What fixes, what repeats
Joanne Conway
What of fixation?
As Alexandre Stevens points out in his argument for the NLS Congress, Lacan in Seminar XI will fix repetition as one of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis.
But what of fixation? Well only in his later teaching will Lacan wrestle with that concept while Freud, says Stevens, uses this term in a “rather discreet way”, but how?
For psychoanalysis, fixation accounts for the fact that we are marked by childhood experiences from which we “retain […] an attachment to greater or lesser extents, to archaic modes of satisfaction, types of object and of relationship.” These fixations of which the subject knows nothing insofar as they are unconscious, are the source of repetitions. These determining fixations may however make their presence very manifest via repetition, in the various rituals, symptoms and acts of the subject.
Freud makes no explanation per se of fixation but utilises it in a highly descriptive way throughout his work, particularly in relation to the aetiology of neurosis. In the Three Essaysfixation is linked to the theory of the libido and the persistence of archaic sexual traits where the subject seeks out particular forms of activity or remains attached to certain properties of an object whose history can be traced to some moment in the sexual life of the child. This gains extension in the theory of libidinal stages which of course includes the drives as he elaborated them there.
Later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud asserts a fixation to trauma, where libidinal satisfactions are no longer sufficient to explain this traumatic element that persists. Here Freud will assert the existence of the compulsion to repeat, to which we shall return later, together with Lacan.
The Freudian Unconscious and Ours
It struck me however upon re-reading Freud’s texts, particularly the metapsychology papers on Repression and The Unconscious from 1915, that in fact fixation is at the very core or rather cause, of his concept of the unconscious.
As a point of orientation Lacan’s seminar XI is crucial. In the opening of chapter II entitled The Freudian Unconscious and Ours, Lacan sets out conduct a “conceptual elaboration” of not only the unconscious but also repetition.
For Lacan at this moment of his teaching we are still in the realm of the unconscious structured like a language and the dominance of the signifier, but here it is also undergoing change.
This linguistic nature and structure of the unconscious for Lacan means that “[…] beneath the term unconscious, there is something accessible, definable and objectifiable”.[1] The Freudian unconscious he says is however something different. In what way? Here Lacan turns to the idea of cause. “Cause” he says, “is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain, in other words the law”.[2] Cause relates rather to something indefinite, “[…] there is cause only in something that doesn’t work”. This is where Lacan situates the Freudian unconscious, “[…] between cause and that which it effects, there is always something wrong”.[3] For Lacan the unconscious, “shows us the gap through which neurosis” connects to a real “[…] a real that may well not be determined.”[4] How may we think about this connection? Perhaps we can think about this in terms of the vignette that I will introduce later.
What emerges from this gap, this hole? What does Freud find there? Something of the order of the unrealised. In other words, the mark of what did not happen.
For Freud, the unconscious is caused by a cleavage, a spaltung, where something in terms of the vorstellungsreprasentanz – that is the ideational representatives of the drive, are held back from satisfaction, inhibited in their aim, prevented from becoming conscious. This pertains to Freud’s theory of primary repression and processes – there is a fixation, a mythical first fixation that we can say founds this spaltung. Can we say therefore that fixation is the founding of the unconscious!
It is important to note certain aspects here in terms of fixation and how Freud uses the term and the nature of the contents of the unconscious in terms of these Vorstellung.
Freud uses the phrase fixation of and fixation to denoting in the former a fixation of a memory or symptom, whilst the latter denoting fixation to a stage or object. Fixation therefore is understood in a very definitive way as a form of inscription or registration, the Niederschriftof traces in series of mnemic systems.[5]
Freud had already asserted such in a letter to Fleiss of December 1896, where he states that here we are “in the presence of survivals”. In other words when this fixation is established, the representative in question remains unaltered and the instinct/drive remains attached to it.[6] What is perhaps pertinent to note is that these primal fixations relate to inscriptions indelibly written in the unconscious like primal insignia and it is perhaps at the very moment of inscription that the instincts, that is certain bodily sensations attach to them thereby constituting themselves as such, as drive. In other words the shock of the signifier and the irruption of jouissance in the body – can we say it in these terms, form a fixation.
