Enlightment in Neurosis
Calculus of Enjoyment
PART I Enjoyment AND THEORY OF VALUE
THE PROBLEM OF ECONOMIC CONCEPTS FROM FREUD TO LACAN
THE ROOTS OF THE NOTION OF ENJOYMENT IN LACAN
Enjoyment in the linguistic matrix
Enjoyment in the ethical-juridical matrix
Enjoyment in the economic-political matrix
Enjoyment in the logical-formal matrix
LACK AND EXCESS: MODULATIONS OF ENJOYMENT IN A CASE OF HYSTERIA
THE NEUROTIC CALCULATION OF ENJOYMENT
Sacrifice, restitution and remainder
The crisis of enjoyment
THE QUANTITATIVE DIMENSION IN PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
PART II FROM STRUCTURE TO SYMPTOM
THE TRIGGERING OF NEUROSIS: A FALSE PROBLEM? THE FREUDIAN NOTION OF VERSAGUNG AND ENJOYMENT AS A PARASITE
PRODUCTION, SUPPORT AND FAILURE OF SYMPTOMS
Symptom and identification
Transient, typical and individual symptoms
Support of the symptom in the family
Phantom and trace of jouissance
PART III CLINICAL PICTURES
CHARACTER NEUROSIS
TRAUMATIC NEUROSIS
FATE NEUROSIS
CURRENT NEUROSES: NEURASTHENIA AND ANGUISH NEUROSIS
NARCISSISTIC NEUROSIS
BEYOND CALCULATION: SUPPLENARY
Enjoyment: Production, support, failure/crisis, supplementary - Mythical Enjoyment - Calculations - …
Enjoyment: Production, support, failure/crisis, supplementary - Mythical Enjoyment - Calculations - Quantifiers: more, less, lack, excess
Phantom and trace of jouissance
- Sacrifice, restitution and remainder - Linguistics, ethical-legal, economic-political, logical-formal
Theory of Knowledge
Structures
Shame
Shame is the typical affect of the situation in which one is denounced for knowledge. In shame, what should remain half-known, or semi-known, becomes exposed, becomes all-known by the Other. Secrecy is a condition of shame. Let us remember that, together with guilt and disgust, shame forms the trio of affects inherited from the Oedipus complex. Shame is the feeling of exclusion and segregation inherent in the civilizing process
Autonomy
The modern subject is born under the aegis of autonomy and the promise of “making one’s own destiny”. To be the author, director and protagonist of one’s own work. In this trajectory there is a possible failure, that of the incompleteness of the project. But there is a second and more distressing form of failure. The one that occurs when the subject triumphs. When your destiny is a logical and necessary consequence of your own actions, deliberations and commands, whether this is true or merely a conjecture, there ensues the “loss of satisfaction” and the feeling of not truly belonging to this demiurgically created destiny.
Boredom
In narcissistic disorder there would be a kind of sabotage of pleasure, a “borderline anhedonia”.
This ranges from the typical feeling of apathy, boredom and futility that historically accompanies the description of narcissistic disorders to cynicism and generalized disengagement with any formation of an ideal. Anzieu speaks of this when he mentions that the borderline state brings with it the feeling that one is a disinterested spectator of one’s own existence. The thesis mobilized to explain this aspect clearly shows an overlap between the structure of the subject and the state of the ego: “For Lacan, the ego normally has this structure, which perverts iterte and alienates him. In my experience, this Moebius ring configuration is specific to the limit state.
Repetition
Fiction with the character stuck in the same day. Not even death will free him from this repetition, which does not prevent him from committing suicide… several times. In other words, his destiny becomes senseless and tragic to the extent that nothing substantial can be changed in it. Nothing important can surprise him and nothing new can change the routine where dayafter day he sees himself losing the woman he loves. This same disappointment is his destiny, and this destiny is a decentering in the face of the present itself, which he inhabits, but to which he does not belong, since no future is created in it or any experience of the past is constructed. The protagonist initially shows a hateful indifference to the other. Such indifference is inversely proportional to the belonging to one’s own destiny.
“fear of going crazy”
“feeling that suddenly everything will no longer have value”Our hypothesis is that anxiety neurosis, or if we prefer its modern name, panic disorder, results from the collapse of the neurotic calculation of enjoyment. We have seen that this calculation is processed by the equivalence or proportionality established by the symptom between lack and restitution. This inscribes the subject in relation to the phallic position and to a mode of enjoyment at the price of the production of a remainder - the surplus-of-enjoyment. We can now propose that anxiety neurosis is a return of the function of nothingness without the formation of a symptom, in the strict sense of the term, that is, as a return of the repressed. It is a kind of incoordination between phallus and surplus-of-enjoyment whose fundamental feature is anxiety and the imminence of fragmentation, catastrophe or dismantling, including corporal.
The calculation
Exchanges
What functions as exchange value in the unconscious is the phallus, that is, the signifier that represents the lack; what functions as use value is enjoyment. The neurotic calculation of enjoyment makes a false identification between the two, thus producing the “surplus-of-enjoyment” whose object functions as a commodity.
