The Book of Love and Pain: Thinking at the Limit With Freud and Lacan

Juan-David Nasio

The Book of Love and Pain Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan Translated by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul

The Book of Love and Pain

SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture Henry Sussman, editor

THE BOOK OF LOVE AND PAIN Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan

JUAN-DAVID NASIO Translated by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Originally published as Le Livre de La Douleur et de L’Amour, Éditions Payot and Rivages, 1996.

Published by

State University of New York Press, Albany © 2004 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nasio, Juan-David. [Livre de la douleur et de l’amour. English] The book of love and pain : thinking at the limit with Freud and Lacan / Juan-David Nasio ; translated by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5925-X (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5926-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Pain—Psychological aspects. 2. Psychoanalysis. I. Title. BF515.N3713 2003 150.19'5—dc22 2003055620 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Translators’ Acknowledgments

vii

Translators’ Introduction

1

Clémence, or the Experience of Pain

9

Threshold

13

Psychical Pain, Pain of Love

19

Archipelago of Pain

41

Corporeal Pain: A Psychoanalytic Conception

49

Lessons on Pain

77

Excerpts from Freud and Lacan Concerning Psychical Pain

123

Excerpts from Freud Concerning Corporeal Pain

131

Notes

137

Index

141

Translators’ Acknowledgments

The translators would like to thank James Peltz, Editor of SUNY Press for his support of this project from the earliest stages. Dr. J. Philip Smith, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dr. DonnaJean Fredeen, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) provided crucial support that sustained our work. Additional support was received in the form of a Connecticut State University Research Grant. We are also grateful to Joseph Solodow, Professor of Foreign Language, and Camille Serchuk, Associate Professor of Art at SCSU, for their assistance with a number of translation questions while the work was in progress. Important assistance in the completion of the manuscript came from Andrea Conque, and Troy Mellon, at Louisiana State University as well as James Ryan in Berkeley, California. Many thanks as well to Meri Aserri. We are particularly grateful for the support of the French Ministry of Culture-Centre National de Livre. Finally, we thank Dr. J.-D. Nasio for his support and advice throughout the translation of the book.

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Translators’ Introduction

I do not possess pain, it possesses me: I am pain. —J.-D. Nasio

The treatment of pain J.-D. Nasio’s The Book of Love and Pain1 engages the experience of pain in psychoanalysis. It is a striking fact that there is no exclusive treatment devoted to pain in the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic literature, given that psychical pain is the essential concern and even raison d’être of psychoanalysis. To this extent, Nasio’s contribution in The Book of Love and Pain fills a gaping void in psychoanalytic research and will play an important role in our understanding of the human psyche. He elaborates the thematic of pain through the psychoanalytic terms that he forged in more than three decades of therapeutic practice. Dr. Nasio opens his reflection with the narration of a dramatic case, that of one of his patients, Clémence, a young woman who lost her infant only a few days after giving birth. The extreme character of this case will allow Nasio to present the most salient characteristics of pain: the intertwining of body and psyche in the affect of pain, the collapse of the ego in loss (accompanied by a desperate contraction on a memory-image), the invasive and overwhelming presence of pain, and the limits of sense and meaning. Her body was the perfect incarnation of the emptied ego of a person in pain, an ego that has collapsed, caught in the vivid memory of the lost child . . . psychical pain is indeed the ultimate affect, the last contraction of a desperate ego that congeals so as not to sink in nothingness. (LP, 10)

Such an example is extreme because ultimately pain itself, according to Nasio, is an extreme affect: pain is the “ultimate” affect, that is, the last protective dam against madness (“We know also that this pain is the last line of defense against madness” [LP, 10]). Further, pain presents us with the 1

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phenomenon of an affect that borders on senselessness, and one that resists symbolization (Nasio thus speaks of a “pain made of stone”). With this vignette, then, Dr. Nasio reveals the limits in attempting to think and treat pain psychoanalytically, or even pain as a limit-phenomenon. The phenomenon of pain also threatens the analytic relationship: as the patient is overcome so the psychoanalyst is thrown in crisis. Nasio writes compellingly: Clémence was overwhelmed by the distress and I was unable to take on her pain. I was destabilized by the impenetrable distress of the other. Speech seemed useless to me and I was limited to echoing her throbbing scream. I knew that pain permeates the one who listens, so that, at first, I had to be the one who, by my presence alone—albeit silently—could dissipate the suffering by receiving her irradiating cries. I knew that this impregnation prior to language could precisely inspire in me the words needed to express and finally allay the pain. (LP, 10)

The issue for the psychoanalyst remains that of “welcoming” this pain, and attempting despite everything to give a meaning to what has none. To be eased, pain must be taken as an “expression of something else,” made into a symbol. This is for Nasio the role of the psychoanalyst: “[t]o attribute a symbolic value to a pain that is in itself pure real, brutal emotion, hostile and foreign” (LP, 13). As we can see, this text engages the limit-character of human suffering and therefore the limits of the ability of the analyst to “take on” the pain and undergo the process required to alleviate it. Nonetheless, Nasio would apply and concentrate psychoanalytical theory and practice to provide an access to pain. Hence, he attempts to characterize psychical pain, in its most general and preliminary sense, as a sudden and unexpected separation from an object with which we have had an intimate bond. The bond has been so intricate that it has constituted our very selves. Therefore the loss of the object threatens the self, disrupts the rhythm of life and requires the painful work of mourning and self-reconstruction. Nasio undertakes a wide-ranging treatment—perhaps the first of its kind—of those subtle and numerous connections, the diverse forms of separation that are all manifestations of psychical pain. Nasio shows that psychical pain is intertwined with love, insofar as pain is pain of separation. Pain is always pain of love, “the affect that results from the brutal rupture of a bond that connects me to the person or to the thing that I love” (LP, 19). He writes, “All these kinds of pain are in different degrees pain of brutal amputation from a love-object, one with which we were so intensely and permanently bonded that it regulated the harmony of our psyche. There is pain only against the background of love” (LP, 14, our emphasis). As a result of this brutal rupture, a series of other pains follow, and the author addresses each of them in the main sections of the text, including: the pain of mourning, the pain of reac-

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

3

tion, the pain of jouissance, unconscious pain, pain as an object of the drive, pain as a form of sexuality, pain as a sadomasochistic fantasy, pain and the scream, and the pain of silence. As it describes all these pains, The Book of Love and Pain constitutes a model of a phenomenological treatment of pain. In addition, Nasio addresses the psychical implications of corporeal pain, exploring in a bold manner the psychical role in the activation of corporeal pain. The author discusses, in this respect, the three moments of corporeal pain: the wound, the trauma, and the reaction, treating of the rapid transformation of the pain of the injury to a mental representation of that very injury. Nasio emphasizes that the memory of this representation of corporeal pain is “engraved in the depths of the unconscious,” an unconscious memory that is destined to return, transfigured as a psychosomatic lesion. It is precisely this transformation from the corporeal to the psychical that Nasio elaborates, noting that the unconscious pain will return and “the subject will experience an inexplicable pain that is without discernable organic cause. He or she will suffer without knowing that the present pain is the active memory of a past pain” (LP, 57). Dr. Nasio’s careful approach to psychical and corporeal pain is informed, to be sure, by the legacy of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In the course of the text, he makes use, for example, of Freud’s neurological conception of pain from “The Project for a Scientific Psychology” and undertakes a reelaboration of the Lacanian categories of the symbolic, imaginary, and the real in relation to pain. Yet The Book of Love and Pain is intended to be neither a strictly Freudian nor a Lacanian treatise. In fact, as Nasio remarks, “analytic literature is extremely limited on this topic. Freud and Lacan themselves only rarely treated the theme of pain and never devoted an exclusive study to it” (LP, 14). This book, then, is to a large extent an innovative and original grappling with pain at its very limit. The text never simply proposes the simple or formulaic healing of such pain. Even though psychoanalysis offers the promise of healing, it remains at a threshold that can only be approached, a path that can only be taken, that cannot be predicted, or otherwise preordained. Accordingly, Nasio does not shy away from those aspects of pain that resist reason, that lead psychoanalytic theory into paradox, and even aporia.

The paradoxes of pain We observe once more the extent to which pain slips between the fingers and evades reason. —J.-D. Nasio

As Nasio identifies pain as the phenomenon of the limit (as the experience of the threshold, as the “imprecise” limit between the body and the psyche,

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as limit between the ego and the other, as limit between the harmony and disharmony of the psyche, etc.), his encounter with pain uncovers a series of paradoxes that leave theoretical reason suspended between seemingly incompatible alternatives. Nasio is struck, in general terms, by the “insurmountable” paradox of a love that both constitutes us and yet renders us vulnerable. He writes that “while being a constitutive condition of human nature, love remains the incontrovertible premise of our suffering” (LP, 20). Under the general context of this constitutive paradox of love, numerous other paradoxes are encountered in analytic experience. Two examples bear mention here. For example, while stating at the outset that the prototypical pain is the pain of separation, Nasio asserts that such a pain is made more intense, as it were, by a second pain, which consists in reinvesting the image of the lost loved one. The ego, in this first paradoxical situation, continues to love the one who has been lost more than ever before, magnifying the image of the loved one beyond all reasonable proportions, thus inducing an overexcitation and an exhaustion of the ego: “[T]his effigy draws all the energy of the ego and submits it to a violent aspiration that leaves it exhausted and incapable of interest in the external world” (LP, 21). To be clear, the paradox is that the pain does not lie in the loss but in the fact that we love the one who has been lost as never before. “Here is what I take to be significant. Pain is not due to a detachment but to an overinvestment” (LP, 119). It is an overinvestment of an object “within,” because it is no longer without. This would be Nasio’s “original contribution,” that the pain of mourning is not the pain of separation but the pain of bond, that the pain is not that of an absence, but of an excessive presence. Therefore, pain is the “affect that manifests the exhaustion of an ego completely occupied with desperately cherishing the image of the loved one who has been lost” (LP, 22). The true cause of this pain is not the loss of the loved person, but the all-consuming maintenance of his or her image, indeed, our complex fantasy of the person. One needs to recognize in psychical pain a twofold dimension, in the sense that the ego reacts to the trauma of the loss in two ways: on the one hand, there is what Nasio calls a “disinvestment,” an emptying out of energy brought about by the loss of the other; on the other hand, there is an “overinvestment,” a sort of polarization of psychic energy on a single psychical image, that precisely of the lost other. Both events, the sudden emptying out and the extreme concentration, are what is painful. The work required is to re-harmonize the unbalance, or split, between the two phenomena. As Nasio explains, “Mourning is nothing other than a very slow redistribution of the psychical energy which was, until then, concentrated on a single dominant representation which was foreign to the ego” (LP, 23). A second paradox presented by Nasio’s work is found in the extent to which the loved one is desired not because he or she allows our love to flour-

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

5

ish but because of the way the fantasy of the loved one guarantees a limit to my love. For Nasio, while the fantasy of the loved one is “carried by the force of desire,” it nonetheless “functions to stem and subdue” that very desire. Nasio explains that “fantasy is protective because it shields us from the danger of an unlimited turbulence of desire or its equivalent, the chaos of the drive” (LP, 29). In this way, the fantasy of the loved one contributes in a protective manner to the homeostasis of the unconscious system, a principle that was central to Freud’s corpus from his earliest to his latest writings. Further, Nasio specifies that his conception of such a protective status of the fantasy of the loved one is a reinterpretation of both the Freudian concept of repression and the Lacanian concept of the signifier of the Name-ofthe-Father. In the first case, repression would be protective in that it prevents the overflow of the libidinal drive; in the second case, the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father would ensure the consistency or the rhythm of the system of signifiers. For Nasio, in the end, the fantasy of the loved one “protects me from turmoil by limiting my jouissance.” He writes: He or she protects me and leaves me unsatisfied. The symbolic loved one is, in the end, a figure of repression and the most exemplary figure of the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father. (LP, 33)

These paradoxes of pain are precisely the challenge facing the analyst and the patient in the analytic relation. As Nasio’s text undertakes a wide-ranging taxonomy of the pain of separation, it also unveils the contradictions of pain and the obstacles to its treatment. Indeed, one has the impression that the only path the analyst must take is that of the paradox, or that the only step is one where there is no path, with no way out. In this respect, Dr. Nasio introduces the following remarkable image: “With his patient consumed by pain, the analyst acts like a dancer who, before the stumbling of his partner, keeps her from falling and, without losing a beat, helps the couple regain their rhythm” (LP, 13).

Thinking pain at the limit In itself, pain has no value and no signification . . . the psychoanalyst is an intermediary who takes on the inassimilable pain of his or her patient and transforms it into a pain that is symbolized. —J.-D. Nasio

For Nasio, finally, a psychoanalyst is engaged in a practice that goes to the limit with pain in order to situate him or herself to “take on” the pain for the benefit of his or her patients. Dr. Nasio’s insights from such thinking at the

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limit are found throughout the text, particularly in his suggestion that “one should add pain to the list of the objects of the drive, and conceive of its detachment from the body as a separation brought about by the phallic signifier” (LP, 81). Through this logic, Nasio considers the conditions that allow us to think and verify that pain is phallic, that is, that pain is an object that can be consumed and that satisfies an essentially sexual desire. He elaborates this insight in the lesson on sadomasochistic pain, where pain becomes the object of the sadomasochistic drive. Two other examples of his innovative thought—in particular in relation to Lacan—bear mention here: local foreclosure and the position of semblance (le semblant).

Local foreclosure With local foreclosure the intensity of the love for the lost loved one leads to a hallucination. The mourner rebels against the reality of the lack and refuses to accept the definitive death of the loved one. Nasio asserts that this denial “borders on madness but tempers pain.” The mourner believes he or she can bring the deceased back to life. For the mourner, then, the hallucination conjures a new reality: Through these hallucinations the mourner experiences the return of the deceased with an unshakable certainty and transforms his or her sorrow with a delirious conviction. We understand that the supremacy of love over knowledge leads to the creation of a new reality—a hallucinated reality— where the lost one returns in the form of a phantom. (LP, 24)

The affective overinvestment of the lost loved one, as we saw earlier, provokes psychical pain. The pain is so intense and “so disproportionate to the image of the lost object that the image is ultimately ejected from the ego” (LP, 25). The image reappears outside the ego in the external world as a hallucination or a fantasy. It is this expulsion and reappearance outside that indicates what Nasio calls local foreclosure: “We will say that the representation has been foreclosed, that is to say, over-invested, excluded and hallucinated” (LP, 25). The dynamic or force of the rejection of the representation from the ego leaves the ego deflated, exhausted, emptied. One could say that with local foreclosure pain is thereby raised—or foreclosed—to a new level. The phenomenon of local foreclosure also raises a concern for the practitioner who needs to determine the degree of the exclusion. Such a degree, to the extent that the exclusion shuts the representation off from all other aspects of the psychical system, may border on psychosis.

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

7

Semblance (le semblant) A second innovative aspect of Dr. Nasio’s thought in The Book of Love and Pain centers around his appropriation of the Lacanian term semblance. Given the paradoxes of pain that we have encountered, it is not surprising that Nasio seeks to identify a medium in which the analyst may have finally a direct “material encounter” with the patient’s pain. In the chapter entitled “Pain and the Scream,” Nasio considers Lacan’s notion of semblance and understands it as the material transmittal of pain. Nasio associates the term with that of the “simulacra” of De Natura Rerum of Lucretius. For Lucretius, the representations of an object carried, in a sense, its very materiality. What Lucretius tells us is that the simulacra are strange emanations from objects, kinds of light membranes, detached from the surface of the bodies, floating in the air, flying in all directions. He adds that these membranes are sometimes images, and other times not, sometimes visible, but not always. These are often impalpable images, strange exhalations and above all rapid irradiations that emerge, spread and dissipate very quickly. (LP, 104–105)

In an analogous sense, for Nasio, the scream carries the materiality of pain. The semblance of the scream is more than an abstract representative or a symbol of pain. In the author’s interpretation, we find that as the scream carries the pain, it reawakens the pain, produces the pain. Here we are led to imagine that there can be an intimate connection through the materiality of the scream between the one who emits the scream and the one who hears the scream. Such a materiality would, for Nasio, support the intimate transferential relation between the analyst and the patient. Indeed, in an earlier text, Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan,2 Nasio addresses semblance as a position the analyst adopts before the patient. It is a position from which the analyst prepares not to interpret or explain the patient’s pain but indeed to take on the pain, to be taken by that pain, to be caught up in its visceral materiality. Such a position, which is, rather, a dynamic, cements the bond of the transference and offers the possibility that the therapeutic relation could restore the rhythm of the drives and reset the psychical metronome, as it were. The contribution of The Book of Love and Pain lies perhaps in nothing other than the engagement with the very origin of psychoanalysis: pain. The text offers the opportunity to enter into the psychoanalytic labyrinth of pain, to enter into its paradoxical senses. It is Dr. Nasio who has perhaps the most interesting suggestion about how one should receive the insights of the book. He writes:

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What use can we make of this psychoanalytic theory of pain that I am advancing? I would dare to say quite simply: make no use of it. Leave it for the moment. Let the theory simmer within us; operate without our knowledge. If this theory of pain, as abstract as it may be, is really fertile, it will perhaps change our manner of listening to the suffering patient or to our own intimate suffering. (LP, 38)

With such a remark, Dr. Nasio remains, in our view, faithful to the intention that gives particular value to his writings, that of fashioning a synthesis between theory and practice in order always and only to take on the suffering of his patients. In so doing, Nasio also reveals pain as that limit with which human beings are confronted and on the basis of which existence itself unfolds in its paradoxical movement. DAVID PETTIGREW AND FRANÇOIS RAFFOUL Paris, January 2002

Clémence, or the Experience of Pain

Love is an expectation, and pain the sudden and unforeseen rupture of this expectation. —J.-D. N.

