“nomansland”
Alicia Arenas
Freud in Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety, develops the different types of resistances he works with, stating that one of them does not have a possible cure through elaboration (working through), with the psychoanalytic method:
“The fourth variety, related to the Id, is the resistance which, as we have just seen, necessitates ‘working through’. The fifth, belonging to the super-ego and the last to be discovered, is also the most obscure though not always the least powerful one. It seems to originate from the sense of guilt or the need for punishment; and it opposes every move towards success, including, therefore, the patient’s own recovery through analysis1.”
It took Lacan years to find the way to operate on a jouissance that doesn’t allow for elaboration in analysis. Since Seminar XI, he established the difference between Freud’s concept of the unconscious and his own, while he kept looking at the relationship between the unconscious and what sustains the parlêtre’s program of jouissance.
In 1976 2 he introduced the notion of the real unconscious, a realm where there is “no friendship”, no relationship, because there is no link to the Other, no chain of language, therefore, no repressed material related to it. This development allowed him to situate RSI in a more extreme partition. On the one hand, the land of the semblantscomposed by the Imaginary and Symbolic orders, with the unconscious formations, the return from the repressed, the discourse of the Other, etc., whilst on the other, no man’s land, a lawless real where there is only the body, its autoeroticism and its marks, which required for Lacan to replace the term subject by that of parlêtre in order to include the body.
So, how to approach that with the psychoanalytic method?
Miller3 refers to a quote from Lacan in Television that points exactly to it:
“It is' the real that permits the effective unknotting of what makes the symptom hold together, namely a knot of signifiers. Where here knotting and unknotting are not metaphors, but are really to be taken as those knots that in fact are built up through developing chains of the signifying material. For these chains are not of meaning but of enjoy-meant [jouis-sens] which you can write as you wish, as is implied by the punning that constitutes the law of the signifier.4”
While remarking the enormity of this statement, Miller highlights that it is to state that the only way left to operate with the real is the real itself.
Freud was on the right track when he pointed to a realm of the analysis where there was no possible elaboration. The way Lacan approached it was by taking the elaboration out of play and along with it the plus of jouissance, its enjoy-meant.
Then, it is no longer about knowledge but about savoir y faire, about using the real in the real. An operation that is not anymore about the signifier, but about the letter, about inscribing a discourse that would not be of semblance5 with a writing that is able to capture the body.
References
1 Freud S., Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. Chapter XI. Appendixes. A) Modifications of earlier views. a) Resistance and Anti-cathexis, The Standard Edition, W.W .Norton & Co, NY-London, 1959, p. 90.
2 Lacan J., Preface to the English-Language Edition, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,Book XI, J.A. Miller (ed.), A. Sheridan (transl.), Norton & Co. New York, London, 1998, p.vii.
3 Miller J.A., El Ser y el Uno. Freudiana, Ch. XIV. El Ultrapase, Mayo 25, 2011, p. 185.
4 Lacan J., Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, Ch. II, pg 10. W.W. Norton & Co. London/New York. 1990.
5 Miller J.A. Reference in the back-cover text of Seminar XIX “…or Worse”, Polity Books. 2018.