Iteration Symptom

Danuta Heinrich

”A symptom, what remains of it, when it is interpreted, when the fantasy is traversed, [...] the symptom is not dialectical,(...) it is echoed, one by one”.1

In Reading a Symptom Jacques-Alain Miller2 writes of the two faces of the symptom discovered by Freud: a face of truth, related to the fact that we interpret it in relation to desire and that it is a truth effect; a face of the real, related to a certain paradox, which is the symptom’s persistence after interpretation. And it is indeed a paradox if the symptom is purely and simply a being of language. When we have to do with beings of language in analysis, we interpret them, that is, we reduce them, bringing them back to nothingness. The end of analysis, however, always leaves symptomatic leftovers - the real of the symptom, that which ”falls wide of meaning”.3

In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety4 Freud characterised the symptom ”as a sign of, and a substitute for, a drive satisfaction which has remained in abeyance”.5 Jacques-Alain Miller writes that jouissance is specific to the body as such, a body that enjoys itself. Jouissance of the speaking being’s body is impacted by speech. Indeed, a symptom vouches that there has been an event that has marked his jouissance of its nature as a body. Jouissance of the symptom, attests to the fact that a body event took place after which jouissance then became disturbed. This jouissance is only primary with regards to the sense that the subject gives it through its interpretable symptom. To read the symptom, is to disconnect it from sense by targeting the materiality of writing, the letter, which produces the event of jouissance that is decisive for the formation of symptoms. For Freud, since he started off from meaning, this presented itself as a leftover. In fact, this is what lies at the very origin of the subject, the original event, one that is ceaselessly reiterated.

It is what we discover in addiction, in the ”one more drink”. It is the root of ”the symptom which is made from the reiteration of the same One”. It is the same, it can’t be added up. One never gets to: ”I’ve had three drinks so that’s enough now”, one always downs the same drink, once more”. It is the root of the symptom. "It was in this sense that Lacan said that the symptom is an et cetera, the return of the same event”6, iteration. It is not speech that repeats itself, it is the symptom that repeats itself.

Iteration is an activity that repeats the process. Each time, the event repeats like the first time. Jacques-Alain Miller classified it as ”semelfactif”- a single, unique event with trauma value.

References

1 Miller J.-A,. Being and the One, Course of the 3rd of May, 2011 (L’outrepasse). Unpublished. Available at www..disparates.org /fr: “Le symptome, ce qui en reste une fois qu’il est interpreté, une fois que le fantasme est traversé, (...) le symptome n’est pas dialectique,(...) il repercute le une seule fois”

2 Miller J.-A., Reading a symptom, trans. A. Price, Hurly Burly, 6, 2011.

3 Miller J.-A., Reading a symptom, ibid, p. 149.

4 Freud S., Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, trans. J. Strachey, [translation modified] in The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol XX, London: Hogarth Press, 1959, p. 91.

5 Miller J.-A., Reading a symptom, op. cit. p. 150.

6 Miller J.-A., Reading a symptom, op. cit. p. 152.