Clémence3 was thirty-eight years old. She suffered from infertility and was struggling to become pregnant. I saw her in analysis for three years. My memory is still fresh of the day when she told me that she was finally pregnant. She exclaimed, “We have succeeded!” I had the feeling that I was sharing the joy with a group of close friends who had worked together with Clémence so that she could become pregnant. I also thought of her husband who was so involved, as well as her gynecologist—a fertility specialist. During the months that followed, our psychoanalytic sessions were devoted, for the most part, to living through and speaking about the intense period when a woman adjusts to becoming a mother. The day of delivery arrived and Clémence brought a beautiful baby into the world. That very day, she telephoned me filled with joy, to announce the birth of a son named Laurent. I was very happy and I congratulated her warmly. Three days later I was surprised to receive a second telephone call of an entirely different nature. In a nearly inaudible voice, she told me: “I have lost my baby. He died this morning in the nursery. No one knows why.” Upon hearing these horrible words I was stupefied and could only say, “This is impossible! This is absurd!” For some time Clémence did not contact me. Her absence did not surprise me, because I am familiar with the experiences of those who are plunged into such mourning, who are utterly crushed by the impact of a violent loss and absolutely refuse contact with those who, before the event, were linked to the one who has departed. I had even imagined that my patient was going to interrupt her analysis because I was inevitably associated with her struggle to become fertile, with the success of her pregnancy, with the happiness of the birth and now with the atrocious pain of a brutal and incomprehensible loss. She was probably going to decide not to continue her analytic work with

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me and to resume it later with a different analyst. It was necessary, I thought, for her world to change. However, things have turned out differently. In fact, shortly after the tragic event, Clémence came back to see me. She was exhausted and could not go anywhere by herself. She needed to be accompanied to the waiting room. When I welcomed her, I discovered a woman who had been transformed by her distress. She was but an impersonal, debilitated body, without any energy, only hanging on through the omnipresent images of her baby when he was still alive. Her body was the perfect incarnation of the emptied ego of a person in pain, an ego that had collapsed, caught in the vivid memory of the lost child, a memory hammered by a haunting question: “What did he die of? Why and how did he die? Why me?”* We know that this state of extreme pain, a mixture of the ego being emptied out and contracted in a memorial image, is the expression of a struggle for life. We know also that this pain is the last line of defense against madness. We know that in the domain of human feelings, psychical pain is indeed the ultimate affect, the last contraction of a desperate ego that congeals so as not to sink in nothingness. During this entire period that immediately followed the death of Laurent, I often heard Clémence speak of her fear of becoming mad. And it is true that at certain moments she might have seemed mad. At times, affliction of the mourner gives way to such an extreme exaltation that the all too clear and distinct images of the deceased are experienced with the sharpness of a hallucination. However, all of my knowledge about pain—I would like to clarify that at that time I was already writing this book—did not protect me from the violent impact that I felt when I welcomed my patient immediately after the tragedy. At that time, our bond was weakened: Clémence was overwhelmed by the distress and I was unable to take on her pain. I was destabilized by the impenetrable distress of the other. Speech seemed useless to me and I was limited to echoing her throbbing scream. I knew that pain permeates the one who listens, so that, at first, I had to be the one who, by my presence alone— albeit silently—could dissipate her suffering by receiving her irradiating cries. I knew that this impregnation prior to language could precisely inspire in me the words needed to express and finally allay the pain. After a period of some months in the course of which I received Clémence face to face, when my listening was limited at best to accompanying the fluctuations of her distress, she lay down on the couch. It was then that *Laurent died in the nursery in the middle of the night while Clémence was sleeping. It was her obstetrician, the very same one who worked through the pregnancy and actually saw the birth, who informed her of the death the next morning without being able to provide any reason. Today Clémence and her husband still do not know the exact causes of the death of their son.

CLÉMENCE, OR THE EXPERIENCE OF PAIN

11

she was truly able to begin her work of mourning, a work marked by a particular session that I would like to recall here. Clémence could not stand to hear the consoling words that in such circumstances are so naturally expressed by friends. “Do not concern yourself! Think of getting pregnant again. You still have time. Have another baby and you will see, you will forget!” These awkward words were unbearable for her and they were driving her crazy. I understood the vehemence of her reaction because these seemingly comforting sentences were in fact a call to forget—an incitement to lose her dead child a second time. This was an incitement to lose the child once more, no longer in reality but “in the heart.” As if rebelling, Clémence cried to the world: “I have lost my child and I know that he will not come back. I know he is no longer living but he continues to live in me. And you want me to forget him! You want him to disappear a second time!” To ask Clémence to forget her dead son by replacing him with another before completing the mourning process could only do violence to her. It was to ask her to no longer cherish the image of the baby that had disappeared, thus to deprive her of the only means of healing the wound. Finally, it was to ask her to renounce the preservation of her psychical equilibrium. The image of the lost person must not be effaced, on the contrary it must prevail until the moment when—thanks to mourning—the mourner succeeds in causing the love for the deceased and the love for a new loved one to coexist. When this coexistence of the old and the new is established in the unconscious we can be certain that what is most important in the process of mourning is underway. I no longer had all these theoretical considerations in mind when, in the course of a session that took place some eight months after his death, I intervened in a way that turned out to be decisive. Clémence lay on the couch and spoke to me in the tone of someone who had just rediscovered a zest for life. I was listening and concentrating intensely when, at the moment of an intervention, I stated the following words, almost without knowing it: “If a second child is born, I mean Laurent’s brother or sister. . . .” Even before I was able to complete my sentence the patient interrupted me and, surprised, exclaimed: “This is the first time I heard of Laurent’s brother or sister! I feel like an enormous weight has been lifted.” A thought came to me that I shared immediately with my patient: “Wherever Laurent is at this moment I am sure he will be happy to know that one day you will give him a little brother or sister.” I was astonished to have expressed spontaneously in so few words the basic aspect of my conception of mourning according to which the pain is diminished if the mourner finally admits that the love for the new living person will never abolish the love for the one who has disappeared. So for Clémence the future child will perhaps never take the place of his older brother who is deceased. He will have his own place, the one reserved for him by his desire, the desire of his parents, and his destiny. And, simultaneously, Laurent will remain the irreplaceable first infant.

Threshold

I decided to begin this book with a fragment of a cure—I should say with a fragment of a life that brings two persons together: one who suffers and the other who assumes the suffering. One, a mother overwhelmed by the cruel loss of her first child whom she desired so much and who was lost so brutally, and the other, a psychoanalyst who tries to give a meaning to a pain that, in itself, has none. In itself, pain has no value and no signification. It is simply there, made of flesh or of stone. Nevertheless, to ease it, we must understand it as an expression of something else, detaching it from the real by transforming it into a symbol. To attribute a symbolic value to pain that is in itself the pure real, a brutal, hostile, and foreign emotion, remains in the end the only therapeutic gesture that renders it bearable. Also, the psychoanalyst is an intermediary who takes on the inassimilable pain of his or her patient and transforms it into a pain that is symbolized. But what is entailed in this process of giving meaning to pain and rendering it symbolic? It does not entail a forced interpretation of its cause, nor does it serve to console the patient, and even less to encourage him or her to undergo its hardship as a formative experience to strengthen one’s character. No, to give meaning to the pain of the other means for the psychoanalyst to be attuned with it, to try to resonate with it, and in such a state to wait for the time and the words to erode it. With his patient consumed by pain, the analyst acts like a dancer who, before the stumbling of his partner, keeps her from falling and, without losing a beat, helps the couple regain their rhythm. To give a meaning to an unfathomable pain is, in the end, to provide a place for it within the transference, where it can be shouted, cried, and used up by the sheer accumulation of tears and words. I would like, in these pages, to share what I have learned with you, namely, that mental pain is not necessarily pathological, that it punctuates our lives as we mature by way of successive pains. For the psychoanalyst it appears clearly—thanks to the remarkable magnifying glass of transference— that pain at the core of our being is the incontestable sign of the experience of adversity. When pain occurs, we are no doubt in the process of crossing a 13

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threshold, of undergoing a decisive experience. What experience? The experience of separation from an object, as it leaves us suddenly and definitively, shatters us and causes us to reconstruct ourselves. Psychical pain is the pain of separation when the separation is an uprooting and a loss of an object with which we are so intimately bonded—a person we love, a material thing, a value, or the integrity of our body—that the bond is constitutive of ourselves. This shows the extent to which the unconscious is the subtle thread that links the diverse and painful separations that punctuate our existence. We are going to approach pain by considering the example of an affliction that affects us when we are struck by the death of a loved one. The mourning of a loved one is indeed the most illustrative experience for understanding the nature and the mechanisms of mental pain. However, it would be mistaken to believe that psychical pain is a feeling that is provoked exclusively by the loss of a loved one. It could also be the pain of abandonment, as when a loved one suddenly withdraws his or her love, of humiliation when we are deeply wounded in our pride, and pain of mutilation when we lose a part of our body. All these kinds of pain are, to different degrees, pains of brutal amputation from a love-object, one to which we were so intensely and permanently bonded that it regulated the harmony of our psyche. There is pain only against the background of love. Psychical pain is an obscure feeling, difficult to define, and, when barely grasped, it eludes reason. Its uncertain nature thus compels us to find the most precise theory possible that explains the mechanism that causes it. There is a challenge in attempting to grasp an affect that eludes thought. We have noticed that analytic literature is extremely limited on this topic. Freud and Lacan themselves only rarely treated the theme of pain and never devoted an exclusive study to it. I will thus attempt to introduce you to a metapsychology of pain. A metapsychology is the only satisfying theoretical approach to explain the formative mechanism of psychical pain in detail. Before beginning, I would like to make some preliminary remarks and state that pain—whether psychical or physical—is always a phenomenon of the limit. Throughout these pages you will constantly see pain emerge at the limit, whether it is the imprecise limit between the body and the psyche, between the ego and the other, or above all between the regulated functioning of the psyche and its breakdown. Another initial remark concerns the vocabulary that I will use in order to distinguish psychical and corporeal pain. This distinction, although necessary for the clarity of my discourse, is not rigorously founded. From the psychoanalytic point of view, there is no difference between psychical and physical pain. The reason is that pain is a mixed phenomenon, emerging at the limit between the body and the psyche. When we will consider corporeal

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pain, for example, one will notice that, apart from its strictly neurobiological mechanisms, it is explained essentially by a psychical disturbance. Furthermore, the model of corporeal pain sketched by Freud at the beginning of his work—which we will reconsider later—has surprisingly guided our conception of psychical pain. Another terminological clarification concerns the difference between the terms suffering and pain. Classically, these terms are distinguished in the following manner: whereas pain refers to a local sensation caused by an injury, suffering designates a general psychical and corporeal disturbance that is provoked by a generally violent excitation. If pain is a sensation that is quite determined and delimited, suffering remains on the contrary a vaguely defined emotion. But this schematic distinction becomes useless as soon as we rigorously clarify the formation of physical pain as well as the psychical factor implicated therein. This is what we have tried to do by exploring the suffering ego with the tools of Freudian metapsychology. Now the term suffering will turn out to be too vague for the reader, while pain, on the contrary, will seem precise and rigorous. Therefore, I have chosen to privilege the word pain and give it the status of a psychoanalytic concept. We would make one final preliminary comment. In order to situate our approach better, I would like to propose a comprehensive vision of pain by dividing it into three main categories. Above all, pain is an affect, the ultimate affect, the last defense against madness and death. It is like a final struggle that attests to life and to our power to regain ourselves. One does not die from pain. As long as there is pain, we also have the available forces to fight against it and continue living. It is this notion of pain-affect that we will study in the first chapters. The second category involves pain considered as a symptom, that is, as the exterior and sensible manifestation of an unconscious and repressed drive. Take the exemplary case of a pain in the body that reveals the existence of an unconscious suffering. I am referring to persistent hysterical migraines, fluctuating according to affective situations, and without identifiable causes. We will say that the migraine is a symptom, that is, a painful sensation that translates a repressed disturbance in the unconscious. In this group I include all the pains qualified by current medicine as “psychogenic.” If one consults one of the numerous recent medical publications devoted to pain, one finds inevitably a contribution—generally very short—on “psychogenic” pain. What does “psychogenic” mean? It designates the various corporeal pains without an identifiable organic cause and to which one may attribute, failing any better alternative, a psychical origin. The third and final psychoanalytic category of pain refers to perversion. This is pain as an object and aim of perverse, sadomasochistic sexual pleasure. This theme is developed in two sections of the Lessons on Pain.

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Concretely, we will proceed in the following manner: After addressing psychical pain, strictly speaking, we will present our psychoanalytic conception of physical pain. But we must first identify the different stages of the formation of any pain. Whether it is a question of corporeal pain provoked by an injury of the tissues, or a psychical pain provoked by the sudden rupture of an intimate bond with a loved one, pain is born in the brief space of a moment. However, we will see that the engendering of pain, while instantaneous, follows a complex process. This process can be analyzed in three parts. It begins with a rupture, continues with a psychical trauma that the rupture triggers, and culminates in a defensive reaction of the ego in order to protect itself from the disturbance. A particular aspect of pain appears at each of these stages. We have the following succession: a pain proper to the rupture, then a pain inherent in the state of trauma, and finally a pain provoked by the defense-reflex of the ego in response to the deep distress. Clearly, these three pains are only, in reality, different aspects of one and the same pain, which is formed instantaneously. In our approach, whether we address psychical or corporeal pain, we will take account of these three moments: the rupture, the trauma, and the defensive reaction of the ego. Here I would like to advance the main premise of our theory of pain: Our premise is that pain is an affect that reflects the extreme variation of unconscious tension in consciousness, variations that evade the pleasure principle. A lived feeling is for us the conscious manifestation of the rhythmic movement of our drives. All our feelings express variations of the intensity of unconscious tensions in consciousness. I postulate that pain manifests, not regular oscillations of tension, but an arrhythmia of the libidinal rate. But by what path, do the drives become lived feelings? The ego succeeds in perceiving from within itself—in the Id—and with an extraordinary acuity, the variations of internal drives, in order to reflect them to the surface of consciousness in the form of affect. The ego, then, is an interpreter capable of reading the language of drives within, and of translating it into the language of feelings without. It is as if the ego possessed an organ capable of internal detection, that can capture instinctual modulations and transpose them onto the screen of consciousness in the form of emotions. When these modulations are moderate, they become conscious as feelings of pleasure and unpleasure; when they are extreme, they become painful. Normally, psychical functioning is ruled by the pleasure principle that regulates the intensity of the tension of the drives and renders them tolerable. But if a brutal rupture with a loved one takes place, the tensions are released and the principle that regulates pleasure no longer operates. As long

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as the ego, turned inward, perceived the regular fluctuations of the libidinal drives, it could feel both pleasurable and unpleasurable sensations. When the ego perceives within itself the disturbance of the uncontrollable tensions, it is pain that it feels. Although unpleasure and pain belong to the same category of unpleasant feelings, we can distinguish them clearly and affirm: unpleasure is not pain. While unpleasure expresses self-perception by the ego of an elevated but modulated tension, pain expresses the self-perception of an uncontrolled tension in a deeply distressed psyche. Unpleasure thus remains a sensation that reflects in consciousness an increase of the tension of the drive, an augmentation subject to the laws of the pleasure principle. On the other hand, pain testifies to a profound deregulation of psychical life that escapes the pleasure principle. Therefore, in the course of the pages that follow, we will see pain as an affect provoked not so much by the loss of the loved one—here I am thinking of psychical pain—but the ego’s self-perception of the internal turmoil unleashed by that loss. Strictly speaking, pain is not pain of loss, but of the chaos of drives in turmoil. In a word, painful feelings do not reflect the regular oscillations of the drives but a madness of the libidinal cadence.

Psychical Pain, Pain of Love

In contrast to corporeal pain caused by a wound, psychical pain takes place without physical injury. The cause that triggers it is no longer located in the flesh but in the bond between the one who loves and the object of his or her love. When the cause was located in that protective envelope of the ego that is the body, we called it corporeal pain. Now the cause is situated outside the body in the immaterial space of a powerful bond of love and pain is called psychical. Therefore, we can already propose the first definition of psychical pain or pain of love as the affect that results from the brutal rupture of a bond that connects me to the person or to the thing that I love.* This rupture—violent and sudden—immediately produces an internal pain experienced as a ripping of the soul, as a mute scream bursting from the entrails. In fact, the severance of a bond of love provokes a state of shock similar to one that is caused by violent physical aggression: the homeostasis of the psychical system is broken and the pleasure principle is abolished. In a state of shock, the ego manages in spite of everything—as in the case of corporeal pain as well—to perceive its own upheaval, that is, to detect within itself the panic of its libidinal tensions unleashed by the rupture. The perception of this chaos translates immediately into consciousness through the vivid feeling of an atrocious internal pain. We can propose a second definition of psychical pain, considered this time from the metapsychological point of view, and state: pain is the affect that expresses the conscious perception by the ego— inner perception—of the state of shock, of libidinal disturbance (trauma), which is not provoked by the rupture of the peripheral barrier of the ego as in the case of corporeal pain, but by the sudden rupture of the bond that attaches us to the loved one. Here, pain is the pain of trauma.

*We write “love,” but the object to which we are attached and whose sudden loss produces pain is an object that is hated and a source of anguish as much as it is an object of love.