What is crucial here to point out in terms of the vorstellung (or ideas) that represent the drive – is precisely that they are ideational – in other words this is an unconscious that operates via signifiers. These vorstellung have a quota of excitation attached which find satisfaction via various routes but what it implies is that without this representation there is no body. He says it in his text The Unconscious, “If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it”.[7]
My reading for the theme has provoked no small number of questions but one of them that has emerged is how to think about this Freudian body?
This is crucial insofar as there is no drive for Freud without the signifier and explains why he was stymied by the end of the treatment – by the remainders, the interminable residues that were not treatable or decipherable via language. In other words, the other side of the symptom which carries a real, a jouissance within it. And it is to the real that we now turn in terms of repetition.
Tuché and Automaton: Real Repetition
In chapter 5 of Seminar XI which is entitled Tuché and Automaton Lacan tells us that; “No praxis is more oriented towards that which, at the heart of experience, is the kernel of the real than psychoanalysis.”[8]
In this citation Lacan makes clear the orientation of the treatment is one that must include the real and here he distinguishes via Aristotle’s concepts of Tuché and Automaton not only what is at stake in repetition but also what real is at stake therein.
As Lacan had previously stated, the Freudian unconscious is caused by the dimension of the unrealised – can we say then that for Lacan the unconscious is caused rather by an unassimilable in the new order of real Lacan that proposes in terms of Tuché? He tells us that Freud’s discovery, that is psychoanalysis always concerns an “essential encounter”. For Lacan that essential encounter is with a real, a real that always eludes.
Lacan distinguishes forms of repetition via the concepts of Tuché and Automaton. Automaton is related to the symbolic order, to the signifier, to the return of the repressed, to the symptom as a ciphering, to the insistence of signs. All of which fall under the auspice of the pleasure principle. Here via these “returns” there is the order of repetitions, that can be treated by the signifier. This is the unconscious of the signifying chain, the S1 – S2…., the blah blah blah of the complaint, the hystorisation of the narrative, the discourse of the Other. The transferential unconscious, to follow Miller.
Tuché is of another order of repetition, related as it is to a chance encounter, an encounter with a real, whose domain is the beyond of the automaton, the beyond of the pleasure principle. Here repetition captures within it a real, an impossible. It is a Stevens states “an irruption of a real which does not obey the symbolic order”. Here is a return of jouissance, that opposes and overruns the homeostatic borders of pleasure, a return that traumatises.
Freud, Lacan tells us was truly preoccupied with what is the first encounter, what is the real that lies behind the phantasy, the primal screen/scene. Freud consistently emphasises the importance of accidental and contingent factors in terms of fixations and the aetiology of neurosis, perversions and pathology in adulthood in terms of infantile sexual life. Lacan reminds us that this preoccupation is demonstrated blatantly by Freud in the Wolfman case, where he relentless wrings every whit of meaning out of the primal scene, and other infantile material, exhausting every interpretive avenue in order to do so. Freud however as we know, will forever be stranded on the rock of castration, forever excluded from this first cause, this real from which the subject emerges as his praxis has not formalised a way to target the real. He has formalised something of the real in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in terms of the compulsion to repeat and the tendency to conservatism of the drives, the capture of and fixation to trauma that repeats without any seeming yield of satisfaction there, but rather a suffering or irruption of jouissance to put it in Lacanian terms. A traumatic real that repeats – a fixation (of the One all alone). Freud could not find an exit out of the symbolic reading of repetition because here we are in the realm of the real unconscious.
So what fixes this real repetition, this missed encounter beyond the signifier?
It is a fixing of trauma that is the real at stake here.
The Game of Existence
So, I am going to try a little experiment that may or may not work. We shall see!
I would like to interrogate the opposition we find in Freud and Lacan in terms of repetition, Tuché, and Automaton, Real and Symbolic and the place of the signifier, subject and object via a vignette that is so very well known to us that we are in danger of missing its most precious elements.
This famous vignette is that of Freud’s grandson playing with the cotton real – the story of the Fort Da which Freud returns to in Beyond the Pleasure Principle – in order to elaborate something about the repetition at stake in trauma.
Freud introduces us to his grandson, of a year and half old, a very good boy, obedient and compliant and he tells us that “above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours”. A boy who at the same time is very attached to his mother. An ideal child apart from a “disturbing habit” that he engaged in that sees the household picking up after him. Freud also reveals that this little boy has few words, but who nevertheless makes certain sounds that his entourage have interpreted to mean certain things.
