tough working environment. She had a harsh lesson that scams exploiting someone’s passion were
embedded in every poor working environment. She received the rest of her salary by suing the director, but she
did not want to work in another academy. Instead, she started a small private academy in the Cheong-dam area.
Since the demand for GRE was very narrow, she started to teach SAT and TOEFL as well. Her business grew
drastically after some of her students were accepted to the Ivy League universities. She started to research the
involved laws for establishing a legally official academy.

She liked to learn languages when she was young. If she was precise enough, there was no single sentence that
could not be interpreted, no matter how long and complicated it was. She did not find it cumbersome to
memorize vocabularies, idioms, and grammar rules. She became qualified for the first rank in the Japanese
Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) not long before she started to learn Japanese. She was a language-learning
machine. Also, this language-learning machine has become a deus-ex-machina to her students: “If you follow
what I tell you to do, you can score as much as you want.” Enchanted by her charisma and skills, a mother even
asked her to be a long-term life plan counselor for her child. She politely rejected the offer since she was already
too busy teaching: “I will introduce a coordinator instead.” She used to be a girl dreaming of becoming a
linguist. How could she become a god of the SAT and a life coordinator instead of a linguist?

Her father was a vice-president of a corporation when she was young. She barely ever stepped on dirt at that
time. Her driver always took her from home to school, from school to the academy. It was a kind of life without
a sense of deficiency. Her life underwent change when she entered middle school. Her father underwrote his
acquaintance’s debt, and then everything went wrong. Her family lost all of its wealth and was burdened by
debts. No one offered a helping hand despite her father’s position as a vice-president. The biggest scar for her
father was to find out that no one had actually been with him from the beginning. Her mother was the heroine
who saved the family. However, as much as the heroes were left with scars, she also had her own degree of
 95

symptoms. Tormented too much by creditors, she would sometimes treat her children as if they were one of
them. Her method of rejection was bizarre in a way. Even though the children’s requests were not financially
burdensome, she rejected them in panic. She was extremely defensive when it came to monetary issues. She did
not actually articulate that money was the best, but she was obsessed about losing it. It was a symptom created
by her arduous life history. Obviously, her children were affected by her attitude in various degrees. She once
learned that her brother and sister were not as sensitive to their mother’s anxiety as she was. Is it their
insensibility or her oversensitivity? Or was she most susceptible to her mother’s anxiety about money? Had she
produced the signifier “a childhood never stepping on dirt” herself? Or was it that her mother regretted the fall
of her family economy, saying that “I used to raise you that way...”

She visited a fancy massage salon after work. She actually had to do some remedial exercise for spinal stenosis,
but she had no time to do it because of her work, so she just had the massage instead. Massage was not a mere
substitute but the only pleasure in her life that guaranteed the happiest moment of the day. She often thought of
herself as a massage addict. So-called high-class call girls were the main guests of the massage salon at
midnight. They would talk about brands of clothes and bags—a topic that she could barely pick up. However,
they were just as hardworking as her, and those who had a job would have their own difficulties, she thought.
Indeed, all women were experiencing tough lives. How could she share an emotional tie with them? What is the
key element in that emotional tie? She showed no interest in a romantic relationship even though some men
were attracted to her straightforward characteristic and financial status. What she was really interested in was
not a romantic relationship but building up her life savings. She most feared her future image as a poor, old
woman. She would agree on the necessity of marriage because she thought it would be lonely to be old without
any partner. She even hated to keep a pet dog. Marriage seemed to be the only option left for a woman who
hates both pets and loneliness. However, one day she realized that marriage is not necessary at all; rather, there
was an even better option to choose. Money was the best option. Money led her father into realizing that there
was no one left in times of financial crisis. Money made her mother suffer from an odd symptom. Money had
the magical effect of massage in relieving stress and pain. Money had become the best option for her, and she
was heading to the massage salon after a long day as always.

What does capitalism do? In Marx’s analysis, the capitalist commercial relationship determined by the singular
standard (money) leads to the destruction and redetermination of all kinds of humanitarian, social, and historical
relationships. Lacan expands and redefines this Marxist idea: “There is only one social symptom: each
individual is really a proletarian, in other words has no discourse with which to make a social bond, in other
words semblance.”148 It is not the case that two opposing classes of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat exist.
Rather, there is only a single class of proletariat. However, this proletariat does not refer to the have-nots
exploited by capitalists but to everyone in the capitalist system whose desire is necessarily exploited: “The

148
Jacques Lacan, “The Third,” in The Lacanian Review: Get Real, 07, Spring, 2019, p. 87.
 96

exploitation of desire, this is the big invention of capitalist discourse.” 149 In other words, “what differentiates the
discourse of capitalism is Verwerfung, the fact of rejecting, outside all the fields of the symbolic.” 150 The
exploitation of desire by capitalism and the rejection of castration follow a double logic. On the one hand, far
from the psychoanalytic teaching that every subject has to endure the burden of desire stemming from structural
lack ($), capitalism encourages people to believe that their desire could be satisfied if they purchase goods by
reducing desire into demand. However, those who moved from a three to a five-room apartment would not be
able to find satisfaction from such progress, because they lack something more than an apartment, and the desire
that is believed to be dealt with stays intact. On the other hand, capitalism presents unbridled jouissance instead
of desire rooted in lack and generates the superegoic command to yearn for jouissance. This is how pleasure,
which in fact has to be fulfilled voluntarily, becomes a compulsory labor to a subject. Everyone is proletariat in
this sense, insofar as desire is substituted for demand and jouissance in capitalism. Some might ask if the upper
class would enjoy their privilege and if everyone else would envy it. Psychoanalysis would answer that it is a
projected sense of deprivation stemmed from your own lack. Moreover, pleasure would devour life itself when
pleasure is accompanied by unbridled jouissance.