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The more one loves the more one suffers But what breaks the bond of love, what is so painful and plunges the ego into distress? Freud responds without hesitation: it is the loss of the loved one, or of his or her love. We will add: the brutal and irremediable loss of the loved one. This is what occurs when death suddenly strikes someone who is close to us—a parent or spouse, brother or sister child, or dear friend. The expression “loss of the loved one,” used by Freud in the last years of his life, appears in two major writings: “Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety,” and “Civilization and Its Discontents.” I would like to note a passage from the latter text. Suffering, he writes, comes from three sources: first “the superior power of nature,” second, “the feebleness of our own bodies,” and third—the one that interests us here—“the inadequacy of the regulations that adjust the mutual relationships of human beings in the family, the state and society” (SE XXI, 86). For Freud the third source of suffering is more problematic that the others. He examines, then, with considerable circumspection—one after the other—the different ways of avoiding corporeal suffering and external aggression. But when he addresses the way to protect oneself against the suffering that comes from the relation to others, what remedy does he find? A quite simple one, apparently: loving one’s neighbor. Indeed, in order to protect oneself against grief, some recommend a conception of life that takes love to be the center and expect that all joy comes from loving and being loved. It is true—Freud confirms—that “such a psychical attitude is familiar to us.” What is more natural than loving in order to avoid conflict with the other? Let us love, be loved, and we keep grief at bay. And nevertheless it is the inverse that happens. It is here that Freud the clinician observes that we are “dependent in a most dangerous way” in our love-object and we expose ourselves to “extreme suffering if we lose it [the love-object] through unfaithfulness or death” (SE XXI, 101). I find these passages remarkable because they state clearly the insurmountable paradox of love: while being a constitutive condition of human nature, love remains the incontrovertible premise of our suffering. The more one loves the more one suffers. In the other essay, “Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety,” we find the same expression, “loss of the loved object,” when Freud distinguishes psychical pain from anxiety. How are each of these affects differentiated? He proposes the following parallel: while pain is the reaction to the actual loss of the loved one, anxiety is the reaction to the threat of possible loss. While reconsidering what we have developed until now, we can refine these Freudian definitions: pain is the reaction to libidinal trauma [commotion] actually provoked by a loss, while anxiety is the reaction to the threat of the possible trauma. But how can what seems so obvious be explained? Why is the sudden loss of the loved one or his or her love so painful for us? Who is the other who is so loved that

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his or her unexpected disappearance is so painful for us? With what knot is the loving bond woven such that its rupture is experienced as a loss? What is a loss? What is the pain of love?

Losing the one that we love Let us delay our response a moment and consider now the manner in which the ego reacts to the trauma triggered by the loss of a loved one. We define psychical pain as the affect that translates the ego’s self-perception of the trauma it undergoes into consciousness. We had referred to it as the pain of trauma. Now we say it is the pain produced when the ego defends itself against the trauma. More precisely, psychical pain is the affect that translates the defensive reaction of the ego into consciousness when, under the shock, it struggles to recover itself. Pain is thus a reaction. But what is this reaction? Faced with the upheaval of the drives caused by the loss of the loved object, the ego rights itself. It appeals to all its vital forces—to the point of exhaustion—and concentrates them on one point, that of the psychical representation of the loved one who has been lost. Henceforth, the ego is entirely consumed with keeping the mental image of the one who has been lost alive (as if trying to desperately compensate for the real absence of the lost other by magnifying its image). The ego is then almost entirely identified with this sovereign image, and only lives by loving and, at times, hating the effigy of an other who has been lost. This effigy draws all the energy of the ego toward itself and submits it to a violent aspiration that leaves it exhausted and incapable of interest in the external world. One can see that I am describing again the same defensive posture of the ego that had allowed us to explain the last stage of the genesis of corporeal pain (reactive pain) when all the psychical energy bandaged the representation of the wound (Fig. 1). Now the same energy flows and condenses in the representations of the loved one who has been lost. The pain of losing a loved one is thus due to the gap that exists between an exhausted ego and the all too vivid image of the one who has disappeared. The reaction of the ego against the trauma triggered by the loss is described in two movements: a sudden sucking up of the energy that empties it—a movement of disinvestment—and the polarization of all this energy on a single psychical image—a movement of overinvestment. Mental pain thus results from a twofold defensive process: the ego suddenly disinvests the quasitotality of its representations in order to overinvest only the representation of the loved one who is no longer. The sudden emptying of the ego is a phenomenon that is as painful as a contraction into a point. The two movements of the defense against trauma generate pain. But if the pain of disinvestment

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Phantom limb

In-drawing hole

Emptying of the ego

Phantom loved one

The image of the loved one expelled from the ego returns in the form of a hallucination

FIGURE 1 Explication of the Phenomenon of the “Phantom Limb” and the Phantom “Loved One”

The psychical image of an amputated arm has been so overinvested that it is eventually projected outside the ego and perceived by the subject as a hallucinated arm. Its expulsion leaves an in-drawing hole in the psyche through which the energy of the ego rushes until it is completely empty. We think that this mechanism of the expulsion of the image of the lost object and its reappearance in the real explains the hallucination of the phantom limb. This mechanism, which is nothing other than foreclosure, would also explain the disorder of some mourners who hallucinate the deceased and see him or her as if still alive. We call this phenomenon the hallucination of the phantom loved one. In both cases the lost object—the amputated arm or the deceased—continues to live in reality for the ego.

takes the clinical form of a paralyzing inhibition, the pain of the overinvestment is both gripping and oppressive. We will propose a new definition of psychical pain as the affect that manifests the exhaustion of an ego completely occupied with desperately cherishing the image of the lost loved one. The despondency and the love are based in a pure pain. We note that the representation of the person who has disappeared is so strongly charged with affect—so overidealized—that, in the end, it not only devours a part of the ego, but also becomes foreign to the rest of the ego, that is, incompatible with those other representations that had been disinvested.

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If we think now of the mourning that follows the death of a loved one we will see that the process of mourning follows a movement that is inverse to that of the defensive reaction of the ego. While that reaction consists in an overinvestment of the said representation the work of mourning is a progressive disinvestment of that representation. To undergo mourning means in fact to disinvest, little by little, from the saturated representation of the loved one who has been lost in order to render it once again compatible with the whole of the network of egoic representations. Mourning is nothing other than a very slow redistribution of the psychical energy that was, until then, concentrated on a single dominant representation that was foreign to the ego. We understand henceforth that if the work of disinvestment that must follow the death of the other is not accomplished, and if the ego remains frozen in a coagulated representation, mourning perpetuates itself in a chronic state that paralyzes the life of the mourner for several years, indeed for his or her entire existence. I am thinking of a particular analysand who, having lost her mother at an early age and having suffered from an incomplete mourning, confided to me: “A part of her is desperately alive in me and a part of me is forever dead with her.” These words, with a cruel lucidity, reveal a person who is split and uprooted by a past and elusive pain. Let us think here of the distorted faces and strangely tormented bodies that inhabit the canvas of the painter of pain, Francis Bacon.

What causes pain is not to lose the loved one but to continue to love him or her more strongly than ever, even though we know that he or she is irremediably lost We have, then, an ego that is disassociated between two states: one part concentrated and contracted in a point—that of the image of the departed other with which it identifies almost totally—and the other part impoverished and emptied. One recalls Clémence seized by the haunting images of her dead baby and emptied of all her substance. However, there is another disassociation that is still more painful, another reason for the pain of loving. The ego is split between its limitless love for the effigy of the lost object and the lucid recognition of the real absence of that object. The splitting is no longer situated between contraction and emptying but between contraction—that is to say, an excessive love for an image—and an acute recognition of the irremediable character of that loss. The ego loves the object that continues to live in the psyche; it loves it as it has never loved it and at the same time it knows that this object will never come back. What causes pain is not the loss of the person we love, but the fact that we continue to love more strongly than ever someone whom we know to be irremediably lost. Love and knowledge are at

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odds. The ego remains split between a love that keeps the loved one alive and the knowledge of an incontestable absence. This rift between the living presence of the other in the ego and its real absence is a cleavage so unbearable that we often want to reduce it not by moderating the love but by denying the absence while rebelling against the reality of the lack and refusing to accept the definitive death of the loved one. Such a rebellion against fate, such a denial of the loss is sometimes so tenacious that the mourner borders on madness. The refusal to admit the irremediable character of the loss or, what amounts to the same thing, to admit the incontestable character of the absence in reality, borders on madness but tempers pain. When these moments of rebellion ease, pain reappears as vividly as before. Faced with the sudden death of a loved one it frequently happens that the mourner seeks for things and places associated with the deceased and, at times, against all reason, imagines that he or she is able to bring them back to life and find them again. I am thinking of a patient who heard the steps of her dead husband climbing the stairs. Or even of a mother who saw her recently deceased son very clearly at his desk. Through these hallucinations the mourner experiences the return of the deceased with an unshakable certainty and transforms his or her sorrow with a delirious conviction. We understand that the supremacy of love over knowledge leads to the creation of a new reality—a hallucinated reality—where the lost one returns in the form of a phantom.

The phantom of the lost loved one In reference to the phenomenon of the phantom limb, well known by neurologists, we call this hallucination of the mourner the “phenomenon of the phantom loved one.” But why the term phantom? Let us recall that the hallucination of the phantom limb is a disorder that affects one who has had an arm or a leg amputated. The person feels sensations coming from the missing limb so vividly that it seems to still be there. In the same way the mourner can perceive with all of his or her senses and absolute conviction the living presence of the deceased. In order to understand this surprising similitude of hallucinatory reactions in the face of losses of a very different nature—one an arm and the other a person—we propose the following hypothesis. Let us clarify first that the ego functions as a psychical mirror composed of a myriad of images each reflecting some part of our body or some aspect of the persons or things to which we are emotionally attached. When we lose an arm, for example, or a loved one, the psychical image (or representation) of that lost object we compensate for it through overinvestment. Now we saw that such an affective overinvestment of the image generates pain. But the high degree

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of this overinvestment will provoke something besides pain: it will involve the hallucination of the lost thing reflected in the image. In fact, the hallucination of the phantom sensations coming from the amputated arm or the hallucination of the phantom presence of a missing husband, are to be explained by an overinvestment that is so disproportionate to the image of these lost object that this image is ultimately ejected from the ego. It is there, outside the ego, in the real, that the representation reappears as a phantom. We will say that the representation has been foreclosed, that is to say overinvested, excluded, and hallucinated. The phenomenon of the phantom limb or the phantom loved one can no longer be explained by a simple denial of the loss of the loved object, whether an amputated arm or a deceased person, but by the foreclosure of the mental representation of such an object (Fig. 1). But the surprising affinity between the two phantom hallucinations shows how the loved one is in truth an internal organ of the ego, as essential as an arm or a leg. I can only hallucinate something essential, the loss of which upsets the normal functioning of my psyche. Specifically, we must now reconsider our inquiry into the particularity of the loved one for whom we mourn. Indeed, among all those we love, who are those rare persons that we hold to be irreplaceable and whose sudden loss provokes pain? Who is the special one that can cause me to be what I am and without whom I would no longer be the same? What place does he or she occupy within my psyche so as to be so important for me? How do we name this bond that attaches me to him or her? With all these questions, we would like finally to identify the mysterious bond, that of love, that unites us to the significant other. The responses to these questions lead to a new definition of pain.

The loved one for whom I mourn is the one who satisfies me partially, renders my insatisfaction tolerable and recenters my desire To know who the significant other is, his or her essential role in the unconscious, and the pain that his or her disappearance causes, we must return for a moment to the ordinary functioning of the psychical system. We will consider it now from a particular perspective. We know that the system is ruled by the pleasure/unpleasure principle that establishes the premise according to which the psyche is constantly subjected to a tension that it seeks to discharge without ever doing so completely. While the permanent state of tension is called “unpleasure,” the incomplete and partial discharge of tension is called “pleasure,” that is, partial pleasure. In its normal functioning, the psyche remains fundamentally subjected to unpleasure, that is, to an unpleasant tension, since there is never a complete discharge. Let us alter our vocabulary

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now and instead of using the words tension and unpleasure we will use the word desire. Because what is desire, if not that very unpleasant tension in motion, entirely oriented toward an ideal goal, that of reaching absolute pleasure, that is, total discharge? Thus, we will say that the ordinary situation of the unconscious system is defined by the tolerable state of insatisfaction of a desire4 that is never totally realized. However, to state that psychical tension remains always present, indeed distressful, that unpleasure dominates or that our desires remain unsatisfied, in no way expresses a pessimistic vision of humanity. On the contrary, this statement amounts to declaring that throughout our existence we will fortunately be in a state of lack. I say “fortunately,” because this lack, this always futural gap that steers desire, is synonymous with life. If we were to represent that part of insatisfaction that draws desire spatially, we would not imagine it as a section of a straight road that we would still have to take toward a mythical goal of a total jouissance. On the contrary, insatisfaction is not the incomplete part of the trajectory of desire toward absolute satisfaction. It is otherwise that I ask you to represent it. I suggest that you imagine it in the form of a hole, a hole at the heart of our being and around which our desire would revolve. The gap ahead is not in front of us but in us. The trajectory of desire does not describe a straight line heading toward the horizon but a spiral turning around a central void that draws and animates the circular movement of desire. Consequently, to declare that our desires are not satisfied means, in spatial terms, that they follow the centrifugal movement of energy that circumscribes an irreducible lack. We see now that the lack is not only a void that pulls in desire. It is also an organizing pole of desire. Without lack—without this drawing core that is insatisfaction—the circular dynamic of desire would spiral out of control and there would be nothing left but pain. We can put it in a different way. If the insatisfaction is present, but bearable, desire remains active and the psychic system remains stable. If, on the contrary, the satisfaction is excessive, or if the insatisfaction has no limit, desire loses its axis and pain surges. We find again here the hypothesis that permeates our text. Namely, that pain expresses the turbulence of the drives in the domain of the Id. A certain degree of insatisfaction is thus vital for us in order to conserve our psychical stability. But how is this essential lack preserved? Further, if the lack is necessary how is it to be maintained within sustainable limits? It is exactly here that our partner comes into play—the person we love— because he or she plays the role of the unsatisfactory object of my desire and thereby of the organizing pole of desire. It is as if the hole of the insatisfaction within was occupied by the loved one without; as if the lack was finally a vacant place successively occupied by the special persons or external things that we hold to be irreplaceable and for whom we would mourn if they were to perish.

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However, how can it be accepted that my partner has this castrating function of limiting my satisfaction? No doubt the restrictive role of the loved one can be disconcerting, because normally we attribute to our partner the power of satisfying our desires or providing our pleasure. We live in the illusion, verified in part, that he or she gives us more than he or she takes. But his or her function in our unconscious is quite different: it assures psychic stability for us through the insatisfaction that it produces and not the satisfaction it provides. Our partner, the person we love, does not satisfy us because, while exciting our desire, he or she cannot—if he or she is even capable of it—and does not want to satisfy us fully. Being human, he or she cannot, and being neurotic, he or she does not want to. That is to say, he or she is both what excites my desire and the object that only satisfies it partially. He or she knows how to excite me, provide me with a partial jouissance and, in that way, leave me unsatisfied. Thus, he or she guarantees the insatisfaction that I need in order to live and re-center my desire. But apart from my amorous partner, are there other special objects that can serve this function of re-centering my desire? Yes, as for example the object that is love in itself, the love itself that my partner offers me, or even the love that I give my own image nourished by the recognition of the other, such as honor or a social position. The object of desire can also be my corporeal integrity, which I must preserve above all. It even happens that the object is a material thing as personal as our body or as the native land or ancestral home. All these are chosen objects and at the same time are so internal, so intimate, so intrinsically organizing of the movement of our desire, that we live without perceiving the how deeply they are anchored in the unconscious. It is uniquely when we are threatened with losing them or after having lost them that their absence reveals painfully the depth of their roots. It is only in the deferred action, much later, that we will know if the lost loved one, the thing or value was or was not special for us. In effect, when faced with the threat of losing one of the objects that we believe irreplaceable, it is anxiety that emerges and it emerges in the ego. If, on the contrary, one of these objects disappears suddenly without prior warning, it is pain that emerges: and it emerges from the Id. I suffer pain in the Id if: I lose the loved one brutally (mourning), his or her love (abandonment), the love that I invest in the image of myself (humiliation), or even the integrity of my body (mutilation). Mourning, abandonment, humiliation, mutilation are four circumstances that, if sudden, would trigger psychical pain or the pain of love. Let us remain with the exemplary case where the object of desire is the loved one whose loss provokes the pain of mourning. But exactly what do we lose when we lose the one that we love? More simply: who is the other that we love?

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Love is the fantasized presence of the loved one in my unconscious If one presses me to say why I loved him I feel that it can only be expressed by responding: Because it was him; because it was me. —Montaigne

These lines from Montaigne are from a very beautiful text on friendship written shortly after the death of his dear friend, La Boétie. Among the many friendships that he had, he singles out one that was unique and that linked him in an indissociable way to his companion. It was a friendship so powerful that all the edges of their differences were blurred in a universal blend. Hence, trying to respond to the question of the reasons for such an exceptional love for a special and recently deceased friend, Montaigne writes this striking sentence full of beauty and reserve: “If one presses me to say why I loved him I feel that it can only be expressed by responding: Because it was him; because it was me.” Love thus remains an impenetrable mystery, that one should not try to explain, but simply acknowledge. Another writer adopts a similar reserve faced with the enigma of the attachment to the special other. Indeed, in “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud speaks of love when speaking of death. He notes that the mourner ignores the intrinsic value of the deceased loved one. The mourner knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost by losing his loved one (cf. SE XIV, 245). Thanks to the impersonal “what,” Freud emphasizes how the person that we love the most is first a psychical agency, and how this agency is different from the concrete person. The loved one is certainly a person, but it is first and foremost that unconscious part of ourselves that is ignored and that will collapse if the person dies. More recently, faced with the mystery of this amorous bond, Lacan invented his “objet a”; for it is precisely with the expression of objet a that he symbolized the mystery without resolving it. The a is, in the final analysis, only a name to designate what we ignore, namely, the ungraspable presence of the loved one in us, that thing that we lose when the loved one disappears from the external reality. This is the decisive question, a question as unresolved as it is unavoidable. In what does this “what” that is lost consist when we lose the other? What is it that unites two persons such that one suffers so profoundly at the sudden demise of the other? Our problem now is not one of pain but one of love. It is love that interests us now because it is by delineating its nature more clearly that we will arrive at a new psychoanalytic definition of pain. Who, then, is the one that I love and believe to be unique and irreplaceable? It is a complex being composed both of the living and actual person who is in front of me and of its double within me.