This commodity-object holds within itself the contradiction that originated it, and thus presents itself as an unsustainable, paradoxical object, unavailable from the outset. Thus, the classic symptomatic device is formed through which one can access desire. However, in the case in question, this privileged object is the ego itself.
It is necessary to include nothingness as a variable in the calculation…
It is necessary to include nothingness as a variable in the calculation
Lacan’s references to the presence of nothingness in clinical structures are numerous. It is the nothingness that the anorexic eats, that the obsessive collects and that the hysteric demands. Nothingness is part of one of the most precise definitions of the concept of enjoyment, that is, enjoyment is that which serves no purpose. We could consider whether it is not this nothingness that the alcoholic drinks or the drug addict consumes, a nothingness that makes the act of consumption always the first act, that prevents the subject from counting and that makes him a perennial consumer of the same. If one andclinical structure always has as its correlate a particular form of calculation of enjoyment, it seems to us that in the case of current neuroses the failure of this calculation can be attributed to the emergence of an uncountable element, incapable of being inscribed in the phallic value: nothingness. The idea that nothingness can be taken as an object appears in the following passage: “For if love is giving what one does not have, it is quite certain that the subject can expect to be given, since a psychoanalyst has nothing else to give him. But even this nothingness, he does not give it, and it is better this way: and for this nothingness he is paid … ” The way the subject deals with nothingness is the way he produces his symptom in place of no sexual intercourse.
Sacrifice
But, as Freud states in the text in question: “only death is free”. By pairing the less enjoyment, of the symptom, with the more enjoyment, of the absence of prohibition, pleasure and satisfaction, as forms of deviation towards enjoyment, lose their value. By making sacrifice a way of accessing enjoyment and not a way of refusing it, sacrifice becomes useless. Theabsence of limits, transgression and virtual embarrassment with social rules thus arise as an effect of the uselessness of sacrifice. A sacrifice that seeks its conclusion, that seeks its closure at some point of return. But at this point of return, at this master signifier .S1., narcissistic neurosis, on the contrary, only finds room for a relaunch. Therefore, it can be said that if in the fantasy, enjoyment assumes the temporal form of the instant and if in the sphere of the ego, this corresponds to the temporal form of understanding, we see how in narcissistic neuroses, as well as in current neuroses, the temporal form of enjoyment it is the conclusion, the anticipated conclusion.
Restitution
But, as Freud states in the text in question: “only death is free”. By pairing the less enjoyment, of the symptom, with the more enjoyment, of the absence of prohibition, pleasure and satisfaction, as forms of deviation towards enjoyment, lose their value. By making sacrifice a way of accessing enjoyment and not a way of refusing it, sacrifice becomes useless. The absence of limits, transgression and virtual embarrassment with social rules thus arise as an effect of the uselessness of sacrifice. A sacrifice that seeks its conclusion, that seeks its closure at some point of return. But at this point of return, at this master signifier .S1., narcissistic neurosis, on the contrary, only finds room for a relaunch. Therefore, it can be said that if in the fantasy, enjoyment assumes the temporal form of the instant and if in the sphere of the ego, this corresponds to the temporal form of understanding, we see how in narcissistic neuroses, as well as in current neuroses, the temporal form of enjoyment it is the conclusion, the anticipated conclusion.
This is what is observed, for example, in what Helene Deutsch called “feminine renunciation”, that is, giving up personal aspirations to see them realized indirectly in the chosen male object. We could also talk about the mother who deprives herself of any satisfaction to see her child recarried out, by proxy, in their children. This is also what is articulated in the hysterical demand for justice or in the obsessive calculation of compensations. The enjoyment lost today will be restored tomorrow, the deprivation of enjoyment in the subject will be restored as the realization of enjoyment in the Other, and so on. It is important to emphasize that this form of calculation of enjoyment is clinically presented by the hegemony of the subjunctive mood in discourse. In expressions such as When I do … or If he consented … the sacrificial position of the subject in relation to the object that conditions his enjoyment is usually clear
Loss and Restitution
The neurotic strategy of inscribing enjoyment, both in obsessive neurosis and in hysteria, would be marked by the equivalence between loss and restitution. The less enjoyment, imposed by castration, would be made equivalent to more enjoyment, understood by the phallic formations of restitution, as the symptom. The neurotic assumption is that less and more are commensurable and reversible, and therefore the lack in the Other is identified with the demand in the subject.