For Lacan, discourse refers to a function to make a social link, but capitalism destroys the chances for discourse
to be formed. It blocks any possibilities of social link. It is not a coincidence that the drama of relationships,
including husband-wife, employer-employee, brother-sister, and parent-child, is reverted to the drama of money.
There is no bond, only idiotic jouissance from isolated proletariats. Lacan formulates capitalist discourse after
discussing the four discourses (the discourse of the master, the university, the hysteric, and the analyst).
However, “capitalist discourse” seems like an oxymoron because capitalism deconstructs discourse but at the
same time produces it. Let us delve into this paradox.

In Lacan’s discourse theory, the agent driven by the unconscious truth is involved with the other, and the other
gives off a certain kind of product. It seems as if the agent and the other are forming a relationship, but it is
actually imbued with the impossibility of relationship. There seems to be a relationship between the agent and
the other, but this relationship is based on the non-relationship of truth and product. Let us take university
discourse as an example. In university discourse, knowledge (agent) is transmitted to students (other) who
submit an essay filled with their own uncertain interpretations (product). However, this essay is not thought

149
Jacques Lacan, “Excursus,” in Lacan in Italia 1953–1978. En Italie Lacan, ed. G. B. Contri, Milan: La
Salamandra, 1978, p. 97.
150
Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital, trans.
Bruce Fink, Cambrige: Polity, 2017, pp. 90–91.
 97

about subjectively with regard to fundamental idea (truth), which has the potential of generating knowledge. The
essay is rather graded and scored according to the existing, objective standard of knowledge. There is no
relationship between truth and product. Again, discourse is a bond limited by a fundamental non-relationship.
Interestingly, capitalist discourse distorts this structure of discourse.

Note that there is a difference between discourse in general and capitalist discourse. In capitalist discourse, an
arrow from the agent to the other is erased, and the agent is not driven by the unconscious truth but rather
approaches an accessible truth easily (note that an arrow points to S1 below, instead of $). The split subject ($)
does not relate to the other, unlike the hysteric who relates with the other as her master. Instead, the subject
relates with a master signifier called market (S1), and this market is considered to be a never-ending abundance
in which every kind of subjective lack could be compensated for. The market is in the position of truth and
functions as an invisible hand that fills out subjective lack by objective product. It reflects the way the subject in
our case suffers from spinal problems due to overworking, while also evading proper medical solutions, and
relies on a massage salon as a refuge. However, purchasing a certain product or service (S1) reveals that it
constitutes a web of difference with other products and services (S2), as revealed by the streetwalkers’
conversation about numerous kinds of new luxury brands. Once being purchased, the products and services
disappear and other products and services come into existence. For this reason, everyone is trapped in a
structural dissatisfaction even though they try hard to seek integral satisfaction. The result of this situation is not
just the production of countless goods but also an “extensive production, therefore insatiable, of that lack-in-
jouissance [manque-à-jouir].”151 What the subject can enjoy is surplus-jouissance as an alternative substitute
that is a residue redeemed from the loss of primary jouissance. Surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) corresponds to
the lack of jouissance in that it could be interpreted as “no-longer (ne-plus) enjoyable.” Surplus-jouissance is
also embodied in the form of commodities (the object a), and commodities always seduce and oppress the
subject by making him or her anxious of being a loser if not buying them. As the subject tamed by surplus-
jouissance steps into the market, the same thing happens again.

What is notable is that the flow of the arrow in capitalist discourse is never disrupted, which means there is no
trace of non-relationship. Everything circulates within the flow of capital and commodities smoothly. Capitalism
achieves “hyper-connectivity” even before Internet of Things (IoT) does. Despite this hyper-connectivity, there
is nevertheless room for calculation, cynicism, isolation, and anxiety to come into play since the capitalist
relationship is achieved only by the rules of demand-supply, input-output, and give-take. Solidarity barely
comes into existence even if everyone is connected, just as there is no solidarity in her relationship with her

151
Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres écrits, p. 435.
 98

students or massage therapists. While her father was frustrated by the unreliability of solidarity, she was
awakened by the uselessness of solidarity. She does not have to be frustrated because she does not even try to
make a social bond with others insofar as she is within the discourse where everything works without a bond.
Therefore, capitalist discourse is not an oxymoron. It is solidarity without solidarity in which one becomes more
isolated as he or she tries harder to get closer to someone else. Lacan adds an irony here: “A very small
inversion between S1 and $, which is the subject, is enough for it to run as if it were on wheels. It can’t run
better, but it actually runs too fast, it runs out such that it burns itself out.” 152 Capitalism will disappear because
of its huge success. A capitalist life refers to a life in which achieving and consuming are hardly distinguished.
That is why she is consuming her life, conforming to the capitalist bond without bond, showing off her talent as
a language machine in the private education industry. Also, this life is a hell on wheels as it runs on the wheels
of the capitalist discourse.

Stijn Vanheule summarizes the differential clinic in relation to capitalist discourse. 153 In the case of the neurotic,
capitalist discourse functions as a motivation to turn a blind eye on (sexual) non-relationship and the
unconscious. Therefore, the analyst should focus on turning the analysand’s attention to his or her symptom and
subjective issues. The key point here is that the subject’s faulty focus on market (S1), which is expected to fill
the gap within the subject, should be moved toward facing the absence so that the subject, for instance, can stop
relying on massage therapy and examine her own life squarely. In the case of the psychotic, the analytic work
should consider that the capitalistic discourse serves as a paradoxical instrument that prevents the psychotic
outside the discursive link from being reduced to the object of the jouissance of the Other. What is at stake here
is whether the subject can make his or her own way of relating to the other, albeit through the process of relating
to the other in a consumerist and capitalist fashion. However, this does not apply to the psychotic subject only. It
applies to her in our case, too. Maybe what is at stake with regard to her obsession about her lonely and poor
future image is not a pet or money but a subjective amorous struggle that leads to the institution of a singular
community.