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In order to better understand how such a being becomes special to me, let us analyze in two parts the process of love by which we transform an external other into an internal other. 1. Imagine a person who seduces us, that is, who awakens and captures the force of our desire. 2. Progressively we respond and attach ourselves to that person to the point of incorporating him or her and making him or her part of ourselves. Imperceptibly, we cover him or her over as ivy covers a stone wall. We envelop him or her with a multitude of superimposed images, each charged with love, hate, or anxiety and we crystallize him or her unconsciously through a multitude of symbolic representations, each attached to a specific aspect of that person that has touched us.5 We call a “fantasy,” that fantasy of the loved one, all the ivy that has grown in my psyche, nourished by the crude sap of the thrust of desire, the entire collection of images and signifiers that link my being to the living person of the loved one to the point of transforming it into a internal double. I realize that generally this word fantasy is equivocal since it refers to the vague idea of daydreaming or of consciously imagining a narrative. However the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy that we are discussing here in order to better understand pain is especially precise. Fantasy is the name we give to the unconscious jointure of the subject with the living person of the loved one. This jointure, operating in my unconscious, is a combination of images and signifiers vivified by the real force of desire that the loved one provokes in me, that I provoke in him or her, and that binds us. But this fantasy of the loved one, although carried by the force of desire, functions to stem and subdue this force. By containing this force and keeping it from escaping, it prevents the desire from attaining absolute satisfaction. In this way, fantasy guarantees insatisfaction and assures the homeostasis of the unconscious system. We understand better now that the protective function of the loved one is in fact the protective function of the fantasy of the loved one. The fantasy is protective because it protects us from the danger of an unlimited turbulence of desire or its equivalent, the chaos of the drive. In short, the loved one has ceased to be merely an external agency and lives also within us as a fantasized object that re-centers our desire by rendering it unsatisfied within tolerable limits. The person that we love the most remains inevitably the person who leaves us the least satisfied. The insatisfaction of desire is translated into the everyday reality of the couple by unhappiness toward a loved one, a loved one who is not only for us the Other of love but also the Other of our complaints, reproaches, and recriminations.

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The loved one exists in two ways: on the one hand, he or she is outside us, as an individual living in the world, and on the other hand, he or she is inside us as a fantasized presence—imaginary, symbolic, and real—that regulates the imperious flux of desire and structures the order of the unconscious. Of these two presences—living and fantasized—it is the second that dominates since our behavior, most of our judgments, and all the feelings we experience with respect to the loved one, are rigorously determined by the fantasy. We only grasp the reality of the one we love through the transforming lens of the fantasy.6 We only see, hear, feel, or touch him or her while enveloped in the veil woven from the images born out of the complex fusion between his or her image and our own image. It is a veil that is also woven from the unconscious, symbolic representations that strictly delimit the context of our bond of love.

The person of the loved one We are going to immediately clarify the three modes of the real, symbolic, and imaginary presence of the fantasized loved one in our unconscious. But first let’s analyze clearly the meaning of the expression “person of the loved one,” which we have used to designate the external existence of the loved one. If it is true that the fantasized existence of the other is more important than its external existence, it is no less true that the first draws from the second and that my unconscious fantasy can only flourish if the other is living. The living person of the loved one is indeed indispensable for me as a living support on which the fantasized objects rests and flourishes. Without this support, the substrate of our life, our fantasy would flounder and the unconscious system would lose its center of gravity. There would be, then, an immense libidinal disorder involving distress and pain. But why must the person of the loved one be living in order for there to be a fantasy? First, because he or she is an active and desiring body, a source of the excitations that stimulate my desire, a desire that fuels, in turn, the fantasy. These excitations are the impact in me of the emanations of his or her desire. Second, because the said person is a body in motion whose unique allure will be projected within my psyche as an interiorized image reflecting my own images. In this sense, the person of the loved one is absolutely necessary for me because he or she is a shining constellation of sources of excitation that fuel my desire and in addition to it, fuel the fantasy. It is also necessary because it is the living silhouette from which the silhouette of the other is imprinted in my unconscious. But if the body of the loved one is for my fantasy an archipelago of sites of excitation for my desire as well as the living support of my images, what am

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I, myself and my body, for his or her fantasy? Certainly, the metaphor of the ivy is quite evocative, since the ivy is a living plant that not only climbs and creeps up the wall, but fastens its crampons in very particular places of the wall, in its cracks and crevices. Similarly, my attachments to the loved one who has become my fantasized object is a jointure that does not just happen anywhere, but quite precisely in the erogenous orifices of the body: places where he or she irradiates his or her desire and excites me without actually satisfying me. And, reciprocally, it is in my body at the places of emission of my own desire that his or her fantasy will attach itself. You will agree then that my own fantasy forms a bond that is all the more powerful if, in turn, I am the living person on whom his or her fantasy is constructed, if I become the regulator of his or her insatisfaction. In other words, my fantasy will be a knot that is much tighter if I am for the other what he or she is for me: the fantasized loved one. Consequently, we must realize that when we love we always love a hybrid entity that is constituted both by the external person that we encounter outside and by his or her unconscious and fantasized presence within us. Reciprocally, we are for him or her the same mixed being made of flesh and unconsciousness. This is why we speak of fantasy. It is to better understand that I will only suffer from the disappearance of the one who has been for me what I have been for him or her: the fantasized loved one. Now, it is important that we clearly separate the three modes of the fantasized presence of the loved one in order to better define the unknown “what” that we lose when its person is lost.

The real presence of the loved one in my unconscious: A force The fantasized status of the loved one takes three different forms, then, that correspond to the three Lacanian dimensions of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. Of the three, it is the real presence of the other in the unconscious that raises the most conceptual difficulties because the term real can lead one to believe that it refers to the reality of the person of the loved one. Now, “real” does not designate a person but that which, in a person, awakens a force in my unconscious that causes me to be what I am and without which I would no longer have any consistency. The real is at the same time the life in the other and the force of life that animates and courses through his or her body. It is quite difficult to distinguish clearly this force that emanates from the body and from the unconscious of the loved one as long as he or she is living and excites me, from that other force in me that arms my unconscious. It is very difficult to the extent that these forces are in truth only one and the

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same energetic column, a vital and impersonal axis that belongs to neither one of the partners. It is also difficult because this unique force has no symbol or representation that can signify it. This is the meaning of the Lacanian concept of the “real.” The real is the unrepresentable, the energy that assures both the psychic consistency of each partner and their common bond of love. In short, if we must summarize what the real other is in one word, we would say that it is the imperious and unknown force that gives consistency to our bond and to our unconscious. The real other is not therefore the external person of the other, but the part of a pure, impersonal energy that animates its person. That part, which is also, since we are connected, my own impersonal part, our shared real. However, for the real other to exist with the real force that belongs to neither partner, it is necessary for the bodies of each partner to be living and quivering with desire.

The symbolic presence of the loved other in my unconscious: A rhythm But if the real status of the loved one is to be a foreign force that connects the two partners like a bridge of energy and arms the unconscious, the symbolic status of the loved one is to be the rhythm of that force. Certainly one should not conceive the pressure of desire as a blind and massive surge, but as a centripetal movement, and with rhythm brought about by a somewhat regular succession of increases and decreases of tension. Our desire is not a pure real but a force that is regulated by a precise and definite rhythm that makes it singular. Now, what is a rhythm if not a symbolic structure organized in a sequence of highs and lows repeated at regular intervals? This rhythm is, in effect, the most primitive symbolic expression of desire, indeed of life, since life, at the beginning, is only a palpitating energy. The force of desire is real because it is in and of itself unrepresentable, but the rhythmic variations of this force are symbolic because they are, on the contrary, representable. They are representable as an alternation of strong and weak intensities, following a line of peaks and valleys. Now, we can formulate the hypothesis that the symbolic presence of the other in our unconscious is a rhythm, a harmonious accord between its power to excite and my response, between its role as object and the insatisfaction that I feel. If I believe that the loved one is irreplaceable, it is because my desire has been progressively molded by the sinuous line of the vibrant flux of his or her desire. He or she is believed to be irreplaceable because no other can correspond so perfectly to the rhythm of my desire. It is as if the loved one was, above all, a body that approaches slowly, positions itself, and adjusts to the beat of my rhythm. It is as if the pulsations of his or her sensibility dance to the same cadence of my own pulsations and that our bodies are

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exciting one another. Thus, the cadence of his or her desire is harmonized with my own cadence and each of the variations of his or her tension corresponds as an echo to each of mine. Sometimes the encounter is soft and gradual, at other times violent and immediate. However, if it is true that the erogenous exchanges can be harmonious, then the satisfactions that result from them always remain distinct, partial, and discordant for each of the partners. Our exchanges accord but there is discord in our satisfactions. They diverge because they occur at different moments and uneven intensities. There is an accord in the excitation and disharmony in the satisfaction. One can see that the loved one is not simply the person in front of me, nor a force, an excitation, or an object of insatisfaction; he or she is all of those things at once condensed in the living rhythm of our bond of love. When he or she is no longer there, when the radiance of his or her living and desiring being is no longer there, and my desire is deprived of the excitations that he or she could awaken so well, I certainly lose an infinity of riches but I lose, more importantly, the framework of my desire, that is to say, its rhythm. Thus, the symbolic presence of the loved one within my unconscious is expressed by the cadence according to which the rhythm of my desire is regulated. In a word, the symbolic other is a rhythm or a measure or even the psychical metronome that sets the tempo of my cadence of desire. This manner we have of conceiving the symbolic status of the loved one is a reinterpretation of the Freudian concept of repression, considered as the barrier that prevents the overflow of libidinal drive. It is also a reinterpretation of the Lacanian concept of the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father, considered as the limit that enframes and gives consistency to the symbolic system. Whether Freudian repression or the Lacanian signifier of the Name-of-theFather, it is always a matter of that which channels the forces of desire and organizes a system. Now precisely, the loved one, defined as a psychical metronome, fulfills this symbolic function of constraining desire to follow the rhythm of our bond. We will also say that the loved one, master of the measure imposed on my desire, protects me from turmoil by limiting my jouissance. He or she protects me and leaves me unsatisfied. The symbolic loved one is, in the end, a figure of repression and the most exemplary figure of the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father.

The imaginary presence of the loved one in my unconscious: An internal mirror As a living body, the person of the loved one is not only a source of the excitation of my desire, it is also—as we have said—the animated silhouette that

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will be projected in my psyche in the form of an internal image. The body of the other is duplicated by an internalized image. It is precisely this internal image of the loved one in me that we identify as his or her imaginary presence in the unconscious. The imaginary other is thus simply an image, but an image that has the particularity of being itself a polished surface on which my own images are permanently reflected. I capture my own images reflected in the mirror of the internalized image of the loved one. This image has the ability to be simultaneously the image of the other and the mirror of my own images. The image of my loved one that I have in the unconscious will only shine brightly, only return my images, and only excite affects if it is supported by the living body of the other. My loved one must be living so that the mirror that doubles him or her in the unconscious can reflect images vivid enough to produce feelings. The images acquire this vividness due to the rhythmic and active force of desire directly linked to the life of the body of the loved one. It is the force of the desire that charges the images with energy, making them undulate like reflections on the surface of water, and making them capable of creating feelings. But what are the principal images of myself that this internal mirror reflects? They are images that when perceived immediately produce an affect. At times we perceive an exalted image of ourselves that reinforces our narcissistic love. At other times we perceive a disappointing image that feeds our self-hatred, and often an image of submission to and dependence upon the loved one that provokes our anxiety. I will make two more remarks to conclude on the imaginary status of the loved other. The psychical mirror of the image of the loved one in my unconscious must not be conceived of as the smooth surface of a lens, but as a mirror broken up into small, mobile fragments of glass on which confused images of the other and of myself are reflected. The advantage of such a kaleidoscopic allegory is that it shows us that the unconscious image that we have of the loved one is a fragmented mirror and that the images that are reflected there are always partial and mobile. The disadvantage is that the metaphor leads us to believe that the imaginary presence of the other would be completely visual, while we know that an image can also be olfactory, auditory, tactile, or kinesthetic. The second remark concerns the context of the unconscious image of the loved one, that is to say, the way in which we imagine the loved one, no longer according to our affects but our values. I am thinking of the various ideals that we attribute to the person of the loved one without always knowing it. We anchor and develop our attachment by keeping these implicit ideals in the background. These ideals are often exaggerated, indeed infantile, and constantly readjusted by the limitations inherent in need (the

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body), demand (neurosis), and desire of the other. Now, what are these ideals that are situated at the intersection of the symbolic and the imaginary? Here are the principal ones: • My loved one must be unique and irreplaceable; • He or she must remain invariable, that is to say, must never change unless we ourselves change him or her; • He or she must survive, unaltered, the passion of our devouring love or our destructive hatred; • He or she must depend on our love, allow us to possess him or her, and always be available to satisfy our whims; • But if he or she also remains submissive, he or she must however be able to maintain his or her autonomy in order to avoid bothering me. These ideals, comparable to those that guide the relation of the child with its transitional object, characterize the neurosis of the lover and give us our sense of his or her limits. Such excessive expectations can only intensify the gap between the satisfaction desire dreams of and its effective insatisfaction. This long detour was necessary in order to respond to our question about the presence of the loved one in the unconscious and to understand that which we really lose when he or she disappears. The loved one is above all a fantasy that inhabits us, regulates the intensity of our desire (insatisfaction), and structures us. It is not only a person, but a fantasy constructed with his or her image, a mirror of our images (imaginary), affected by the force of desire (real), structured by the rhythm of this force (symbolic), and supported by his or her living body (also real), source of the excitation of our desire and the object of our imaginary projections. However, it is certainly necessary to understand that the fantasy is not only the representation of what the loved one is within us, but also that which bonds us inextricably to his or her living self. It is not only an intrasubjective formation but also intersubjective. Let us put this in a different way. The loved one is a part of us that we refer to as an “unconscious fantasy”; but this part is not confined to the interior of our individuality, it extends into the space of the in-between (entre-deux) and attaches us intimately to his or her person. Reciprocally, the loved one is also inhabited by a fantasy that represents us in his or her unconscious and attaches him or her to our person. We can see how the fantasy is a psychical formation that is unique and shared by two partners and how it was, until now, inadequate, however necessary, to speak of the fantasy of the one and the fantasy of the other, to speak of “his” or “her” unconscious or the unconscious of the “other.” This is what I want to say: the fantasy and more generally the unconscious that it manifests is a

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psychic structure, a complex edifice that stands, invisible, in the space of the in-between and rests on foundations of living bodies of the partners. Consequently, when we lose the person of the loved one, the fantasy collapses like a building from which one has removed a pillar. It is then that pain appears. To the question: What do we lose when we lose the one that we love?— we respond—By losing the living body of the other, we lose one of the sources that nourishes the force of desire without completely losing that force, a force that remains indestructible and inexhaustible as long as we have life in us. We also lose the animated silhouette that sustained the internal mirror that reflects our images. But by losing the loved one we also lose the rhythm according to which the real force of desire vibrates. To lose the rhythm is to lose the symbolic other, the limit that gives the unconscious its consistency. By losing the one that we love, we lose a source of nourishment, the object of our imaginary projections, and the rhythm of our common desire. That is to say, we lose the cohesion and texture of a fantasy indispensable to our structure.

The pain of the turmoil of the drives The loss of one’s internal compass. —Marcel Proust

We return now to our definitions of pain. We had said that corporeal pain was produced by a wound situated at the periphery of our selves, that is to say, in the body. But in the same way that one believes, wrongly, that the painful sensation due to a wound of the arm is located in the arm, one also wrongly believes that the psychical pain is due to the loss of the person of the loved one. It is as if it was his or her absence that caused the pain. It is not the absence of the other that causes the pain but the effects in me of the absence. I do not suffer from the lack of the other. I suffer because the force of my desire is deprived of the excitement provided by the sensibility of his or her living body. It because the symbolic rhythm of this force is broken by the disappearance of the tempo that his or her excitations caused; and also because the psychical mirror that reflected my images collapsed, lacking the living support that his or her body had become. The wound that provokes the psychical pain is, then, not the physical disappearance of the loved one, but the internal turmoil engendered by the disarticulation of the fantasy of the loved one. In the pages that preceded our considerations about the fantasized presence of the loved one, we defined pain as the reaction to the loss of the object of love. Now we can be more specific and advance the idea that pain is a reaction, not to some loss, but to the fracture of the fantasy that attached us to the loved other. The true cause of pain is thus not the loss of the loved one,

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that is to say, the removal of one of the pillars that supported the structure of the fantasy, but the collapse of that structure. The loss is a triggering cause, the collapse is the efficient cause. If we lose the loved one, the fantasy is undone and the subject is then exposed without recourse to an ultimate tension of desire, a desire without a fantasy to support itself, an errant and unhinged desire. To affirm that psychic pain results from the collapse of the fantasy is to locate its source, not in the external event of an actual loss, but in the subject’s confrontation with its own inner turmoil. Pain is here a distress imposed inexorably on me when I discover that my desire is bare, mad, and object-less. We find, henceforth, in another form, one of the propositions offered at the beginning of this chapter. We said that pain is the affect that expresses the ego’s self-perception of the trauma that ravages it when it is deprived of its loved one. Now that we recognize the destruction of the fantasy as the major intersubjective event that follows the loss of the loved one, we can affirm that pain expresses the brutal and immediate encounter between the subject and its own panic-stricken desire. It is at that moment of intense disturbance of the drives that our ego desperately tries to save the unity of a collapsing fantasy by concentrating all available energy on a small part of the image of the lost other, a fragmentary image that will become saturated with affect. It is at this point that pain, which immediately surged from a tumultuous desire, intensifies instead of being diminished. Some months later, once the work of mourning is under way, the hypertrophy of this fragment of the image of the lost one diminishes, and the pain associated with it eases progressively. The moment of conclusion has arrived. Through the several hypotheses I have offered, I wanted to take you on the same path that led me to modify my initial point of view with respect to pain. I began from the common idea that pain is a sensation of a wound and that the psychical pain is the wound of the soul. That is the first idea. If one had asked me, “What is psychic pain?” I would have responded without much thought: it is the confusion of someone who, having lost a loved one, loses a part of him or herself. At this point we can respond more accurately and say: pain is the confusion that we experience when having lost a loved one we find ourselves faced with the most extreme internal tension confronted by a mad desire within ourselves, a sort of madness within that lies dormant in us as long as an external loss does not come to unleash its fury.