There is no progress
There is no progress. What is gained on one side is lost on the other. Since it is not known what was lost, it is believed that it was gained. LacanLogic Poor, Underdeveloped, not total
Zero Sum
Jeremy Bentham, the creator of the panopticum, is also known for his presentation of the individual as a being driven by the search for pleasure and the calculation that this involves in relation to the resulting sacrifices. It is curious that his theory was developed in light of the problem of the restitution of enjoyment in the case of transgression. Bentham poses, very objectively, the problem related to the criminal: how can he repair the harm done to society. His thesis is that it would be possible to calculate exactly this “measure of the lack”, as long as one could count on a closed totality where no waste, no pleasure or sacrifice could be excluded from the accounting. Crime and punishment would thus form a zero-sum equation, like the law of retaliation, which Freud claims to be in force in the unconscious
Shadow of totality
The progress of analysis ends up showing in what form of negativity the calculation of enjoyment organizes the symptoms for each subject. It is common for the obsessive to have this recognition marked by the undecidable, the uncountable or the inescapable. In hysteria, in turn, the path of reduction of enjoyment of the symptom is often marked by the encounter with the indiscernible or the unnamable. The experience of the negative inhabits, as we have seen, the innumerable forms of embodying enjoyment, in discourse, in the body and in the Other. In this parasitization, enjoyment will always appear in negative, as a surplus or a minus, but always under the shadow of totality.
Crisis of Enjoyment
But as long as this neurotic currency remained stable, that is, as long as the Rat Man knew how to pay in order to have his enjoyment restored, we can say that his identification with the symptom was consistent. It turns out that the impossibility of paying a debt contThe incident at the time of purchasing new glasses significantly altered this “metabolism of objects”, producing a series of effects ranging from confusion and fear to the depersonalization and agitation that characterizes his arrival at Freud’s office. It can be said, imprecisely, that the Rat Man was thrown into an obsessive crisis, a crisis of enjoyment.
The notion of substitution
Lacan in turn uses the notion of substitution in three distinct contexts:
the. To designate the stabilizing function of delirium in psychosis. Thus the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father is supplemented, but not complemented, by the delusion when it takes on a specific form.
b. To designate the function of love in its relation to castration. Thus love supplements but does not complete the lack inaugurated by castration.
w. To designate the relationship between the Other enjoyment and phallic enjoyment. Thus, feminine enjoyment supplements phallic enjoyment, but does not complement it, since the latter continues to be articulated from phallic lack.
If we ask about the consistency of this element, the phallus, we will always find the dimension of lack, of gap, of the constitutive deficiency of being. Dialectics dominates the understanding of this phallic element from the variants of the incidence of the Other – Symbolic, Imaginary or Real – to the modes of inflection of lack – deprivation, castration, frustration. and the forms of its transmission: demand, desire, need, love… We always have the element and the set in a relationship of overdetermined double negation.
The second part of the analysis generally begins when the subject feels “missing” his symptom and finds himself faced with the difficult task of finding a new destination for what has been precipitated by the work of transference. In fact, it is only in this second time that the generic expression “the symptom” is properly applicable. In the beginning there are only symptoms, diverse and unconnected with each other. Symptoms in a crisis of enjoyment, or enjoyment in stable calculation, delimited by character. The means of analysis, if it can sustain the ambiguity of this notion, was very well examined by Nasio through the so-called “transference crisis”. Point where the possibility of an interruption is acutely posed but also where the exhaustion of the phallic character of the transference becomes clear. If at first the work was oriented towards the vicissitudes of the calculation of enjoyment, at second the themes and questions linked to substitution begin to gain strength.
Freud said that healing in psychoanalysis occurs by addition. We can say that for the last Lacan, the cure lies in the substitution, in the identification with the symptom as proof of the incompleteness of the symptom. Clinically this allows the analysis to be divided into two parts. The relationship that little Hans maintains with his symptom is emblematic of this first phase of treatment: the enjoyment of the symptom, he says, doesn’t count, it’s “nonsense”. At first the symptom itself, according to the image formulated by Freud, is comparable to a beautiful lady who one day suddenly appears in a city.ity. Since it is not known where it came from, it is expected that one day, equally without warning, it will go away. In the first part, the calculation of enjoyment is taken to its point of paroxysm. The paths of symptom formation are retraced and the significant articulations for its reduction, subjectivation and displacement are carried out. This does not always result in a removal of the symptom, but always in a reduction of its capacity to engender suffering.
What is lost in enjoyment is not entirely recovered in its forms of restitution, in this case in the form of a sign of love. Love, like pleasure or the letter and even art in the sense of sublimatory aesthetics, borders on enjoyment. When enjoyment gains body, in the double sense of unity (corpus) and corpse (corpse), it will always be in the form of a mistake, exchange or deception. The totalization of enjoyment will be marked by a very precise index: “That’s not it - there is the cry by which we distinguish the enjoyment obtained from the expected enjoyment”
Crisis of Enjoyment - Change in the Field of Language…
Crisis of Enjoyment - Change in the Field of Language
Internal or external subjective repositioning: objects: Rules, Exchanges, Judge, others, Substance
Enjoyment: Production, support, failure/crisis, replacement - Mythical Enjoyment - Calculations - Qu…
Enjoyment: Production, support, failure/crisis, replacement - Mythical Enjoyment - Calculations - Quantifiers: more, less, lack, excess
Phantom and trace of enjoyment
- Sacrifice, restitution and remainder - Linguistics, ethical-legal, economic-political, logical-formal