Let us first compliment her for doing her best to take care of her students as always. However, do not let that
compliment be cheap or shallow. Let us rather wait for her to ask some fundamental question about her life. At
least we can agree with her as we adhere to the formula “Woman is not-all,” in that there is no exceptional
woman with some easygoing life. Indeed, her gut feeling that all women are having tough lives is correct,
insofar as women become powerful capitalist machines.

152
Jacques Lacan, “Du discours psychanalytique,” in Lacan in Italia 1953–1978. En Italie Lacan, ed. G. B. Contri.
Milan: La Salamandra, 1978, p. 48.
153
Stijn Vanheule, “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” Frontiers in Psychology 7.
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5145885/)
 99

In and Against Power

“Hello there, bandage up my leg. Right now.” It was an unusually peaceful Monday. Soon enough, a rush of
patients hit the hospital. “Sir, could you wait here for a while?” She was out of shape. She needed to eat
something sweet. “Patient XXX has just arrived.” She had a night out yesterday with her friends whom she had
not seen for a long time. She regretted not leaving early.

She was a physical therapist with a three-year career at a major hospital. Just after starting to work there, she
kept murmuring to herself, “Patients are fussy.” After that period of adapting to the working environment, she
somehow got used to treating picky patients. At least, that’s what she thought. Working in a treatment room, she
could get to know how patients view physical therapists. Physical therapists were, according to patients, mere
assistants taking orders from the doctor and doing what they were told. In Germany, physical therapists had a
separate right from doctors to look after patients. It was not the case for Korea, obviously. Patients’
discriminative attitude toward physical therapists might have stemmed from the social distinction between
doctors and therapists. She was not even called “therapist” by patients but “Hey” and “Hello”… She did not
expect to be called politely, but “Hey” or “Hello” was a bit…rude: “Hey, put the bandage on!”

But “Hey” was not the worst thing. She could calmly persuade patients when they were complaining “You are
charging this much money? It was not even effective!” Patients were fussy. One day, while treating a patient, he
said, “You look too ugly. How did you even get this job?” She could not get herself back for the entire
afternoon. Because of her tight schedule, sometimes she was forced to work even when sick with a cold, but
verbal abuse was worse than working with a cold.

Sometimes, patients’ gapjil (a Korean neologism referring to arrogant and authoritarian attitudes or actions of
people who have power over others) conspires with the interest of an organization. One day, a patient with a
knee problem received treatment. From a distance, a national soccer match played on a television while he was
being treated. Then a complaint was uploaded on the hospital’s webpage that night: “Therapist XXX dragged
her feet when walking, and it was really disturbing. And she seemed to care about the soccer match more than
treatment.” She was doing her job as usual, but the complaint suddenly made her a huge fan of soccer who did
not even know what offside was. The next day, her boss immediately summoned her. She and her colleagues
were sent to the office: “I will not drag my feet again.” Televisions were often turned on in other treatment
rooms too, but she promised, “I will not make customers uncomfortable with television.” Customers’ discomfort
should not lead to failed treatment. She submitted a written apology. It was okay at the moment, but that night
she felt an urge to resign for the first time. However, she soon gave up on that thinking. Taking a step back and
thinking about it, stepping down was not an easy thing for her. She had to make a card payment for this month,
and on top of everything, she had to enter another hospital and repeat the same thing after all.
 100

Freud’s grandson threw the cotton reel and said “Gone!” (fort) and “Here!” (da) repeatedly to symbolize his
sense of loss of his mother. In contemporary Korean society, the younger generations symbolize their burden of
making a card payment by repeatedly getting and quitting a job. She called her boyfriend for a word of comfort.
She had been going out with him for four years. Both of them were in love with each other, but they would not
get married. She was willing to get another boyfriend if she broke up with her current one, but she was not
going to marry the new one either. She thought that all fathers were lonely and all mothers were pitiable. Her
mother’s generation’s devotion to family was too much for her and her peers to follow. Korea’s unprecedented
low birth rate, which hit 1 per family, must be inevitable. Such a low birth rate stemmed not from women’s
higher financial power but from the impossibility of becoming a mother. She told her boyfriend that she
sacrificed her own spine to treat patients with spine disorders and that she got a complaint in return. He asked
her to drink, but she pulled herself away from the temptation. For the second day in a row, she could not drink.
She fell asleep instead.

The next day, she found that a company get-together had been arranged. It was not welcoming news. It was not
because of the get-together itself but because there was one colleague she did not want to talk to. He was a
pretentious know-it-all who fancied himself as a gentle, father-like boss, but he constantly belittled other
colleagues. The company get-together was not as oppressive as that of her father’s generation, but she still felt
uncomfortable being lightly scolded for not drinking much. Recently, she had been taking extra care in working
with newcomers in the treatment room. She had to give orders to those newcomers so that the treatment process
could flow more smoothly. Every time she gave them orders, she wondered whether she was like that boss or
not. A hospital was a unique world with its own rules. Also, she believed that what leads a medical team to treat
patients better was not the leadership of authoritarian power but an equal and fair participation of members to
create the rules.

She talked about her boss to her friend, a feminist activist regularly participating in feminist demonstrations. Her
friend denounced her boss for her. She felt relieved, but overtly resisting like her friend was not her way. Of
course, she was as willing as her friend to fix what was wrong. She was not a champion of the revolution, but
she did not lose her critical thinking toward an unfair authority. Was there some other way?