Summary of the causes of psychical pain Pain emerges from the loss of the person of the loved one. Pain emerges from the fracture of the fantasy that connects me to the loved one.

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Pain emerges from the disorder of the drives prevailing in the Id, consequent to the rupture of the barrier of the fantasy. Pain emerges from the hypertrophy of one of the fragmentary images of the lost other. A last word in the form of a question:What use can we make of this psychoanalytic theory of pain that I am advancing? I would dare to say quite simply: make no use of it. Leave it for the moment. Let the theory simmer within us. Leave it to operate without our knowledge. If this theory of pain, as abstract as it may be, is really fertile, it will perhaps change our manner of listening to the suffering patient or to our own intimate suffering. Let us recall here the case of Clémence, where the psychoanalyst’s intervention took place at the intersection of theory and the unconscious. In his or her way of remaining open to suffering or coming to terms with it and offering decisive words that transform the unbearable illness into symbolized pain, the psychoanalyst has acted on the basis of his or her theoretical knowledge but also with his or her unconscious. In this way, through his or her knowledge of pain and his or her knowledge based on the transference, he or she has eased the pain by giving it a context. He or she has taken the place of the symbolic other who, in Clémence’s fantasy, articulated the rhythm of her desire, that other that Clémence had lost by losing her child. Faced with the pain of his or her patient, the analyst becomes a symbolic other who imposes a rhythm on the disorder of the drives so as to finally ease the pain.

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A Chart Comparing Corporeal and Psychical Pain CORPOREAL PAIN

• The wound is located in the body. • Pain is thought to be in the body, but in fact it is in the mind for a painful feeling, and in the ego for a painful emotion. • Pain appears to us as external and as something that can be remedied. It comes over me as a momentary illness.

PSYCHICAL PAIN OR THE PAIN OF LOVE

A. The Loss of the Loved One

B. Loss of Corporeal Integrity

• The wound is located incorrectly in the external world: the loss of the person of the loved one. In fact, it is located at the point where my most intimate feelings are attached to those of the loved one, where my faltering internal image lacks the support that was his or her person. And at the point where my symbolic system fails, due to the loss of the pivot that was the rhythm of our couple. The wound is in the collapse of the fantasy.

• We love his or her body like the most loved other. Having an arm amputated causes the same atrocious internal pain as the loss of the dearest loved one. This loss requires a true work of mourning that will teach us to love the new body that is deprived of the leg.

• Pain seems to us to be internal, absolute, irremediable, and at times even necessary. It is within me as my vital substance.

• The wound that provokes corporeal pain is located at the site of amputation, but what causes the psychical pain is located in three different levels similar to those that define the loss of the loved one: that of the feeling (the leg is part of my sensory whole), that of the imaginary (the image of the absence of the leg changes the image of my body), and that of the symbolic (the psychical order loses one of its principal references that is the integrity of the body).

Archipelago of Pain

The unconscious is a conservator of pain. It does not forget.

Two kinds of psychical pain There are two ways to react painfully to the loss of a loved one. When we are prepared to see him or her go due to a terminal illness, for example, we experience his or her death with an infinite yet representable sadness. It is as if the pain of mourning was named before appearing and as if the work of mourning was already begun before the death of the loved one. Therefore, although unbearable, pain remains integrated within our ego and involved with it. If, on the contrary, the loss of the loved one is sudden and unexpected, the pain is brutal and upsets all references of space, time, and identity. It is unbearable because it cannot be assimilated by the ego. If we were to designate which of these two types of suffering really merit the name of pain, we would choose the second. Pain always has an immediate and unpredictable nature.

How is psychical pain experienced in the body? In the first moments, psychical pain is experienced as a devastating attack. The body loses its armor and falls to the ground like a coat falls from its hanger. The pain is, then, experienced as a physical sensation of disintegration and not explosion. It is a silent collapse of the body. But the very first attempts to prevent such a collapse—which occur too late—are the scream and speech. The most primitive antidote against pain—on which humanity has always depended—is the scream, when it can be emitted. Subsequent to the scream there are words that resonate in the mind, and that try to establish a bridge between the reality that was known before the loss and the unknown reality that follows. Those words attempt to transform the diffuse pain of the body into a pain collected in the psyche. 41

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The true cause of pain is in the Id Human beings have only themselves to fear or, perhaps it is better to say that humans have only the Id to fear, the true source of pain. The pain coming from the Id is a stranger with which we cohabitate but that we do not assimilate. Pain is in us but it does not belong to us [La douleur est en nous, mais elle n’est pas à nous]. The one who suffers confuses the triggering cause of his or her pain with other causes. The one who suffers confuses the loss of the loved other with the upheaval of the drive that the loss provokes. He or she believes that the reason for the pain is the loss of the loved one, although the true cause is not outside, but within the ego, in the depths where the Id reigns. There is no pain without the ego, but pain is not in the ego, it is in the Id. In order for there to be pain, three conditions are necessary: that the ego recognizes the irremediable reality of the loss of the loved one; that it perceives the upheaval of the drives in the Id—the true source of pain; and that it translates this endoperception into a painful feeling.

Unconscious pain Often the patient feels grief without knowing why he or she is sad nor what loss he or she has suffered. In other cases, he or she is inhabited by pain without even knowing that he or she is in pain. This is the case with the alcoholic subject who ignores the deep pain that is at the source of his or her compulsive thirst. One drinks in order to intoxicate his or her ego and thus neutralize the capacity to perceive the disturbances in the Id. The turmoil of the drives exists, but the ego that is anesthetized by alcohol does not translate them into painful emotion. It is as if alcohol had the effect of neutralizing the function of the ego, translator of the language of the Id into the language of conscious feelings.

Micro-traumas and unconscious pain A psychical trauma can be produced either by the brutal shock of the loss of a loved one, or on the occasion of an innocuous event that adds to a long series of microtraumas that are not felt by the subject. Each of these particular traumas provoke an imperceptible pain of which the subject is not conscious. The progressive accumulation of these multiple pains creates such a state of tension that one needs but the spark of an innocuous event to release the pain—heretofore contained—and to see it burst into conscious form. The

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slightest triggering event can be either exterior or interior to the ego. Such a memory or insignificant dream can appear so precise in these circumstances that it release a savage flux of internal excitations that overflow and wound the ego. That state is then experienced as a traumatic pain.

Who is the loved one? The loved one is a stimulant for us, one who leads us to believe that he or she can carry excitement to its maximum limit. He or she excites us, makes us dream, and disappoints us. Our loved one is our lack. The loved one is not an other, but a part of our selves that re-centers our desire.

The person of the loved one The person of the loved one is like a coat hanger on which our drives hang, drives that cover it with innumerable layers of affects.

The one I love is the one who limits me The most remarkable representation of my loved one, the one that will be overinvested with his or her disappearance, is the representation of that which I cannot have, but also of that which I do not want to have: absolute satisfaction. The loved one represents a limit, my limit. Not only, then, does the loved one provide me with my image, assure the stability of my reality, and make my dissatisfaction tolerable, but it also represents protection against the excess of an absolute satisfaction I could not bear. In a word, the special one [l’élu]—whom we call the loved one, but who can just as well be hated, feared, or desired—represents my protective barrier against a jouissance that I take to be dangerous although I know to be inaccessible. By its real, imaginary, and symbolic presence, the special one is, outside, equivalent to what repression is inside. This living barrier protects me against extreme forms of jouissance and guarantees that my insatisfaction is tolerable and still does not prevent me from dreaming of absolute jouissance. On the contrary, my loved one nourishes my illusions and causes me to dream. We understand, then, why we suffer when the loved one dies. With him or her, the everyday and tolerable dissatisfactions of my desires disappear and I become entirely dissatisfied, or, what amounts to the same thing, entirely satisfied. What the death of the other involves, essentially, is the death of a limit. Thus, the work of mourning is the reconstruction of a new limit.

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My fantasy of the loved one A fantasy is a complex assemblage of images and of signifiers laid out in a ring turning around a hole of insatisfaction. The living person of the loved one stands at the center of this hole. The fantasy that I have of my loved one is the basis of my desire. If the loved one dies the fantasy collapses and desire is thrown into a panic. The fantasy that I nourish in relation to the loved other can be so invasive and exclusive that it prevents me from establishing new bonds with new intimate partners, that is, from creating new fantasies. An example of an invasive fantasy is that of a young woman who, having been so deeply attached to her father, has developed a fantasy so rigid such that it is impossible for her to create a new bond of love with a man. Another example of an invasive fantasy is that of an unyielding grudge against the person who humiliated us. The special person is, in this case, one who is hated and not loved. There can be a fantasy of the loved one that is regulative of our unconscious without corresponding to a particular person in reality. This is the case of a pathological fantasy, often invasive, excessively developed and self-sufficient. The most striking illustration of this is pathological mourning. The mourner continues to fantasize about his or her dead loved one as if he or she were alive. Or the case of erotomaniacal delirium, organized around a fantasy developed in such a disproportionate manner that it causes a bond of love to exist artificially, a bond develops in which the one who is delirious attributes to him or herself the role of the loved one, with a stranger.

Pain is the certainty of the irreparable When there is pain in reaction to a loss it is because the suffering subject takes the loss to be irreversible. It matters little whether the loss is real or imaginary, definitive or transitory; what matters is the absolute conviction with which the subject believes the loss is irreparable. One woman can experience the departure of her lover with immense distress and take it as a definitive abandonment while in reality it turns out to be temporary. Her pain is born of the absolute certainty with which she interprets the absence of her loved one as being an irremediable separation. There is, in this case, neither reason nor doubt which tempers the belief, only certitude and pain. The pain remains indissociable from the certainty and incompatible with doubt. Thus, the painful feeling that accompanies the doubt is not pain, but anxiety. Anxiety takes root in the uncertainty of a dreaded danger while pain is the certainty of an evil that has already been realized.

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The dead loved one is held to be irreplaceable I say that the loved one is “held” to be and not that it is irreplaceable. It is we who give him or her the status of being unique, both while alive and immediately after its death. While he or she was alive we were guided by the tacit conviction that he or she was our only possible loved one. If he or she dies, this conviction is made explicit and becomes a painful certainty: no one else can ever replace him or her. It is nevertheless true that with time, once mourning has been completed, another person will come to occupy the place of the loved one.

Love and pain The ego is like a mirror where images of parts of our body or aspects of our loved one are reflected. An excess of investment in one of these images signifies love if the image facilitates the real thing that it reflects. However, the same excess of investment signifies pain if the real basis of the investment leaves us. The blind love that denies the reality of the loss, on the one hand, and the lucid resignation that accepts it, on the other hand, are both extreme modes that rip the ego and provoke pain. Psychical pain can be summarized in a simple equation: an excessive love within us for a loved one who no longer exists outside us.

Two modes of the pain of mourning The pain of loving the one who has died while knowing him or her to be lost forever is a pain that can occur at the very moment of the loss or else reemerge episodically during the period of mourning. Although it is always the same pain, it manifests itself in various ways: sudden and massive when in immediate reaction to the loss, or episodic during the mourning. In order to distinguish between these two manifestations it is necessary to propose our conception of mourning.

Mourning is a process of a withdrawal of love [désamour] and the pain of mourning is the insistence of love Mourning is a long path that begins with the acute pain of the loss of a loved one and declines with the serene acceptance of the reality of what

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happened and of the definitive character of his or her absence. During this process pain manifests itself as momentary episodes of grief. In order to understand the nature of these painful episodes one must consider mourning as a slow work by which the ego patiently undoes what it had invested in the urgency affected by the blow of the loss. Mourning works to slowly undo what was precipitously formed. In fact, in order to protect itself from the ravaging effects of the trauma, the ego overinvests the representation of the loved one who has died. Now, during the period of mourning, the ego undergoes the inverse path: little by little it disinvests the representation of the loved one until that representation loses its vivacity and ceases to be a foreign body—a source of pain for the ego. To disinvest the representation mean to remove the excess of affect from it, to reposition it among other representations and invest it differently. Thus, mourning can be defined as a slow and painful process of the withdrawal of love from the deceased in order to love him or her differently. For the sake of clarification, we would say that in mourning the mourner does not forget the deceased or cease loving him or her but only tempers an excessive attachment that has resulted from the brutal loss. Now that we have defined mourning as a process of the withdrawal of love we understand that pain occurs each time that there is a resurgence of love. In mourning pain corresponds to the momentary reinvestment of an image in the process of being disinvested. This is what happens when the mourner accidentally encounters in reality some detail reminding him or her of the loved one when he or she was alive. At the moment when the representation of the deceased is reanimated by the force of memory and the subject must again bear the obvious irreversible loss, pain returns. There is pain each time the image of the deceased is reanimated and, simultaneously, when I recognize the incontestable death of the other. The episodes of pain that punctuate mourning are thus the insistence of a tenacious love which does not want to disappear.

Nostalgia is a mixture of love, pain, and jouissance: I suffer from the absence of the loved one and I undergo jouissance by offering him or her my pain Although painful, the memory of the lost loved one can provoke the jouissance of offering our pain like a homage to the deceased. Love, pain, and jouissance are conflated in this case. Loving the other who has been lost certainly causes suffering, but this suffering can also allay the pain. It makes us relive it.

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Pathological mourning In the case of pathological mourning, the affective overinvestment has permanently crystallized on the psychical representation of the loved one who has been lost, as if we were attempting in vain to revive him or her. Pathological mourning is love frozen around an image.

“I do not want my pain to stop!” The manifestations of pain—despondency, screaming and tears—sustain it as if the person who suffered was led by an unconscious desire—a desire that has nothing to do with masochism—to live the experience of pain fully. Those who suffer from having lost a loved one experience an atrocious pain that they want nevertheless to endure. They want to suffer because their pain is a homage to the dead, a proof of love. The pain is a jouissance one must exhaust, a tension one must discharge by screams, tears, and contortions. It is as if the person in pain says, “Leave me alone! Do not console me! Let me alone with my pain!”

Anxiety is a reaction to the imaginary lack Anxiety is the reaction to the menace of the loss of the object, that is, to the idea that our loved one could be lacking. Thus, anxiety is associated with the conscious representation of what could be the absence of the one we love. In Lacanian terms we would write: anxiety surges when I imagine the lack; it is a response to the imaginary lack. There are three forms of anxiety: anxiety before the menace of losing of the loved one, anxiety before the threat of losing of the loved organ (castration anxiety), and anxiety before the threat of losing of the love of our loved one, like a punishment for a real or imaginary fault of which I accuse myself (moral anxiety or guilt).

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Comparative Table of Affects Pain

is a relation to the loss of a loved one, to the loss of his or her love, to the loss of my corporeal integrity, or to the loss of the integrity of my image.

Jealousy

is a variant of psychical pain. It is the reaction to a supposed loss of the love that the loved one gave me and that he or she then gave to a rival. Jealousy is an affect that mixes with the pain of having lost the love of the loved one, the integrity of my narcissistic image, the hate of my rival and, finally my self-reproaches for not having held my place.

Anxiety

is a reaction to the threat of an eventual loss of the loved one or of his or her love.

Guilt

is a variant of anxiety. This is a reaction to the threat that the loved one might withdraw their love from me, in the guise of a punishment for a real or imaginary fault that I committed or could commit.

Narcissistic Humiliation

is a wound to the image of myself that I nourish.

Hate

is a reaction to the wound to my image provoked by my loved one. Hate is the mobilization of all my forces to attack the other’s own image, a violence that rehabilitates the wounded image of myself and gives me consistency: I hate, therefore I feel my existence.

Corporeal Pain: A Psychoanalytic Conception

I do not possess pain, it possesses me: “I am pain.”