Freud observes him at a game that he has invented. He describes it thus, “This good little boy, had an occasional habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and rounding them up was quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out, o-o-o” accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction”.[9]
Freud and the boy’s mother both interpret the sound as the German word Fort (gone) and Freud eventually realises that it is a game wherein the use he made of his toys was to make them “gone”.
Then sometime later Freud notices a further elaboration of the game, an addition. Here the child had a “wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It is amusing to read Freud here as he is stupefied as to what the child does not do with the reel – he says, “it never occurred to him to pull it along on the floor behind him, for instance, and play as its being a carriage”. Freud is missing the point perhaps?
What use does he make of it? “What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive 0-0-0-0. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” (there). This then was the complete game – disappearance and return.” But Freud notes, and this is crucial, “As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act”.[10]
So this is a game of two halves – the most repeated was the one that yielded less enjoyment. Why?
Freud interpret this game as a great cultural achievement the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction that he achieved in allowing his mother to leave without his protestation. He compensated for this by staging this disappearance and return via the objects in his reach. Yet Freud goes on to ask how a distressing experience such as this fits with his ideas of the pleasure principle when what was is repeated most often is the most distressing part – the absence. Freud theorises that it is an attempt at mastery, turning a passive position into an active one, revenge upon the mother for going away.
But he arrives at a very interesting point – “We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expression as a primary event and independently of the pleasure principle”.[11] “ “It can also be observed that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always unsuit it for play”.[12]
Let’s leave that in suspense for a moment – and turn once again to Lacan and Seminar XI and hear what he has to say about this game.
For Lacan the disappearance of the mother is secondary. What is at stake here is the subject himself. Her absence has presented “an ever open gap” and what falls is not the other in which the subject is projected but the reel “linked to itself by the thread it holds”. [13]S XI p.62
The absence Lacan tell us creates a “ditch on the frontier of the child’s domain – the edge of his cradle “around which one can only play at jumping”. Ibid. In other words something has opened up before the subject, a real, to which he will attempt to respond.
For Lacan the real is not the mother reduced to an object but is the subject itself, represented by the object ,“a small part of the subject” which detaches itself but is nonetheless still retained.
Here there is an opposition between the signifier as first mark of the subject and the object to which it is applied “in act, the reel that we must designate as the subject”. The object that Lacan names as objet a.
This game does not concern the need for the mother – if it did the child would cry for her, rather he does something else. This game as a whole symbolises repetition says Lacan, not of the mother’s departure but of the Spaltung, the division that her absence causes.
It is aimed at what is not there, at lack, as says Lacan “represented”. And he says, “for it is the game itself that is the Reprasentanz of the vorstellung”.[14]
Can we say this then in this game of two halves – we meet both Tuché and Automaton as forms of repetition?
Here is an act of invention by this child in response to a traumatic encounter to a real of which we cannot speak but which is elaborated. In the first version, any object is thrown away, later a specific object with and this is crucial, an object with strings attached, that can be retrieved, refound.
Tuché as an impossible that this young subject encounters, a real that irrupts that causes this spaltung as Lacan names it. The second half of this game sees a symptomatic dressing, a treatment of this real via the string and the object that can be refound, the automaton that produces a satisfaction. It goes from one to the Other from fort- to-da, and thus becomes a part of a signifying chain. It is, one could say, a form of symptom that captures the real and symbolic in its co-ordinates of repetition.
In the chapter entitled The Subject and the Other: Aphanisis, Lacan returns to the game and to Vorstellungsrepasentanz. Here he localises them as “the original mechanisms of alienation in that first signifying couple that enable us to see that the subject appears first in the Other, in so far as the first signifier, the unary signifier emerges in the field of the Other and represents the subject for another signifier, which other signifier has as its effect the aphanisis of the subject – when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as fading, as disappearance. There is one might say, a matter of life and death between the unary signifier and the subject qua binary signifier, cause of his disappearance. The vorstellungreprasentanz is the binary signifier.”[15]
This signifier constitutes the central point of Uverdrangung (primary repression) – of what, from having passed into the unconscious will be as Freud indicates in his theory, the point of attraction, through which all other repressions will be possible, all other similar passages in the locus of the Underdruckt, of what has passed underneath as signifier. This is what is involved in the term Vorstellungsrepasentanz.”