What is power? What is the relationship between women and power? In Seminar XXII, Lacan states that men are
attracted to masculine categories like power or knowledge, whereas women are barely interested in them. 154 To
women, those categories are something insignificant, and their power overcomes those categories
immeasurably. At the same time, women are well-aware of power and knowledge, and they are swayed less by
the uncomfortable knowledge of the unconscious. Lacan says that female psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein
deal with the unconscious so comfortably and proficiently that even some degree of savageness (sauvagerie) is
present in their way of approaching the unconscious. Women incarnate the uselessness of all sorts of measures

154
Lacan, SXXII, February 11th, 1975 (unpublished).
 101

(mesure) and freedom intertwined with madness. Lastly, Lacan points out that “anyone” (n’importe laquelle),
which is believed to be established by an analyst, directs all, whereas women direct the not-all.155

We need to delve into the obscure power of the not-all instead of simply placing women as an agent of madness
who infinitely surpasses the symbolic order. The not-all is placed within the symbolic order, but it partly slips
out of the symbolic order. Women as the not-all are still trapped with the unconscious imbued with power and
knowledge, but they are not completely locked up. Women are “the eternal irony of the community” (Hegel)
because they are adept at being in, and at the same time, against power. Superego is a constituent of the subject
insofar as civilization and society set the law and conscience, and humans internalize them by civilizing and
socializing. However, in the case of women who are open to asubjective effects, the power of superego lessens.
Women do not “superegoize [se surmoite] as easily as the universal conscience/consciousness [conscience].”156
While the analyst is wary of the trap of ego, women read through the logic of superego. Let us remind ourselves
of the fact that superego is a complete form of ego ideal. Only what is thought to be ideal can observe, judge,
and punish us. Only what mimics the generousness of a father tends to evaluate us. As a vanishing mediator of
organization, can she become an exceptional subject who resists the superegoic boss?

Today, power is not always found within a clearly identifiable substance that should be protested. Power is
alienified. It is a monster in our everyday life born within our very lives. It operates insidiously in our beds,
breaktime, get-together, family gatherings, jokes, gaze, and voice tones. The true form of power is a
microscopic collection of how she is referred to in the hospital, patients’ gapjil, the hospital’s self-defensive
rules, her mother’s pitiful life, and a cheerfully greeting boss.

In the get-together, she ate meat to her heart’s content. As always, her boss gave a lengthy speech to
encourage/discourage colleagues. Already drunk, he told her, “XXX, you are not enjoying yourself. Why don’t
you drink more? It will help to get closer to newcomers.” Let us return to the case brought up by Slavoj Žižek in
this point. While premodern, authoritarian fathers simply force their unwilling children to visit their
grandmother, postmodern, postpatriarchical fathers tell them, “You know how much your grandmother loves
you.” Children are not only forced to visit their grandmother but are obliged to love her. This relates to the
structure of superego. For Lacan, superego is something more than a simple restriction. Superego commands
one to “enjoy,” instead of saying “shall not.” It allows and bans at the same time. It is friendly on the surface but
is in fact more restricting. Her boss’ logic is similar to this because he coerces an uncomfortable get-together in
justification of getting to know the newcomers. Instead of setting a univocal law, it generates a double-bind
effect. In the form of feminine “superegohalf” (surmoitié), it exercises insinuating tricks rather than imposing
direct attacks. Her reaction to it would be neither conforming (“I am sorry, but he is that kind of boss. I have to
drink”) nor resisting overtly (“It is none of your business. We will get to know each other by ourselves”). It is a
155
An analyst incarnates anyone because an analysand is not aware of any personal traits of the analyst during and
after the analysis.
156
Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits, p. 468.
 102

third reaction that destroys such a tricky demand by nullifying its internal logic. As Lacan says, “What is said by
it [superegohalf] can only completed, be refuted, be shown as inconsistent, as indemonstrable, as undecidable by
starting from what ex-sists by way of saying.” 157 Following Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, her saying is an
ironic one (S(Ⱥ)) that cannot be determined either this way or that. One could locate such an irony within a
situation in which a student studies too hard and then collapses, without affirming or negating the superegoic
command to study. He would not remember the next day, and she had to say “Hi” to him again. Giving up on
her dream of resignation, she said to her boss with absolute composure,

“You would clean everything up if my colleagues and I throw up, then?”

157
Ibid.
 103

Nun

It was time for lights out. She finished her daily routine, said grace, and lied on a bed. Closing her eyes, she
thought of three faces. One was that of Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, another was that of her colleague nun
in the same community, and the last was that of a god in between the former two. She reminded herself that
mystery, community, and god were not separate entities.

Freud was both doubtful and curious about the mysterious meditation experience of Romain Rolland, who was a
writer and a friend of Freud. Although Freud warned not to find what cannot be discovered from science outside
of science, he did not entirely give up on his effort to initiate an approach toward mysticism. Still, it is obvious
that the concept of god can be explicated reducibly through psychoanalytic terms. For Freud, god was either a
collectively shared form of obsessional neurosis, an illusionary wish on the omnipotent fatherly figure
protecting his children, or an effect of a father returned in the form of guilt and conscience who was murdered
by his sons in a primitive tribe (Just like “the father is dead, but his name still remains,” or “when god is dead,
everything is not allowed but prohibited”). Despite this reductionist approach, Rolland’s experience would have
been a complicated yet attractive enigma to Freud. Freud wrote to Rolland, “I shall now try with your guidance
to penetrate into the Indian jungle from which until now an uncertain blending of Hellenic love of proportion,
Jewish sobriety, and philistine timidity have kept me away. … But it isn’t easy to pass beyond the limits of
one’s nature.”158

One can witness exactly the opposite approach from Lacan who addresses the problem of mysticism with a bold
and drastic attitude beyond the love of proportion and sobriety. A discourse on mysticism is not some useless
chatting or an empty harangue. Lacan claims that we can see the face of the god from feminine jouissance and
that the jouissance that goes beyond phallus is as much intense as the pleasure mysticists experience vividly
outside a sexual relationship even though they do not know exactly what they are going through: “It [mysticism]
is something serious, about which several people inform us … they get the idea or sense that there must be a
jouissance that is beyond. Those are the ones we call mystics.” 159 Furthermore, he points out that Saint Teresa of
Avila, as represented by Bernini, experiences a strange orgasm. According to St. Teresa, those who genuinely
aspire to god lose all of their will except a will to enjoy the grace from god. At this point, their souls seem to
leave their bodies, but they are never dead. They have simply transcended to some other dimension upon which
the light of gospel sheds. John of the Cross explains Saint Teresa’s spiritual intuition with the dialectic of all
(Todo) and nothing (Nada). To reach the glorious divine all, one has to take a path of nothing that deviates from
everything worldly. What those two mystics share in common is the total effacement of ego (anéantissement).