We think most often that physical pain is the exclusive concern of neurophysiology and only concerns the psyche if it has an effect on the personality of the suffering man or woman. It is as if, on the one hand, there would be a painful phenomenon that can be explained scientifically by the transmission of the nociceptive message of pain within the nervous system, and, on the other hand, the inevitable social and psychological consequences brought about by a chronic pain. There would first be pain, and then its emotional consequences. We know the importance for a practitioner—medical or psychoanalytic—of listening to not only the patient’s corporeal suffering but also the psychological problems that the physical pain provokes. However, we prefer here to occupy ourselves not with the repercussions of pain but with its psychical origin. More precisely, we need to occupy ourselves with the psychical factor that intervenes in the genesis of any corporeal pain. Let us note that our interest in delimiting the psychical element of pain is curiously shared by current research in neuroscience. I was surprised when I discovered, for example, the doubts and questions of the scientists at the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) concerning the incidence of psychical factors in the neurophysiology of pain. Without going as far as a formal explanation, they hold the psychical factor to be one of the principal causes of a painful emotion whose inner mechanism still remains unexplored. They consider, in particular, that this unknown factor is responsible for a quite atypical pain known as “psychogenic,” that is to say, a pain whose origin is exclusively psychical. It is a question of a painful sensation effectively felt by the subject but without any cause that would explain it. Therefore, the official definition of pain proposed by the IASP betrays various uncertainties with respect to the role of the psychical factor. I would like to reproduce here the exact terms of this definition. Pain, it is said, would 49

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be “a disagreeable sensorial and emotional experience associated with a real or potential injury of the tissue or described in terms evoking such an injury.” With these lines, we can appraise the ambiguity of the term pain. More than a sensation, it is an emotion; an emotion that can emerge without the wound: “an experience . . . described in terms evoking such a wound.” We see how this definition recognizes the existence of a real pain, that is to say, one that is concretely felt and deplored by the patient without necessarily the existence of an organic wound that would justify it. In a word, the IASP recognizes that pain could indeed only exist in the experience and the complaint that expresses it. We measure the scope of the field of pain, which goes well beyond a strictly neurophysiological conception, and we understand why it is actually necessary to open new furrows in psychoanalytic research in order to situate the role the psyche plays in the determination of the painful event. Now, if we want to know why our patients suffer and why we ourselves suffer we must use the lens of metapsychology and descend to the heart of the ego in order to discover there the psychogenesis of pain. We want to shed light on the inner mechanisms of the unconscious representations to identify, as best as possible, the fluctuations of psychical tensions and thereby understand the irreducible incidence of the psyche in the birth of corporeal pain. The practice of psychoanalysis teaches us that an intense pain always comes from a severe disturbance in the ego, however momentary, and that once anchored in the unconscious it will reappear, transfigured, in painful and inexplicable events of everyday life. We will study physical pain following the three stages of its genesis: injury, trauma, and reaction. At the outset we will draw from the “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” a text from 18957 that contains the seeds of the major concepts of psychoanalysis. In these often very difficult pages Freud tries to develop an energetic model of corporeal suffering. He will never, in his rare considerations of the phenomenon of pain, be as precise or as rigorous as he is in this text. Before beginning our investigation, I must introduce here a terminological remark relative to the word ego, a term that we will use in different ways through the text. In order to hold firmly to the guiding thread of my discussion, I will use the word ego as a malleable concept. It will designate different functions and psychical states such as the ego-person, the body-ego, the conscious-ego, the endoperceptual ego-organ, the unconscious memory-ego, and finally the ego-inhibitor. All of the meanings that we attribute to the concept of the ego can be placed in two groups: in one group, “ego” refers to the “selfhood” of a whole person distinct from other individuals; in the other group it designates a particular agency of the psychical apparatus characterized by the specific attributes and functions. These various meanings are in no way

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arbitrary, each corresponds to a definition or a use of the term “ego” that was proposed by Freud at some point in his work. After this clarification of our vocabulary, we will address now how a pain emerges in the body and how it is transformed into unconscious pain.

The pain of the injury Let us consider the example of a serious burn on an arm. After a brief moment of terror, when it is anesthetized by the trauma, the ego experiences the local pain of a wound on the arm, and immediately experiences the indefinite and penetrating pain of a severe internal trauma. The ego has two simultaneous perceptions in this way: it perceives both a pain that it identifies [localise] as an external injury and a state of internal disturbance that invades it. These perceptions, while blended in the feeling of the same painful affect, are however quite distinct. Therefore, we are going to consider the pain produced by the injury and then consider the one related to the internal shock. We will then approach the third phase of the genesis of pain: the pain of the reaction. In order to defend against the shock, the reactive ego augments its pain awkwardly and paradoxically instead of reducing it. We begin with the pain of the injury. It is the affect experienced by the ego when it suffers a damaging of the tissues that, from the energetic point of view, appears as a brutal excitation that is imagined at the periphery. Whether it damages the external envelope of the body or the internal organs, any injury will be felt by the suffering ego as a peripheral attack. In fact, the body is experienced by the ego as its vital and sensible periphery, with the external world beyond it.8 Therefore, any corporeal injury, whether a superficial skin wound or a deep myocardial necrosis, will remain in the eyes of the suffering ego a peripheral incursion, an invariably surface injury. Let us be more specific. However, in the case of a very dramatic accident the ego is no longer disassociated from the body and no longer perceives it as a peripheral protective envelope. In such moments when we are our devastated body there is no longer a corporeal injury but it is our whole being that is shattered.

The imaginary perception of the wound, pain, and their mental representation The perception of a painful excitation that is imagined to be at the periphery—the case of the burn for example—immediately imprints the image of the wounded place of the body in the ego. The painful sensation is therefore

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revived by the birth of the mental representation of the wound. The subject feels a stinging pain and simultaneously it visualizes a diffuse image of the flesh and its arm. The perception of the wound is not only the grasp of a brutal transformation of the state of the protective tissues; it also acts as a stamp that fixes the mental representation of the wounded area in consciousness. We call the representation that will play a decisive role in the third phase of the painful process, “a representation of the wounded and pained place of the body.”9 Now, this mental image of the wound born out of the perception of the wound identifies and fixes the pain that is experienced. In feeling pain, the person who was burned believes that his or her pain is entirely contained within that wound and only emanates from the gaping hole in the tissues. It is as if the source of suffering was reduced to the place of the burn alone. The painful feeling is so specific and determined in the wound that the damaged region seems autonomous and stands as a tyrannical outgrowth that is detached from the body and wears down and weakens the ego. The sensory perception of the injury has formed the mental image of the wound, which is accompanied not only by the impression that the seat of the pain is in the damaged tissue and that the damaged tissue is on the periphery, but also by the impression that the painful place, detached from the body, has become a hostile growth. Surely, without the wound there would not be pain, but the pain is not in the wound, it is in the ego, entirely contained in an internal image in the ego—an image of the wounded place. To summarize, we can say that the ego is a sensible captor of changes in the tissues, but a bad mapmaker. It not only locates any corporeal injury as a peripheral wound but it is deceived when it believes that the source of the pain is in the wound. The pain is not in the wound, it is in the brain, in the case of the painful sensation, and in the underpinnings of the ego—in the Id—in the case of the painful emotion. In a word, the pain of the wound carries three aspects: real, symbolic, and imaginary. Real: a somatic-sensorial perception of a violent excitation affecting the organic tissues. Symbolic: a sudden formation of a mental and conscious representation of the place of the body where the injury took place. Imaginary: since the body is experienced as a periphery, any wound will be experienced as peripheral. The painful sensation, referred by the imagination to be the wound, seems to emanate only from the wound and the wound seems to institute itself as a second body.

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The pain of the trauma Let us consider now the pain of the trauma and clarify immediately that it does not occur if the sensorial excitation is weak. The stimulation would be powerful enough for it to trigger an internal trauma in addition to the damage to the tissue. We have said that the pain results from a twofold perception: one turned toward the outside (external perception) in order to perceive the injury and the painful sensation, and the other turned toward the inside (internal perception) in order to perceive the severe psychical disturbance that ensues. The first is named by scientists “somatic-sensorial,” and the second we call “somatic-libidinal.” If we reconsider the burn, the subject perceives both the pain emanating from the injured arm and the internal suffering that shakes him or her. The pain of the injury pierces the subject at the edge of the body, while the pain of the trauma consumes from within. It is as if the throbbing sensation of the burning of the arm located at the periphery came first. “I hurt” means that I circumscribe that pain and that, in a sense, I confront it. But soon another pain rises from the depths of being, quite different, essential, and profound. I do not possess that pain, it possesses me: “I am pain.” What, then, is that other suffering that takes over the ego and seals its misfortune to its very depths? In order to respond, one must reread the theory of physical pain elaborated in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” and apply it to the case of the burn. We will say that, while the heat of the flame attacks the skin, it is immediately transformed into a current of internal energy that is devastating and uncontrollable, plunging the ego into a state of traumatic shock. A sudden and massive flux of energy erupts through the breach opened in the protective barrier, an energy that submerges not the body, but the very core of the psyche (memory neurons). The homeostasis of the psychical system is thereby broken and its regulative principle—the pleasure principle—is temporarily abolished (Fig. 2). It is at that point that the ego, although upset, is able to perceive its own upheaval, that is to say, the panic of its libidinal tensions. This singular perception by the ego of its own state of internal disturbance—a somatic-libidinal perception—creates the painful emotion.

The unconscious memory of pain Pain is the last, immortal, fruit of youth. —René Char

Just as the impact of the external and local excitation creates the image in the ego of the wounded and painful zone, the violence of the trauma leaves

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External aggression

Injury

Protective envelope of the ego Massive surge of energy

Memory neurones

FIGURE 2

Pain results from an injury to the protective envelope of the ego and from a massive surge of energy that attacks the memory neurones. The ego is represented in the simplified form of a living vesicle.

its traces. There again it is a matter of the formation of an image, but a very different one from the immediate and local one elaborated consciously at the time of the wound. The internal trauma is so upsetting and painful that its image remains imprinted not only in ordinary memory—which retrieves the past as conscious memory—but engraved in the depths of the unconscious, which is also memory, a quite different memory. In effect, the unconscious harbors the past but does not reflect it to the surface of consciousness. Thus, the pain of the trauma remains marked in the unconscious, but its return will take other forms than the mere recollection of an unfortunate episode. Certainly the person who has suffered a trauma can recall the circumstances of the accident, recover the unbearable feelings that he or she experienced, and live in the fear of a new attack, but there are the other forms of the return of the trauma that he or she ignores. The

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past pain will re-emerge in an unexpected manner elsewhere than in the mind. Perhaps it will re-emerge in the flesh converted into another pain, or incarnated in a psychosomatic injury, or even in consciousness, for example, transfigured in another affect as oppressive as guilt, or even transformed into an impulsive act. All these are eventualities by which the pain of the past returns to the present without our identifying these returns as the resurgences of a forgotten suffering. This is why we identify as unconscious a former corporeal pain that has returned—as transfigured—to the present. Registered in the unconscious it reappears in diverse ways that are imposed on us without our knowledge. The subject repeats—Freud writes—but without knowing that it is a repetition. It is in this way that we distinguish clearly a first and very trying painful experience from its later reproductions. The past experience of a violent pain provoked by a real incident (such as a burn) is one thing, its reappearance transfigured in a new sensation—a psychosomatic injury— affect, or painful action, is another. While the pain of the past was provoked by an external agent, the painful manifestations of today can be provoked by an external or internal stimulation that is often insignificant and imperceptible. We can state this more clearly. From the moment when the first painful experience is registered in the psyche and reappears in an unrecognizable form, it has the status of an unconscious pain. But how can we explain the passage of a pain from an intensive corporeal pain to unconscious pain? We said that, at the time of the trauma, the violent surge of energy reached the central core of the ego (Fig. 2). Now, it is precisely at the heart of the ego that the traumatic experience is registered. In order to better show this capacity of the ego to conserve the unconscious traces of the trials that it undergoes, I must dwell here for a moment and briefly describe the constitutive elements of the ego. At the time of the Project, Freud imagined that the ego was composed of two essential elements: an “energy” that circulates tending to discharge, and neurons that carry it. One part of the energy comes from the exterior and the other propagates in the interior in the intra and inter neuronal space. The neurons are divided into three groups. One group, located at the periphery of the ego, perceives the stimulations of the external world.10 A second group, situated in the center of the ego—composed of “memory neurones”—does not perceive but conserves the traces of important events.11 This is precisely the group that will become, in Freudian thought, “the system unconscious.” In effect, the memory neuron is the conceptual ancestor of the Freudian notion of unconscious representation. In the same way that the psychical representation carries two disassociable elements, a figurative content, called “representative” and the energy that invests it, the memory

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neuron contains the mnemonic trace or image of a past event and the affect that invests it. In these two cases we have both a representative content and its affective investment. Finally, the third neuronal group, like the first, carries out a perceptual function directed not toward the external world but toward the inner world to capture the fluctuations of internal energy. These perceptual neurons do not only have the task of detecting the variations of psychical tension but also of echoing them in consciousness as affects, whether agreeable, disagreeable, or painful. They are agreeable when the rhythm of energetic flux is synchronic, disagreeable when accelerated and asynchronic, and painful when the rhythm is broken or in turmoil. What must we retain of this synthetic tableau? First, that this fiction of the ego imagined by Freud at the very beginning of the twentieth century remains—with some minor variations—the matrix of psychical life such as most psychoanalysts conceive of it today. A remarkable fiction indeed, judging by its echoes in the current scientific literature. Let us retain the concept of the memory neuron that assists us in understanding the transformation of corporeal pain into unconscious pain.

The passage from corporeal pain to unconscious pain We have shown that the ego, upset by the massive eruption of an implacable energy, nevertheless manages the self-perception of its internal disturbance, and we have shown that the pain results from the translation of this self-perception into consciousness. We have also said that the massive influx of excitation, entered through the breach and the wound, penetrates to the central group of “memory neurons.” The forceful passage of the energetic flux involves two consequences: the inscription of a mnemonic image in some of the neurons and an increased excitability of the neuronal system. The image that will remain engraved in the neuron is that of a detail of the aggression or the aggressive object. If we reconsider the example of the burn, it could be an aspect of the fire that is retained, its crackling, its odor, its colors, or else an element from the context of the accident. But this image, forever inscribed in the ego by the disturbance, is very different from the one imprinted by the wound. It is no longer a matter of the conscious representation of the site of the wound but of an image representing a particularity of the accident, one, however, that is not perceived by consciousness. The ego will keep the “photo” of a detail of the aggression in its memory, a mnemonic image definitively associated with the pain of the experience. However, the neuron that conserves this image remains extremely irritable. It is ready to react to a potential excitation, susceptible to be led to discharge

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its energy in the form of a new pain, wound, action, or painful affect. Freud advanced the term facilitation (Bahnung) to designate this phenomenon of the sensitizing of the memory neurons. The influx of energy has sensitized the neurons to such an extent that weak excitations will suffice to reactivate them and reanimate the image that they contain. These excitations will not be as brutal as the burn, but imperceptible and fainter. Such stimulations could be either external or internal. Thus, as soon as the mnemonic image of the aggression is reactivated by one of the unnoticed excitations a new pain can occur, for example, less violent than the first and located in a different part of the body from the one affected by the initial accident. In this case, the subject will experience an inexplicable pain that is without any discernable organic cause. He or she will suffer without knowing that the present pain is the active memory of a past pain. I would like to dwell for a moment on this painful return because of its clinical importance. This new pain—a frequent cause of medical consultation—often appears to the clinician as a physical suffering without organic cause. We can imagine a doctor confronted with a patient complaining of muscular, visceral, or tendon-related pain that cannot be explained. Perhaps he or she will be content to attribute this pain to a vague psychological origin and diagnosis it as a psychogenic pain. Prudently, he or she will probably prescribe an anti-anxiety medication, or perhaps a placebo. However, we are convinced that his or her clinical attitude would be modified if he or she admitted—as we propose in these pages—that the body is a screen on which memories are projected and that the current somatic suffering of the patient is the vivid resurgence of an earlier pain that had been forgotten. He or she would invite the patient to speak about earlier traumatic shocks, whether psychical or corporeal, that the patient could remember. But we have said that the earlier pain could just as well reappear transfigured in another affect that is as painful as a feeling of guilt, transformed into a psychosomatic injury or metamorphosed into an impulsive act. How do we explain these avatars of pain? It could happen that the flux of painful energy can strike other neurons than those upon which the image of the aggression is inscribed: other neurons, for example, that carry the traces of painful events that were experienced but then forgotten by the subject. Consider the case of a person absent from the bedside of his or her dying father and who has forgotten what, at the time, was considered a moral failure. Let us suppose that this moral failure remained engraved in a memory neuron. Later, on the occasion of a violent corporeal pain the neuron of the memory of the moral failure will be facilitated, that is, sensitized so that a slight ulterior stimulation will suffice to awaken an inexplicable feeling of guilt in the subject. The patient will feel oppressed and guilty without understanding the reason for it. With this short

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sequence, we see how the minor stimulation of a neuron, already sensitized by the facilitation of pain, can engender an oppressing affect, and provoke an injury of the tissue or even awaken an irresistible compulsion. Everything depends on the representational content of the mnemonic image inscribed in the reactivated neuron.

Our first pain Until now we have established that a violent physical pain that has become unconscious must necessarily resound in the life of the subject in the form of painful incidents. However, a question presents itself here. If we admit that a pain in the body can be the return of a former suffering that has become unconscious, why not generalize and think that all our physical and psychical suffering result from an originary pain? And if that is the case, what would that inaugural pain be? How far must one go back in time in order to grasp the most primitive painful experience? We do not know. Is it an extreme suffering experienced long ago; a first time at the dawn of life before being able to scream? Perhaps we have been traumatized and that trauma perdures, active in an odd memory. Can we situate it at the moment of birth, or earlier, during the stirring of fetal life? Or should we imagine it with Freud, as the pain of an archaic separation undergone even before the embryonic stage, at a pre-individual phase, encoded in the memory of the species?12 Certainly, we do not know from what immemorial suffering we have issued, but we can rest assured that it surges again with all physical or psychical pains and transmits to each its specific quality as an unpleasant affect. This primordial and intemporal pain constantly returns into the present in order to communicate to all the other pains, the mark of intolerable displeasure that we experience when we are sick or afflicted. But it is also the painful past experience that makes us experience each of our pains in a unique and individual manner. The experience of a pain is always the experience of my pain. Each suffers in his or her own way, whatever the cause of his or her suffering. Every time that a pain afflicts us, whether it comes from the body or from the mind, it blends inextricably with the earliest pain that lives within us. It is precisely this vivid resurgence of the painful past that renders the pain of the moment my own. The pain that I feel again is indeed my pain because it bears the most intimate seal of my past. However, if the repetition is the basis of the painful affect, can we not consider any affect—pleasant or unpleasant—as the reproduction of an originary affect? According to Freud, in effect, emotion is not only what we feel in the moment but is also the repetition of something felt long ago. An affect is always the diminished return of a first intense emotion. The most unique

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emotion that I can experience today, whether pleasant or unpleasant, inevitably repeats an archaic emotion. If, for example, faced with an unbearable scene, I feel overwhelmed by repulsion, I will have the certainty that I am experiencing a novel feeling as if I had never experienced it as such. Later, once the violence of the impact is attenuated, I will recognize that I have already felt a similar disgust. In a word: it is not a new affect, the affect is always the fruit of a repetition. But what intrinsically defines an affect? What is the core and vibrant substance of a feeling that I am feeling at a given moment? We cannot respond. Perhaps the in itself of the feeling is a pure, immediate, simple sensation, that unknown real that we call energy. But this statement is insufficient for the delineation of the nature of an affect. Since we do not know what it is, let us look at whence it comes: its origin. The genesis of an affect is nothing other than an awakening of a past affect. Let us insist that any affect is the repetition of a primordial emotional experience. It is certainly on the basis of this eminently Freudian understanding that we are able to identify the affect with the Lacanian signifier. A signifier, said Lacan, is always the repetition of another signifier. In that case, to say that the affect is a signifier would be equivalent to saying that there is no affect without repetition.

