Fixion and Fixation

Karina Tenenbaum

The fundamental fantasy is a solution through which the neurotic subject finds an answer to a confrontation with the real that is a lack in the Other. Such an answer is always the same and fixed, covering up the emptiness of signification. This inertia of the fantasy and its repetition is how the subject is related to the Other through the object a. By means of the subject’s response, there is a function and know-how in the fantasy.1 “However, nothing new comes from fantasy; the repetition of the drive from the masculine side is universal. It is phallic Jouissance.”2

During the preliminary interviews, it is important to understand what happened with this answer, this know-how that couldn’t respond and protect the subject. Often, anxiety and subjective urgency are present in the demand of a new analysand. What is the real at stake at the beginning of the analysis?

Our orientation is aimed toward the real, knowing that the fantasy is a fixion, a fictitious entity that can be constructed, deconstructed, and traversed in the analytical experience as evidenced by testimonies of the pass, such as, being the “gold nugget”3 , and being “grabbed by the other”4. Being the object a is a fixion.

The fundamental fantasy as a defense against the real, is also a window and entrance to the real. Lacan in The Third says, “The real is precisely what does not work out […] what does not stop repeating itself, hindering the course”. “[…] the real is what always returns to the same place […] “What is revealed [in this return] is the place of the semblance.” 5

We have to lose our objects, says Lacan in Seminar X. beyond Beyond the object, without a link to the Other and the drive that does not speak but enjoys; something still repeats, iterates, always the same, yet there is no more meaning. If it is not semblance then what has been revealed in this return? What is the status of fixation at the end of the analysis? It is no longer fiction, it is a new signifier, a “Signifier that could have another use… the use of awakening” 6. “The only meaning my S1 has is to punctuate this nonsense, this signifier-letter that I write S1, - which only gets written by doing so without any effect of meaning”. 7 This new signifier limits and halts the infinite possibility of meaning.

In her videoconference towards the Lacanian Compass Clinical Study Days 14, Elisa Alvarenga gave us a beautiful vignette about the end of the analysis. A woman trying to find a formula for a sexual relationship has a dream in which she stole a piece of paper from a man, but the paper was empty. This formula does not exist; this was an encounter with the real as impossible.

One can keep searching for the formula, or seek a know-how-to-do with contingency.

References

1 Naparstek F., El Fantasma, Aun.Grama Ediciones, 2018.

2 Alvarenga E., The real is the mystery of the speaking body, Lacanian Compass, videoconference toward the Clinical Study Days 14.

3 Sota Fuente M.-J., To Let Oneself be Written, The Lacanian Review 8, 2019, p. 106.

4 Assef, J., Testimonio 1, Cuerpos, Revista Lacaniana De Psicoanálisis 30, 2021, p. 103-112.

5 Lacan, J., The Third. GET REAL, The Lacanian Review 7, 2019, p. 89.

6 Lacan, J., Seminar, Book XXlV, “L’insu que sait de l’une bévue s’aile a mourre” (session of May 17, 1977), unpublished in English.

7 Lacan, J. The Third. GET REAL, The Lacanian Review 7, 2019, p. 90.