158
Freud, cited in Alf Hiltebeitel, Freud’s India: Sigmund Freud and India’s First Psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar
Bose, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 63.
159
Lacan, SXX, p. 76.
 104

She read about St. Alacoque in her spiritual reading hours. St. Alacoque was a figure who pushed the limits of
the effacement of ego. She was commonly known for her mystical illusion of Jesus taking his heart out and
giving it to her (Cor Jesu Sacratissimum). A sacred heart represents Jesus Christ’s boundless love for
humankind. Churches nowadays hold the Sacred Heart feast for encouraging the Christian faith. St. Alacoque
also practiced extremely harsh penance. She fasted, slept on shards of broken dishes, and tied up her guilty body
when she was ten years old. In Seminar VII, Lacan refers to the episodes of Angela of Folignio drinking water
used for washing a leper’s feet and St. Alacoque eating a patient’s feces, in a state of spiritual elevation. 160
Those examples illustrate jouissance exceeding the normativity of pleasure principle. The central hole of the
signifier’s structure, namely, the unspeakable Thing (das Ding), is revealed in this point. It is some kind of
inhumane cruelty that is within the subject but is unfamiliar to the subject, taking a semi-scatological form. In
her biography, St. Alacoque described her experience as follows: “‘When I was tending a patient who was
suffering from dysentery, I was overcome by a feeling of nausea. God reprimanded me so strongly, that I felt
urged to repair this fault, soaking my tongue for a long time and filling my mouth.’ She would have swallowed
the excrement of this patient if God had not reminded her that she could not eat anything without having been
obliged by him.”161 This is how mysticism not only brings forth the effacement of ego but also nullifies the
distinction between sacredness and disgust.

She thought that those medieval biography writers might have confused mystery with superstition. They might
not have been able to distinguish mystery from pathology. However, St. Alacoque’s illusion was confirmed by
church despite the huge doubt. For St. Alacoque, pathological perversion and the manifestation of the Sacred
Heart go hand in hand. Should the church separate those two, remove the former, and proclaim the latter?
However, not all mysteries entail pathology. Poverty, hardship, and asceticism can be found in the life of John
of the Cross, but such pathology is absent. Did his passionate love toward god alleviate his deep-rooted
pathology? Did the doctor of love complete his symptoms into his stigmata as the subjective sinthome? How
does a life of nothingness pursued so passionately help the subject avoid becoming affected by pathology? Is it
what Saint Teresa referred to as the light of gospel? It would be made up of more darkness than light. John of
the Cross refers to two kinds of nights. 162 The former is the night of darkness (tinieblas), and the latter is the
night of obscurity (oscuras). In the former, we are so obsessed with the blessing from god that we remain blind.
In the latter, we are just sitting still in the dark inside of grace. As our meditation progresses, the latter
encompasses the former. The way to god is not through the light repelling darkness but obscurity embracing
darkness. If god can separate mystery from pathology, then do humans mix up those two? Can mystery
encompass pathology as obscurity encompasses darkness?

160
Lacan, SVII, p. 188.
161
Irrmann, Lacan à l’École des Femmes, p. 136.
162
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1978, p. 171.
 105

Her community put strict restrictions on going outside the monastery. If the members of the community had to
go outside, they must be in a pair. As many other nuns did, she also suffered from chronic musculoskeletal
problems because of stress from the community and physical tension from arduous labor. This caused her to
visit the hospital and receive treatment twice a month with an old nun, her colleague in the same community.
However, the old nun wanted to visit the hospital whenever she was comfortable, not taking her situation into
account. She also had help the old nun to catch the bus, eat, and return to the community. The old nun never
cooperated but wished for everything to be done in accordance with her convenience. Even though all the sisters
are equal within god, a ranking order still persisted within the community. It was okay for a while, but she
started to feel burdensome. Actually, most of the community members knew that the old nun was a picky and
difficult person. She sometimes shouted during the free time designated for all the nuns to converse freely,
complaining about others’ attitude toward her. She took neutral expressions as an attack aimed at her. Others
usually stayed silent because she became even angrier if they tried to explain themselves. If she was persuaded,
she seemed to be depressed and guilty. As she talked more with the old nun, she learned that the old nun had
traumatic childhood experiences. Of course, she did not know exactly what happened to the old nun, since she
never gave any more details. She thus realized how difficult it was to keep a fair relationship with a sister right
next to her, compared to praying for humanity as a whole. Dostoevsky also suggested the following irony: ‘“I
love humanity, but I wonder at myself, because the more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in
particular.’163

Lacan mentions that religion contributes to concealing the real as that which does not work out: “Religion is
designed for that, to cure men—in other words, so that they do not perceive what is not going well.” 164 Religion
functions as the imaginary device repressing symptoms by projecting meaning onto the malfunctioning real:
“By drowning the symptom in meaning, in religious meaning naturally, people will manage to repress it.” 165
Religion is not aware of the fact that although symptoms are meaningless, they get reconstructed by and fed on
by meanings. On the contrary, psychoanalysis intervenes in the structure of meanings by vagueness and reveals
its randomness. By doing so, psychoanalysis raises the waves (vague), which allows the analysand to realize
that symptoms are just meaningless mirages. “It is that as far as analytic practice is concerned, it is from here
[meaning] that you work; but that, on the other hand, you only work to reduce this meaning.”166