Unconscious pain is not a sensation without consciousness, but a process structured like a language Over the course of these pages, the brutal sensation of a burn has been imperceptibly transformed into an unconscious pain that cannot be grasped. By wondering how a trauma leaves its traces in the unconscious and how these reanimated traces are externalized, we were able to state that unconscious pain is the memory of an earlier traumatic suffering. In spite of the rigor of this definition, I want to dispel a final misunderstanding about the concept of unconscious pain. When we questioned the nature of a traumatic suffering that was so deep and so archaic, yet so vivid, we were inclined through a mental reflex to imagine it as an affective material palpitating at the core of our being. It is true that by identifying the earlier trauma with unconscious pain we might have led the reader to believe that this emotion was confined to a closed part of the psyche. However, it would be a mistake to depict it in this way. Unconscious pain cannot be reduced to the suffering of a moment, however traumatic, nor even be conceived as an enclave of hostile energy. It covers a much larger concept designating an active process that begins with a very intense somatic suffering provoked by an external aggression and ends with another, awakened by a light excitation (generally internal). Put differently,

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when the external aggression that provoked a traumatic pain leaves its traces in the unconscious, it also produces a state of hypersensitivity such that a mere spark can reawaken a new pain. In order to be more precise, we can say that the unconscious pain does not designate a thing or a sensation apart from consciousness but a circuit that, reactivated by a slight stimulation, discharges itself into a painful manifestation. Finally, the unconscious pain is an aptitude, an aptitude of the ego to remember an earlier traumatic pain, but not as a conscious memory; unconscious pain is the name we give to the unconscious memory of pain.13 What have we tried to understand thus far? Namely, that the psychical origin of corporeal pain is always the revivification of a primordial pain. Therefore, in the painful emotion we have both the unpleasant sensation of today and the reawakening of a first pain. It is precisely this reawakening that communicates to the unpleasant sensation of the moment its character as a painful affect, and furthermore, as a specifically human affect. Pain is human because it is unconscious memory. It is indeed the unconscious that humanizes the painful affect because it gives life again to the former pain of a founding trauma. Before moving on, we can already draw the following conclusion: at each stage of its genesis, corporeal pain is marked by the predominance of the psychical factor. In fact, we have seen how the psyche successively forms the representation of the body-injury (ego-consciousness), undergoes the impact of the disturbance (ego-upheaval), self-perceives the upheaval that it produces (ego-endoperceptor organ), and registers and restitutes the aforesaid disturbance (unconscious ego-memory). The developments that follow will confirm the powerful action of the psyche in the determination of the painful fact.

The pain of reaction We have understood pain as being provoked by a wound (a burn of the arm) and by the internal disturbance that follows. Then we have seen the pain of the disturbance inscribed in the unconscious and becoming the source of subsequent suffering. We can approach now the third stage of the formation of pain. To that end, let us return to the event of the burn, when the ego—submerged by the sudden influx of an implacable energy—sees its homeostasis broken and the pleasure principle neutralized. Now it is no longer a question of an overwhelmed ego undergoing the aggression, but of an ego reacting to the aggression. But with the defensive surge, far from suppressing the pain, the ego will suffer in another way. Rather than suffering from a submission to the pain, the

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ego suffers from a protestation against pain. Corporeal pain is no longer due to an injury and to the upheaval that goes with it, but from an immense effort of the ego to fend off the upheaval. Physical pain becomes the expression of a defensive effort rather than a simple manifestation of an injury of the tissues. But what is this defense that causes suffering? The answer to this question will be decisive for our later understanding of psychical pain. While the ego is in a state of shock what does it do to defend itself? How does it react? It performs a gesture that will increase the suffering; it tries desperately to heal itself alone by carrying out a sort of self-bandaging. In response to the injury the ego sends all the energy at its disposal to surround the wound in order to fill the hole and stop the massive influx of excitations. It is this reactive movement of energy—which Freud called “counter-investment” or “counter-charge”—that is opposed to the brutal eruption of excitation caused by the burn. However, this self-bandaging is not applied to the damaged tissues of the wound, but on the psychical representation of that wound. And the fact that the defensive counterinvestment does not concern the wound itself but the representation of the wound reveals the incontestably psychical nature of any corporeal pain. Why? Because the response to a physical injury is not only physiological but is also and above all a displacement of energy within the network of psychical representations that are constitutive of the ego. The body is wounded and the ego tends to it by concerning itself with the representation of the place of the injury (Fig. 3). Each time that our body suffers a violent event, a psychical reaction is triggered: the ego counterinvests the mental representation of the damaged place. An astonishing consequence follows from this: the pain provoked by the aggression is not diminished by this symbolic bandaging, rather intensified by it. This is the phenomenon of a painful and inadequate defense that I want to explain now. In what exactly does this defense consist and why is it painful? Further, what role does the representation of the area of the wound play? First, one must recall that the ego functions as a psychical mirror that reflects, in a mosaic of images, parts of the body, or aspects of things or people to which we are affectively and durably attached. We may then postulate the following hypothesis: when we are deprived of the integrity of our body or deprived of our object of attachment, when our physical integrity is at stake, an affective excess of affective investment of the image of the wounded place of the body occurs. When the presence of the object is at stake, an excess of investment of the image of the lost object occurs. Such a compensatory excess is translated into pain. In psychoanalysis, the overinvestment of the psychical image of a point of our body is called “narcissistic overinvestment,” and that of the image of a partial aspect of the object that is dear to us (the loved one) is called “the overinvestment of the object.”

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External aggression Real wound

Convergence of all the energy onto the representation (overinvestment)

Psychical representation of the wounded arm

FIGURE 3

The ego bandages the representation of the wound since it is unable to bandage the real wound.

But whether what is in question is corporeal pain due to the excessive investment of the representation of the injured place, or psychical pain due to the excessive investment of the representation of the loved and lost object, we are, in both cases, faced with the same phenomenon. The pain is engendered by the excessive affective valorization of the representation in us of the thing to which we were linked and of which we are now deprived; whether it be a part of our body or the person that we loved. Corporeal pain is therefore the sensible expression of a reactive overestimation of the representation of the injured part of the body and psychical pain is the sensory expression of an overestimation—just as reactive—of the representation of the loved and lost object. That being established, let us wonder once more how the ego attempts to overcome the disturbance brought about by the wound. Upset, it reacts in a survival mode by desperately grasping the psychical representation of the wounded part. It is as if it wished to cure the wound, not by protecting the damaged tissues, but by concentrating all of its available forces on the mental image of the injured area; since it is unable to bandage the wound itself, the

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ego bandages the symbol of the wound. In this way, to resist the disturbance it throws itself frantically at the symbol of the affected place and clings to it affectively with its entire being. It is precisely here that the pain appears; it results from the desperate effort of the ego to free itself from the disturbance by focusing exclusively on a symbol. We suffer because we panic in the face of danger. What causes pain is thus a futile focus on the image of the wounded body, an inadequate defensive attempt to address the disturbance, a local isolated attempt that, for that very reason, is doomed to failure. Certainly the question remains of knowing whether the ego could have reacted differently, more intelligently and less vigorously. Perhaps a global action would have been more efficacious and less painful than an isolated gesture. But the ego cannot do otherwise. Its blind contraction into a single point is a survival-reflex and is the only possible response so as not to despair in the face of the disturbance. We must stress this again: it is in this final reaction of the ego that pain originates. But it is here that another question presents itself: why does a passionate attachment to a symbol—I mean an excess of energetic charge investing a representation—become painful? The answer is contained in one word: “exclusion.” Yes, the mental representation of the injured organ is so charged with energy and so heavy that it is isolated and excluded from the system of the other structuring representations of the ego. The psychical cohesion then disappears and the ego must now function with a structure that is destabilized by the isolation of a representation within the system. Certainly the ego was able to contain the disturbance but at the price of engendering a monstrous affect that disturbs it from then on. It is thus, indeed, the polarization of all psychical energy upon a single representation that has become excentered that produces the pain. The corollary that rises from our assertion is simple. We will state it in the following way: there is no corporeal pain without representation. Far from tempering the pain, I intensify it by saturating the representation of my wound with energy. In this last stage, corporeal pain results from the reactive and passionate attachment of the ego to the symbol of the injured place of the body. We can put this more rigorously: the said symbol, overinvested with affect, crystallizes as a foreign body and weighs upon and rends the fabric of the ego. It is this tear of the internal fibers that provokes the pain.

Summary of the psychical causes of corporeal pain Now if I ask why I have a pain in my arm when I am burned, I can respond by employing the psychoanalytic vocabulary: apart from the neuro-biochemical mechanisms that generate pain, there is above all a connection of psychical

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causes, namely, the impression that my pain emanates from the burn; the selfperception of the panic of my libidinal tensions; the revival of immemorial pain; the mobilization of all of my forces on the mental representation of the injured arm; and, finally, the isolation of this representation.

The representation of the wounded and painful part of the body Let us emphasize that such a connection of causes inducing corporeal pain evokes that which presides at the formation of the psychical pain. We see that the logical schemas accounting for these two forms of pain are almost identical. However, one of their differences resides in the imaginary contents of the hypertrophic representation.14 Indeed, while for corporeal pain the representation refers to a wounded body, psychical pain refers to an object that has been loved and lost (a person, a thing, or a value). We will address at length the issue of psychical pain, or the pain of loving, but for the moment it is necessary for us to define more clearly the particular status of the representation of the injured part of the body. It will then be easier for us to understand the nature of the representation of the object loved and lost, a crucial element in the genesis of the pain of love. Let us ask now how the representation of the body is formed. What are its imaginary and particularly its visual contents? Let us underline from the start that the representation of the painful place did not exist before the injury, but is formed at that very moment. I mean here that this representation has not always been there, but emerges with the sensory perception of the wound and the impression that the pain is located in that place. However, the image of the injured body is not only contemporaneous with the injury, it also comes from multiple traces left in the unconscious by older pains and others’ desires. It is also shaped by the present experience of my body moving in space. This means that such an image of the painful place, overinvested by the ego in its attempt to defend against the disturbance, is based on a multitude of unconscious perceptions that have crystallized past events, registered the impact left by the others’ desire, which today receive the sensory vibrations of my living body. But if it is true that the representation arises on the basis of all these factors, it is also true that its passage into consciousness is ephemeral, it lasts however long the painful attack lasts. But what is the imaginary content that is proper to the representation of the injured place? Until now, we have referred to this representation as an “image,” “symbol,” or “psychical representation of the area that is injured and painful.” These terms are deceptive, because they suggest that the imaginary content is a faithful image of the injured part of the body. But we know that it is never an exact replica. The image of the painful place—whether con-

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scious or not—never corresponds to real anatomy but instead to a fantasmatic anatomy. No image of a corporeal region offers the strict reflection of the body as it is. My perceptions always remain deformed representations of reality, fantasies experienced by my body. Thus, the imaginary content of the representation is integrated in a fantasy that is already organized by our unconscious desires. The place of the body affected by the injury always appears as inserted in the fantasmatic scene of a dream and associated with the action of a fictive character. In short, the representation of the painful area that issues from my past and present impressions, fashioned by the impact of the bodies of the others, born from the injury and destined to concentrate the uncontrolled influx of energy in it, is the imprecise image of a fragment of a body at the center of a fantasmatic scene. Although it can penetrate into the field of consciousness, this image remains essentially unconscious. When it becomes conscious, its imaginary content frequently assumes a spatial configuration resulting from sensations that are as visual as they are tactile. Thus, when the suffering subject visualizes the internal or external region of the body that is in pain it represents it in space. Trying to describe its pain, it uses expressions such as: “I feel a heavy weight on me,” or, “I feel a hot poker stick,” or “a lump in my throat,” “I feel a barbell,” or yet again, “needles.” All these expressions show how the conscious image of the body in pain is a spatial and imprecise metaphor of the painful sensation. What must be kept in mind with respect to corporeal pain? Essentially, that it is the affect felt by the ego when, wounded, disturbed, or remembering a former pain, it makes the effort to overinvest the image of the injured part. This defensive gesture tempers the disturbance but increases the pain. Let us be clear about this: the state of disturbance hurts and the defense against disturbance hurts even more. With respect to the pain proper to the upheaval, we can add that this expresses the desperate effort of the ego to save its integrity.

Questions and answers concerning corporeal pain You have given us your conception of corporeal pain on the basis of Freudian theory. But how can one rely on a century-old theory of pain when there are so many new advances in the domain of the neurosciences today?

Psychoanalysis and neurosciences First, the Freudian model of corporeal pain, as we saw, carries an indisputable heuristic value since it helps us construct a rigorous theory of mental pain.

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But beyond this aid, it has permitted me, above all, to identify the psychical factor acting in the formation of any corporeal pain, whatever it may be. Let us recall, in fact, the basic Freudian idea, which we have formulated in the following way: there is pain sustained by the narcissistic overinvestment of the representation of the injured place of the body. Such a hypothesis seems so rich that I would not hesitate to propose it to neurologists who would seek to unveil the inner mechanisms of pain. You see, we are no longer waiting for current science to confirm earlier psychoanalytic elaborations. Quite to the contrary, we invite future scientists to extend the thesis of the overinvestment of the mental image of the affected part of the body. I am convinced that this Freudian thesis of overinvestment will become a key concept for the neurological research of pain in the future. That said, your question provides me the opportunity to draw a chart comparing Freudian concepts—particularly in the Project—with the hypotheses of neuroscience. I will then comment upon the theory of pain recently proposed by an eminent representative of the neurosciences, Antonio R. Damasio.15 I will attempt, therefore, to highlight the themes that are surprisingly common to psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. I think in particular of the definition of memory, which we identify with the unconscious and which neurologists explain in terms of images stored in the neurons. Another question is that of the rhythm of the drives with regard to the rhythm of the propagation of the nerve impulse. Finally, I will consider the relation between the structural network of the ego and the spatial order of the neuronal system. As you see, we have a good deal of work to do. Let us address the problem of memory. What does neuroscience teach us? It formulates hypotheses that are surprisingly similar to Freud’s first elaborations concerning a memory that occurs at the cellular level in “memory neurones” (SE I, 299–300). Today, some scientists, including Jean Pierre Changeux, postulate the existence of mental images stored in the neurons called “mental objects.”16 Others, such as Damasio, think that the mental images, instead of being stored in the cells, stem from a proto-image that they call a “potential representation.” The appearance of a painful memory, for example, would result from the activation of a so-called potential representation; this representation is not the memory itself but the means of forming the memory. In fact, the expression “potential representation” does not designate an intra-neuronal element but rather a very specific connection between different neurons when awaiting reactivation. But whether the neurons retain a stored image or whether they elaborate it on the basis of a potential representation, these scientific hypotheses are surprisingly similar to Freud’s early findings. You recall my remark about the memory neurons that are capable of retaining the images of the hostile object

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at the origin of a first pain. Recall our remark concerning the memory neurons that are able to store the image of the aggressive object at the origin of the first pain. We have said that the reactivation of the memory neurons by a slight endogenic excitation provoked either the appearance of a pain similar to the initial pain or various manifestations in the spheres of thought or action. These are manifestations the subject will undergo without understanding why. I think also of another rapprochement that can be discerned between Freud and contemporary scientists concerning precisely the “memory neurones” and the biochemical transmission of the nerve impulses. In fact, we know now that the painful feeling results, among other factors, from the mediation of a protein called substance P (where P stands for pain). The nociceptive message (of pain) is transmitted when the axon of a neuron secretes the neurotransmitter P that enters into contact with the receptors located in the dendrite of another neuron. Now we are surprised to see in the “Project” the hypothesis of the existence of a similar chemical contact between the “memory neurones” and another category of neurons called “secreting neurons.” According to Freud, these neurons, having themselves been stimulated by weak internal excitations, would release a substance that generates pain. It is a substance that, once produced, would excite the memory neurons, revive the image of the hostile object, and reawaken the former pain. In this way one can imagine that a weak endogenic excitation relayed by a secreted substance is capable of reviving the memory neuron and causing a new pain to appear. I find Freud’s ideas absolutely surprising given the time in which he proposed them (1895) and strikingly contemporary in relation to modern neuroscientific theories. You have advanced the idea of an unconscious memory by relying on the concept of “memory neurons.” Could you clarify the nature of these neurons and their relation to the unconscious?