So this game, enacted with an object between this o-o-o- and da, can we say is precisely the game of life and death, of existence in act? A spaltung, a real, from which signifiers appear and between which the subject emerges, as divided and as disappearing in the object that supports him. Can we see here the co-ordinates of the fixation to trauma and the beginnings of an elaboration of phantasy, a screen to support subjectivity?
There was another important aspect to this game of existence. Freud tell us in a footnote that there was another game of disappearance that this little subject engaged in – that is a game of the image. In this footnote Freud tells us how the child found his image in a full-length mirror and that during the hours of solitude of his mother’s absence played at making his image disappear and reappear, greeting his mother’s return with the words “baby-gone” (baby -o-o-o).[16]
Lacan in seminar 17 specifies that what gives the specular image its support, that is the ego, is the lost object, by which, and I quote, “is merely the dressup by which jouissance is introduced into the dimension of the subjects being”.[17]
So this fort and da – this there and gone we can say has very specific co-ordinates at “play”. Here this beginning of the signifying chain, and play of the originary mark, the “glory of the mark”, the mark of jouissance as Lacan names it in Seminar 17.[18] It is an index of the subject from where all the later experiences of the subject will reshape “the value of the determining index […]. [19]
For Lacan the subject as X can only be constituted from the necessary fall of the first signifier in other words a fixation, in terms of primary repression. A signifier of pure nonsense, which Lacan terms as an infinitization of “the value of the subject not open to all meanings, but abolishing them all […]“.[20]
In other words this X as the first mark, from where others will be inscribed will come to determine the subjects relation to the desire of the Other and “give a particular value to the relation of the subject to the unconscious”.[21]
Lacan tells us that repetition involves an “identification of jouissance” and the function of the unary trait, which he says is the simplest form mark designating the origin of the signifier.[22]
Furthermore, he says “Repetition. This does not mean the one redoes what one has finished, like digestion or some other physiological function. Repetition is the precise denotation of a trait […] as being identical with the unary trait, with the little stick, with the element of writing, the element of a trait in so far as it is the commemoration of an irruption of jouissance.[23]ibid. p. 77
So here we have a game of existence can we now say in the form of writing in act? Where the co-ordinates of the subject in terms of jouissance, the Other, the subject, the object, signifier and desire are embodied in that act? Can we see mapped out the signifier as an apparatus of jouissance, a means by which is it carried but also treated?
Can this child’s game teach something about what Lacan terms as “the gap through which neurosis” connects to a real – “a real that may well not be determined.”
Références
[1] Lacan, J., The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI, J.-A., Miller (ed.), A. Sheridan, trans., London: New York. Norton, 1998, p. 21.
[2] Op.cit. p.22.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. There is an important distinction between the English translation and the original French text. In English it states “For what the unconscious does is show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with the real…” The French is written as “L’inconscient nous montre la béance par où la névrose se raccorde à un reél… » (p.25) . Here there is no question of harmony but rather a connection.
[5] Cf. Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B., The language of psychoanalysis, London, Karnac, 1988, pp.162-165.
[6] Cf. Freud, S., Repression, S.E. Vol., XIV, London, Hogarth Press, 1915.
[7] Cf. Freud, S., The Unconscious, “Section III Unconscious Emotions”, Standard Edition Vol. XIV, London, Hogarth Press, 1915.
[8] Lacan, J. Op.cit, p.53.
[9] Freud, S., Beyond the pleasure principle, S.E. XVIII, London, Hogarth Press, 1920, p.14.
[10] Ibid. p. 15.
[11] Ibid. p.16.
[12] Ibid. p. 17.
[13] Lacan, J., op.cit, p. 62.
[14] Ibid, p. 63.
[15] Ibid, p. 218.
[16] Freud, S., Beyond the pleasure principle, S.E. XVIII, London, Hogarth Press, 1920, p.15.
[17] Lacan, J., The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Seminar XVII, R, Grigg, trans., London, Norton, 2007, p. 50.
[18] Ibid, p.49.
[19] Lacan, J., 1998, p. 251.
[20] Ibid, p.252.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Lacan, J. 2007, p. 46.
[23] Ibid, p.77.