She thought to herself that religion, as a socially functioning and culturally mediating institution, could become
a puppet of meaning. Religion in this point functions as a network of relationship, a means of pursuing inner
peace and accepting death, and a last resort of mystery in a secularized world. However, as religion is practiced
within a contemplative community, nuns ordinarily encounter the subjective real emerging as a symptom, far

163
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff, New York: Penguin Classics, 1993, p. 79.
164
Jacques Lacan, The Triumph of Religion preceded by Discourse to Catholics, trans. Bruce Fink, Cambridge: Polity,
2013, pp. 71–72.
165
Ibid., p. 67.
166
Lacan, SXXII, December 10th, 1974 (unpublished).
 106

from closing itself up with meanings, just like the old nun’s symptom as the unsymbolized waste. Also, the
beginning of symbolization is speaking. She gives the old nun the opportunity to speak on their way to the
hospital and so as to talk more with her. It is ironic that the community emphasizes silence so much that Silent
Retreat is included in morning and night routines. Silence is far from interruption of speech; rather it is an act of
perceiving the presence of god, a passive and active act of mystery. This brings tension between letting one
speak about one’s pathology and staying silent within mystery. How can she deal with such tension? How can
she encourage the old nun’s pathology to encounter the mystery of grace?

The Lacanian Other would help her, insofar as this Other relates to the matter of god and speaking for later
Lacan. “The Other, the Other as the locus of truth, is the only place, albeit an irreducible place, that we can give
to the term ‘divine being,’ God, to call him by his name. God (Dieu) is the locus where the dieu [God]—the
dieur [God-saying]—the dire [saying] is produced.”167 God is not the locus through which we implore against
difficulties in our life, repent our sin, and ask for salvation (God of religion), or the locus where we lay the
foundation for the principle of the universe via mechanical and necessary reason (God of philosophy). God
(Dieu) is the locus constituted by saying (dire). In every moment we speak, the place of the Other as god is
established, and infinite signifiers are instituted in that place like a repository. Signifiers relate to the Other,
where our unconscious desire and truth forms, not to one’s counterpart as an imaginary other. Here, note that
there is no such thing as a transcendental being who guarantees speech because the Other of the Other does not
exist. In other words, “In the beginning was the Word,” but not the Word of the Word. There is no instance
more superior than the Word as a signifier. Immersed within the Word, with its own contradiction and
inconsistency, we live in the lack of being, and it is not a coincidence that the order of signifier conforms to
creationism, not evolutionism. Lacan makes reference to Richard of St. Victor’s distinction between a being that
receives its being from itself and a being that receives its being from other beings. According to this distinction,
a signifier stems from itself, not some other things. It is created from nothingness (ex nihilo): “Isn’t it clear to
you that it [the signifier] participates in that nothing on the basis of which something entirely original was made
ex nihilo, as creationism tells us?” God as Word is constructed within speaking, and speaking is the very act of
creating new signifiers. In addition, we can seek for chances to bring change to the existing structure of the
unconscious only by speaking of the unconscious in a better way.

She wishes that “god-saying” (dieur) could be not only a means of subjective change but also a new motivation
for a monastic life for the old nun. She hopes the old nun will experience the convergence of abyssal pathology
and miraculous grace. She thus aims to experience and practice the religious truth that loving god and loving
neighbor are never separate. She welcomes Lacan’s provocative view on loving god and loving one’s neighbor.
Is divine love just a kind of narcissism—the imaginary love of our being? Far from being lovable, is our
neighbor rather a catalyst to trigger lethal evil that is present both within and outside of us? St. Alacoque and St.
John let her realize that divine love is the nullification of ego, far from being a mere narcissism. Also, the

167
Lacan, SXX, p. 45.
 107

monastic life with the old nun proves to her that even the contemplative community is not free from the
dilemma of managing one’s aggressiveness toward the inhumane face of the neighbor. Here, she is reminded of
St. Benedict and St. Matthew. St. Benedict built a house in front of a monastery as a refuge for the homeless.
The book of Matthew claims that whatever is done for the least of the members in a community is done for
Jesus and that practicing love is the only sign for salvation. She finds the figure of the homeless and the least
within the old nun. Church refers to love toward god and neighbor as caritas ( charité). However, her love
toward the old nun is never a charity. It is rather “trashtas (décharité),”168 insofar as she not only takes the role
of both the Other, where the old nun’s god-saying is revealed, but also the semblance of waste, where the saving
and all-powerful Other is deposed. God is both present and absent insofar as god appears and disappears through
god-saying. God-saying is speaking next to silence. It serves as a means of connecting pathology and mystery
indirectly in the form of the Borromean knot. Lacan once said that “the only tenable God was a threefold God,”
and “I have the privilege of having given, with my triple knot, a form that might be called the real of this
trinity.”169 She now realizes that a new kind of trinity has been suggested. It is neither the Father/Son/Holy Spirit
nor the Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, but is as much interdependent as those two. It is the trinity of Mystery/God-
saying/Pathology.

Night falls. Three faces glow dimly within the mystery of trinity.

168
Lacan, Television, p. 15.
169
Jacques Lacan, “Religion and the Real,” The Lacanian Review, No. 1: Oh My god(s)!, London: NLS, 2016. p. 9.
 108

Counselor

His reaction was so severe that she was reminded of the symptoms of dissociative identity disorder. The boy
was with her, but he actually was not there. He barely responded to her questions. He had a vague sense of self.
Whenever she tried to talk about his past experience, he became frozen and overwhelmed with anxiety,
especially when it came to the history of his self-harm. Anxiety as the real affect that never deceives us could be
a path to reach the boy’s subjective truth, but the analyst must be exceedingly careful. The smallest mistake can
lead to the dismissal of a session before reaching the truth. It is important not to move too hastily but exactly at
the right moment so as to move the fundamental psychodynamic of his subjectivity. Counseling was still
difficult for her.

There was no victim of bullying in her class. When her classmates started to bully someone for absurd reasons,
she simply stayed with the outcast. She sat and ate next to her at lunch and showed others that the outcast also
had a friend. Sometimes she herself turned into an outcast. However, she never minded. She could not just sit
and watch someone getting bullied despite the price of becoming an outcast. She knew the teachers’ words for
encouraging friendship were empty. The human animal’s community somehow manages to create the fiction of
an outcast. Nonetheless, this fiction is so strong that it cannot be controlled with rules of morality. Staying with
an outcast is the only way to prove there is no such thing as an outcast, just as she did. Bullying is a
phenomenon that forms within the variation of the masculine logic composed of All and the One. As universally
castrated sons become subordinate to the father with an exceptional authority, they find an exceptional victim to
reclaim their inferior status. This is how the logic of bullying works. However, to a woman who is composed of
non-exception and not-all, there is no exception that we have to obey or despise. This makes every one of us the
outcast of something. Each person is ostracized to some extent, albeit in different manners. The outcast
identified and produced by bullying turns out to be a fiction. Therefore, she already knew the following when
she was in high school: There is no such thing as “the Outcast” as much as there is no such thing as “the
Woman,” and all children are precious and problematic beings.

She majored in youth counseling when she was in college and received qualification as a youth counselor. Then
she encountered many teenagers, including normal ones, those from a detention center, and those from Wee
Center (an institute for counseling students in crisis), for the next five years. She not only listened to what they
had to say but also laughed, cried, and argued with them. She was invited and absorbed into their lives. It was
not training but everyday life. It was not a clinical experience but the formation of a bond. She had started all of
this because she liked teenagers. It was fruitful and joyful but sometimes painful and despairing. The toughest
moment was when she realized there was nothing she could do for a child. She was not his sister, parent or
relative, just a counselor who would soon slip out of his life. She could not offer him a substantial help. All she
could do was stay with him. She felt sorry for him. It was an apology without a fault to be condoned. Jean
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Allouch refers to those analysts who are engaged in the excess of love as a counter-analyst ( contre-analyste).170
A counter-analyst overtakes the fundamental motivation of psychoanalysis which only aims to open up the
discourse of the unconscious, driven by the intimate jouissance of giving love to the analysand. Unlike Plato’s
metaphor of love as damp and humid being, the love of a counter-analyst is a flaming one. This forces counter-
analyst to give too much importance to therapeutic ambition, reparative drive, and parental drive, which both
Freud and Lacan warned about, and this drive would return in the form of regret and shame.

A few years had passed since then. She had gone through major changes in her life. She married a man of love
and had a child. Life as a mother granted her another point of view on counseling. She realized from her
experience that a happy mother raises a happy child and that the greatest inheritance children receive from their
parents would be emotional, not financial. She also opened up her own counseling office. She stylized her way
of counseling based on clinical experience, psychoanalytic theories, and intuition. She still had a long way to go,
but she tried her best every day. She was so immersed in the case that it usually took some time for her to find
her car in the parking lot. Her parents got divorced. She did not tell her husband, but she wept at the park
everyday with an inexplicable sense of loss. At that moment she was reminded of the children she met in the
counseling center. How shocked would they have been? She was determined to stay away from poor sympathy
and shallow words of console. In addition, she realized that she was not the one trying to help but that the
children were actually teaching her. She did it for the sake of the children, but it was in fact for her own sake.
She realized that she had been projecting her own lack and trauma onto the children and taking care of her
younger self by caring for them. She also learned that only those who are capable of managing their wound and
treating it in a loving and rational way can treat that of others as well. She learned that if counseling was
somehow related to love, it is not just about giving love but something more than that—that is, opening up the
void. Counseling means limiting the jouissance of giving love, while also emptying her mind. She is to let go of
all of these: a technical routine, therapeutic drive, an illusion of salvation, an expectation toward future,
memories of the past, identification, and pity. She still feels the urge to cure her analysands, but she stays calm
by reminding herself of the fact that analysands want her best effort, not a full recovery. Now her love is devoid
of an object since it is not a matter of giving and taking. Also, every great love does not demand love or a cure
but desires “beyond,” while knowing how to be satisfied with the slightest chance of change. She thus has gone
beyond the position of counter-analyst by passing through it.

A child whom she counseled in a previous center somehow managed to find her and arranged an appointment
for counseling. She did not want him to pay for the counseling fee since she knew his situation. She wanted to
buy him lunch instead. However, she did not do so because it might hinder the counseling. She also let him pay
for the fee just like any other analysand. She knew that he had not found her just because he missed her. It was
the faintest hope of “she might be the one who can help me.” When the session with him ended, she became

170
Jean Allouch, L’amour Lacan, Paris: Epel, 2009, p. 36.
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absorbed in finding ways to open an empty space for the dignified subject to fledge itself without any other
unnecessary personal drives projected.

She encountered numerous teenagers in crisis and still does today. One conclusion she drew from her practice
was that the parents’ problem leads to the children’s problem. The impact of parents’ violence, conflict,
oppression, and negligence on the children’s mind, symptoms, and future is absolute. Teens’ tendencies toward
running away, theft, violence, prostitution, addiction, and self-harm lead to delinquency, but these are the result
of their parents’ behaviors. However, she could not do anything with her analysands’ parents. She sometimes
saw some improvements in children as she focused on counseling, and their parents were always there to help
promote change. A family’s poor financial status was not a prior factor of family trouble either. According to
her experience, the children with parents of high income are as tormented as those with low-income parents.
Their problems are simply stylized and conditioned in a different way. Just like the sadistic aggression of the
obsessional neurotic is directed inwardly with a sense of guilt, the former children express their aggression
toward themselves, unlike juvenile delinquents who express their aggression in the form of deviation. As
superego expands and the pressure of id combines with the sadism of superego, the ego is suffering from both
superego and drive. Then ego struggles for survival. The result of this struggle emerges as self-harm.

The case reported by Carina Basualdo proves that what is at stake in the clinical approach to teenage self-harm
is not a phenomenological discernment on the symptom but a structural diagnosis on the locus of speech. 171
Also, it is usually parents who occupy the locus of speech. Basualdo counseled a girl who was raped ( viol) and
dumped by her boyfriend and later learned that she was pregnant. Her mother labeled it as a violation (viol)
because the girl’s father had banned her from sleeping with a boyfriend in the house. In this regard, rape is not a
catastrophic trauma but a violation of law. It is no coincidence that she had no words to reply (“ Je n’ai pas de
réponse”). She was haunted by an anxiety triggered by her parents’ desire to equate rape and violation. She
harmed herself to find reconciliation from her anxiety. She cut her own veins and bled. She found peace within
dripping blood. She sometimes could not sleep without harming herself. A sense of guilt and emptiness is
usually accompanied by self-harm, but she enjoyed a sense of freedom and relief. As the transference was set up
in the analysis, and exploration for the locus of speech began, she labeled self-harm as punition. Why would it
not be a punition? Self-harm was her atonement for transgressing law. She could not answer the desire of her
parents as the Other. Self-harm was her way of answering her parents’ desire by blood as her corporeal real. In
this case, psychoanalysis should establish “another scene (autre scène),” which is separate from an isolated
scene of self-harm. In this scene, the analyst’s saying should mobilize and operate on the flexible signifying
chain. By doing so, the analyst has to let the girl “think” (the girl stated that she does not think of anything when
harming herself) and lose the self-destructive drive and blood as the corporeal real by thinking.

171
Carina Basualdo, “Automutilation et sacrifice,” Enfances & Psy, no. 32, 2006/3, p. 73.
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The boy she is dealing with has a history of self-harm. His symptoms are so severe that it is like that of
dissociative identity disorder. She finds some clue from her clinical records and starts analyzing. Her goal is to
make him walk out of the lonely scene of self-harm. He often falls into silence for the entire session, but he is
more desperate than anyone else. She hears him asking for help without words. Just as she did to the victims of
bullying in her middle school, she walks into the boy’s mind. She can feel his sadness, pain, and anxiety more
vividly than ever. She decides to take all those feelings within herself so as to admire the boy’s truth. She says,

“Let love bloom in counseling like a miracle.”

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Epilogue

What is the position of an analyst? How does the convergence of an analyst and a woman take place? Do they
converge in the sense that an analyst is an analysand’s object-cause of desire and a woman is man’s object-cause
of desire? Let us explore further than this analogy based on the object a. We can only deal with a singular
analyst, as the analyst ex-sists without any imaginary being, just like the Woman does not exist. Insofar as an
analyst is just another subject (even though this subject has a unique desire to be a self-vanishing object), each
analyst has his or her own interests. It could be love toward humanity, theoretical scholarship, scientific
precision, transcendental intuition, thoughtful sympathy, rich clinical experience, acknowledgement of the
limitation of treatment, flexible techniques, or institutionalized protocol of the school. In my perspective, an
analyst should focus on an analysand’s singularity and become devoted to the advent of the unconscious. For the
analyst’s part, psychoanalysis is to forget everything (money, theory, time, emotion, etc.) except for the analytic
work and encounter some unexpected thing emerging through and across the chain of signifiers. An analyst is
committed to these two functional practices for the sake of the singular subjectivization of the analysand.

This book is a mise-en-scène of 24 unique cases in which an analyst and a woman meet each other, but singular
subjectivization did not take place for all of the cases. Sometimes analysts failed to form a discursive tie,
struggled with the subject’s deep-rooted symptom, and had to remain silent about the analysand’s overwhelming
act. All we can say is that where singular subjectivization takes place, an analyst and a woman meet each other
in a less strained way. Therefore, we cannot generalize the way they converge. As Éric Laurent points out,
Lacan did not simply allocate woman to the place of an analyst. Rather, Lacan hoped an analyst would respond
to the feminine superego with a properly feminine perspective, which embodies the inexistence of the Other of
the Other.172 Then it would be true that, although they are not in the same place, an analyst and a woman meet at
S(A) or the not-all insofar as “an analyst arises from the not-all.” 173 Furthermore, we can also find a clue of an
analyst and woman not only meeting but also affecting each other from the case in Obsessional Neurosis
chapter. As the obsessional subject, she existed as an imaginary ego deeply rooted in the ambivalence. “She
(consciously loves, but unconsciously) hates, therefore she is.” However, she could become a subject of desire
after working through ambivalence and freeing herself from the mirage of her imaginary being through the
analytic work. If she pushes the analytic work further enough to regulate her superegoic jouissance implied by
“I must stay seated,” subjectivizing both her feminine ex-sistence and the analytic un-being (dés-être), then she
not only ex-sists but also de-ex-sists (elle dés-ex-iste). In other words, an analyst and a woman meet at the point
where the logic of ex-sistence is combined with the logic of un-being. She hates, she is, and she de-ex-sists (elle
hait, elle est, elle dés-ex-iste). This then leads us into the following psychoanalytic aphorism.

There is some One,

172
Éric Laurent, “Lacan and Feminine Jouissance,” in Lacanian Ink 38, trans. Marcus Andersson, Fall 2011, p. 96.
173
Jacques Lacan, “Lettre à trois psychanalystes italiens: Verdiglione, Contri et Drazien,” Spirales, 1981, no. 9, p. 60.
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There is no such thing as the Other of the Other,

There is no such thing as the sexual relationship,
The Woman does not exist,
but where there is the combined effect of ex-sistence and un-being, there is psychoanalysis.