Unconscious memory and the neurosciences We can first recall that in the “Project” Freud conceived of the ego as a neuronal network formed from two principal sources: the first, called “impermeable neurones” or “mnemic cells” are the neurons of memory, of which we have already spoken. Their function is to register the excitation they receive, to archive the photo left by the agent who provoked the excitation (a photo of the hostile object for pain, a photo of the love object for pleasure). Finally, they remain sufficiently in play to be reactivated later by a second excitation, however minimal. The function of the other neurons, which

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are called “perceptual cells”—of which we will speak later—is to receive excitation, but unlike the memory neurons they allow the influx of excitation to pass through them without keeping any trace. Now you just asked me about the relation between the memory neurons and the unconscious. Or, in other words, you are asking me to justify my claim that the neurons of memory are the conceptual ancestors of the unconscious representations. I will respond simply by affirming that these neurons, just like the representations, possess that particular capacity of conserving the past without necessarily allowing it to become conscious. It forms a memory of the past that is not conscious. What is the unconscious if not a memory? What is the unconscious if not a memory whose recollections are not actualized in consciousness but in our acts, our dreams, our bodies, unbeknownst to it? We can look again at the chart comparing psychoanalysis and neurobiology by approaching now their second point of encounter. It concerns the temporal variations of the propagation of the nerve signals, that is to say, the rhythm of the transmission of the nerve impulse. Currently, the latest neuroscientific research on the nature of consciousness is focused precisely on the problem of rhythm and the oscillations of inter and intra neuronal nerve impulses. A scientist such as R. Llinàs defines consciousness as a harmonious relation between the rhythm of the neuronal oscillations of the thalamus and that of the neurons of the cerebral cortex. Now, this concern of neurophysicians with the oscillations and rhythms of nerve impulses leads us back to Freud and to the interest he had in the rhythm of libidinal variations as well as to our own way of thinking of pain as the conscious expression of the rupture of the libidinal cadence. It is true that Freud only had a passing interest in rhythm, and only in two places.17 We would prefer to follow this path a bit farther and define all affect as the conscious expression of the rhythmic variations of the drives. Therefore, the feelings of pleasure or unpleasure would not be the expression of the level of intensity of the drives (pleasure = low intensity; unpleasure = high intensity), but rather the expression of oscillations of tensions, the alternate rising and falling of tensions during a defined period. From this point of view, we will say that pain is very different from pleasure or unpleasure. Why? Because it does not express a particular rhythm, but the violent rupture of that rhythm; this is the rupture of the cadence of the drive that, we recall, corresponds to the turmoil of the tensions, to the breakdown of the pleasure/unpleasure principle, and finally to the brusque cessation of the homeostasis of the economic system of the ego. Now this hypothesis that defines the affects as the surface expressions of libidinal oscillations requires, in order to be complete, the intervention of an intermediary agency. It is an agency that, on the one hand, detects the

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rhythm of the drives within, and on the other hand, echoes it to the surface of consciousness. What is the intermediary? It is the ego itself when it exercises its twofold function of endopsychic detection and conscious translation. You can see that the psychoanalytic concept of affect in general and pain in particular cannot be understood without the notion of endopsychic perception. This is a perception that, alone, allows us to account for the “radar” function of the ego when it registers the libidinal cadence and translates it into consciousness in the form of agreeable affects of pleasure, disagreeable affects of displeasure or even pain. Freud had already hinted at this notion of endopsychic perception of the ego when in the “Project,” while studying the perceptual neurons (a group distinct from the memory neurons), he differentiated two types. There are in effect two types of perceptual neurons. Those that perceive the excitations coming from the periphery of the body and others that capture the oscillations of internal tensions and transpose them into consciousness as affects. The first only perceive external stimulations and the others detect internal affects of these stimulations and translate them into conscious affects. Specifically, it is the latter group, the one that detects and translates, that interests us. The neurons that detect the amplitude and cadencies of the internal tensions play the role of a two-sided sensorial organ. On the one hand, they capture the tension of the rhythm and on the other hand they transforms these rhythms into diverse affects including pain. Thus, pain is an affect felt consciously that expresses intolerable variations and sudden ruptures of the rhythm of the drives. Let us continue our dialogue with the neurosciences and address now the third point shared in common. I had moved away from it to better explore a theme that is important to me, that of rhythm in relation to some of my major statements about pain. This third point concerns the incidence of the topology of the neuronal network on the transmission of the nerve signals. Today the neuroscientists have a growing interest in studying the spatial arrangement of the neurons. Now, I could not help comparing the topology of the neuronal network to the topology of the ego established by Freud in 1895 (SE I, 322–24). Once again, I was surprised to see how Freud’s early writings contained the signs of modern scientific developments. At that time, Freud conceived of the ego as a network of neurons organized in such a way that the flux of excitations running through it could, according to the circumstances, be inhibited. He did not hesitate to claim that “if an ego exists it must hinder the primary process of the psyche,” that is, hinder the circulation of free energy. The function of the ego is to stem energetic movement through a very precise spatial order: that of a lattice. This lattice is arranged in such a way that a neuron that is overinvested with energy can transfer part of its charge toward lateral neurons. The ego,

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thereby organized in the network, lowers the intensity of the tension because its architecture forces the energetic charge to fragment and be diverted toward neighboring neurons. The system of ego neurons thus becomes, through the singularity of its structure, a veritable organ of inhibition. How can we not see in this conception of the ego-inhibitor the germ of the concept of repression? It is as if the first form of repression resided in the ramified structure of the ego. That said, we should not forget that inhibition has a definite role, that of protecting the ego from an overflowing of excitation that would threaten its integrity. Now, pain, considered as the most imperious of all the psychical processes, is a particular state of high excitation that no inhibitor can check. It is a process that is certainly upsetting and uncontrollable but that respects nevertheless the integrity of the system. No doubt the painful affect breaks all internal barriers without, however, destroying the ego. We find again the limit character of pain that ignores the inhibition but does not damage the ego’s capacity to react. Pain hurts but does not destroy. To conclude, I would like to mention the theory of pain proposed by Antonio R. Damasio. Apart from our differences, I nevertheless have found certain points of analogy in his scientific work with our own psychoanalytical thinking. For example, Damasio distinguishes two parts in the perception of pain: on the one hand, a somatic sensorial perception that comes from the skin, from mucous or from the part of the organ where the wound is located— this is the perception of a local change of the body—and on the other hand the perception of a global disturbance of the body, an overall change. It is this latter perception that would correspond to painful emotion.18 According to this author, the brain would form, from these perceptions, two images of pain that would be superimposed at the moment of suffering: one a somatic sensorial image (the image of a local place of the body) and the other an emotional image (the image of the general and disturbed state of the body). The ego—which according to Damasio is an inevitable concept in scientific thought—would play the role of a third party, a sort of “meta-ego” whose function is to perform the syntheses and adjustments between the two images. Their juxtaposition produces a painful emotion. I am surprised to find, stated in different terms, points similar to our first two moments concerning the process of the formation of pain. In fact, you will recall, we have distinguished three moments in the genesis of any pain: the wound, the trauma, and finally the reaction. During the first moment, pain results from the perception by the ego of the peripheral excitation inherent in the wound; during the second moment, pain results from the perception, still by the ego, of the heightening of libidinal tensions. Now, Damasio’s conception of the somatico-sensorial perception, and of the sensorial image derived from it, evokes our conception of a perception of a wound and the

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representation of a wounded body that results from it. The other perception described by Damasio, whence comes the emotional quality, and that he characterizes as a perception of a global disturbance of the body, recalls our second moment of the formation of pain, namely, the ego’s self-perception of the state of internal disturbance. While Damasio speaks of the perception of the state of disturbance of the body, we advance the idea of an internal and immediate apperception of the sudden variations of the libidinal tensions or, more exactly, of the break of the rhythm of the drives. It is as if, in order to take account of the painful emotion, Damasio depended on the global perception of the body without daring to imagine that it is not the body that is perceived but indeed the psyche. The difference between us can be summarized in the exchange. Damasio would say, “Painful emotion emerges when the brain perceives the disturbed state of the body.” I would respond that “pain emerges when the distraught ego self-perceives the libidinal disturbance.” Could you speak again about psychogenic pain? How are we to understand that a pain is located in only one part of the body?

Psychogenic pain Let us recall first that psychogenic pain is not a psychical pain but a corporeal suffering, minor or major, acute or chronic, the origin of which is psychical (psychogenic means that it is of “psychical origin”). This is a somatic pain experienced by the subject without any organic reason to justify it, and to which one attributes—lacking a better alternative—a psychological cause that is in general unknown. It is a matter of persistent physical pains, most often erratic and deceptive. When they are attached to a specific place of the body, their locality remains enigmatic. Generally, the patient describes his or her pain in a self-indulgent manner, in a language rich in detail or at times confused and evasive. But more important is the special relationship that the patient maintains with his or her pain. The patient speaks of his or her suffering as a capricious or demanding other that inhabits his or her body. That said, before responding to your question on the place where the pain appears, I must pose another question: “What are the psychical origins of this psychogenic suffering experienced in the body without an identifiable organic cause?” I propose three possible origins of psychogenic pain. The first of the psychical causes capable of provoking a psychogenic pain presupposes the idea of a body endowed with memory. You will recall our discussion in the beginning. A much earlier pain, intense and felt in a specific place of the body, has left such traces in the unconscious that later an internal

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or external excitation—a stressful situation, for example—can provoke a lesser pain at the same place or in another area of the body. It is this second pain, a somatic memory of a past pain, that will appear to the eyes of the clinician as a physical affliction—quite real, but unjustifiable. The second hypothesis of a psychical origin draws from the Freudian theory that considers conversion hysteria as the leap from the psychical to the somatic. A repressed drive leaps from the domain of the unconscious to that of the body and becomes somatic pain. A past emotion, already forgotten but still active in the unconscious as a drive, becomes, for example, an inexplicable muscle pain. But what part of the body will be chosen by the drive to manifest itself as a painful sensation? It will locate itself precisely in the part of the body associated long ago with an intense emotion, that emotion that was the momentary emergence of an unconscious drive. The corporeal area marked by such a emotion remains, then, imprinted in the unconscious like an image. Let us take the example of a young hysterical woman who suffers cramps in the right thigh. We learned in the course of the cure that just before the appearance of these pains, the patient, taking care of her sick father, seated at this bedside, had rested the head of the father gently on her right thigh. At that moment she had felt a strange embarrassment, a mixture of shame and incestuous pleasure. This vignette shows very clearly the imperious surge of an incestuous drive repressed by modesty (repression) and felt as embarrassing. A similar emotion remained associated with this precise part of the body, the right thigh: today a place of guilty desire, tomorrow a place of physical pain. What has taken place? The incestuous drive first surfaced in consciousness as a feeling of embarrassment. It then returned to the unconscious, taking with it the image of the thigh, or more specifically, the tactile image of the sensual contact between the skin of the thigh and the hair of the father. Later, the drive reappeared as a painful contraction located in the very place where the father’s head had rested. The erogenous and guilty sensation of that moment has later become a painful sensation without apparent cause. While the second origin of psychogenic pain—the conversion hysteria— is explained by the transformation of a drive into a pain with any apparent cause, the third psychical cause refers to another sort of relation between drive and body. Let’s take the example of the young woman and change it slightly to illustrate our third point of discussion. Imagine that at the moment when her father puts his head on her leg and she feels embarrassed, a cramp—as if by chance—occurs in her shoulder. The embarrassment—the form adopted by the incestuous drive for its appearance—coincides with the appearance of a muscular ache in the shoulder.

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Thus, we can say that the drive encounters by chance a banal pain. Henceforth this accidental muscular pain affects the drive, and their fates are forever intertwined. So, in our example, the drive affected by the pain in the shoulder is changed later into a painful feeling situated in the shoulder without any explainable cause. We can see how a repressed drive can convert itself in a suffering body because it was wounded long ago, “stamped” by an earlier organic pain, however minor it was. We will call this third mechanism the somatic imprint of the drive. In other words, a banal pain, present in a certain place of the body and associated with the surge of a drive, has opened the way for that drive to reappear later in the form of a unexplained painful sensation in that same place of the body. If we want now to compare the hysterical origin of psychogenic pain to that other origin we have just discussed, we would suggest the following. Whereas conversion hysteria, in its very definition, falls under the Freudian concept of the “enigmatic leap from the psychical to the somatic,” from the drive to the body, the third cause of the psychogenic pain falls under a more general concept: a leap from the somatic to the psychical, then from the psychical to the somatic. There is a leap from an organic pain to the drive and from the drive to a “psychogenic pain.”19 Allow me a synthetic comment to conclude this point. Psychogenic pain can be defined in three different ways. First, as the painful revival of a former organic pain that has been forgotten: psychogenic pain is here the memory in the body of a former pain. Next, it can be defined as the painful expression of a repressed drive that previously affected a place in the body: this is the case of conversion. Finally, it can be the case that psychogenic pain manifests a drive that has itself been affected by a past organic pain: this is the case of the somatic imprint. I think I have responded to your question concerning the place where psychogenic pain chooses to appear. It can appear where a former pain—of which it is the memory—has appeared. It can also appear in the place affected long ago by a drive or a place where the drive had been affected by a previous pain. You have defined unconscious pain as a chain of events beginning with a painful trauma and ending in the reawakening of that trauma. But how can we speak of a pain that would be both experienced and unconscious?

Unconscious pain I prefer to respond to you by proposing a schema that clearly separates the past from the present, that is to say, the past traumatic pain and its reappearance in a present pain. I hope to show you that unconscious pain is different

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from a nonconscious feeling. It is not an object in itself but a relation between two objects or, more exactly, a relation between two events: one past and the other present. Let us begin with the past. In the past, a real incident happened in the course of which a hostile object provoked a very intense pain (D1), even violent. We have referred to it as the pain of disturbance. An unconscious psychical representation then conserves the trace of the aggressive object in the form of a photo, or a mnemonic image of the said object. The representation formed in this way has two parts: an imaginary one, a mnemonic image of the hostile object (more precisely of the detail of said object), and another one, an energetic charge that renders the image vivid and that we call the investment. The union of the image and its investment constitutes the psychical representation per se. Beyond this clarification I have taken the liberty of using the words image and representation interchangeably. The pain (D1) was so upsetting that the trace of its event remained extremely susceptible to new excitations or to new investments. The slightest impression could henceforth reactivate the trace. In a word, the striking event of the pain or trauma has left two traces: the photo of the aggressor and the susceptibility of that photo to a new investment, however minimal. Let us move now to the present. Thus sensitized, the representation receives a circumstantial investment, that is to say, a momentary and occasional stimulation. As soon as the image is reactivated, a reflex discharge takes place in the form of a new pain (D2). The subject who suffers today thus experiences a pain (D2) without being able to establish any connection to the initial painful incident. It could also happen that the reactivation of the mnemonic image of the hostile object produces, not a second pain, but other manifestations in everyday life: dreams, unexplained behavior, or unusual affective states. What causes the reactivation of the mnemonic image to manifest itself through a pain rather than some other disturbance? This depends on the type of stimulation that has reawakened the image or other associated secondary elements. But consider this above all: the subject who experiences a pain at the present time or who suffers disturbances in his or her everyday life has no inkling of the temporal schema we have established. It is a schema that begins with an initial pain that has been forgotten, proceeds to the reactivation of its unconscious trace, and ends in the experience of a pain or a disturbance in everyday life. Consequently, we call unconscious pain the entire process that is ignored by the subject, having begun with a traumatic pain and culminating with the current feeling of a painful experience. Unconscious pain is, finally, the name we give to a circuit, imprinted by a pain we experience, reactivated by an occasional excitation, and finally manifested by another pain that is felt. It is the entirety of

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this circuit that can be reactivated—apart from our consciousness—that is called unconscious pain. We see therefore that, in itself, unconscious pain is not “a sensation without consciousness,” a pure, simple, and unknown sensation, as Maine de Biran stated, but an unknown chain of events that culminates in the pain we feel today.20 Certainly, unconscious pain only exists in the concrete actuality of my present pain. If we want to be more exact, we should modify our claim and state: unconscious pain only exists after the appearance of the current pain. Why add “after”? Because I could only deduce the existence of unconscious pain, retroactively, on the basis of the first beginnings of my current pain. But this pain without a discernable cause presents me with an enigma. This is precisely its obscure nature that causes me to return to the past and finally establish the events that determined it. What is this return to the past if not the act of the one who listens to the enigma of pain? This is what we want to explain. Unconscious pain only exists in the deferred action of listening. I thought about the model of conversion hysteria that you used to account for psychogenic pain and I wonder if the most ordinary corporeal pains are not always in part hysterical.

Pain, hysteria, and psychosis Your question fits nicely in our analysis. I think, in fact, that all the pains that affect us—from the most serious to the most banal—are to some extent hysterical. We could formulate this otherwise: organic pain originates, in part, according to the mechanism of conversion hysteria. However, I sometimes wonder about the affinity between the formation of a corporeal pain and the genesis of a psychotic symptom. It is as if the advent of a corporeal pain evoked the advent of hysteria and even that of a psychosis. In fact, the choice between hysteria and psychosis depends on the way one conceives the fate of the representation of the wounded body. You will recall one of the major hypotheses concerning the genesis of pain: the overinvestment of the mental image of the wounded and painful region of the body. The problem, precisely, is of knowing how long the ego can bear this representation that has become unbearable for it. We had suggested that the representation was excluded from the group of the other representations of the ego; that is to say, it was irreconcilable with the rest of the system. But the question that presents itself concerns its degree of exclusion. Is it excluded while remaining connected to other representations? Or is it excluded to the point of being rejected and shunned by the ego, as if the ego tore this harmful part of itself from its entrails and expelled it outside itself.

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This line of questioning may seem abstract and purely speculative, but it raises a major clinical problem for the practitioner. If the psychical representation was held apart while remaining in the system, corporeal pain would be explained by a mechanism of conversion similar to that of hysteria. Pain would thus be the somatic double of a symbolic element or, in other words, the somatic expression of the representation of the wounded body. Following this line of thought, we would take corporeal pain to be a hysterical symptom or would even conclude that all physical suffering, in whatever form, is to some extent hysterical. We could even state that the psychical part at the basis of all organic pain is subject to the same law of conversion hysteria. If, on the contrary, we follow another line of thought that takes the exclusion of the representation of the wounded body to be a radical exclusion from the ego, we would assimilate the mechanism of corporeal pain to foreclosure, that is, a specific mechanism of psychosis. In that case, we should draw another conclusion: all physical pain obeys the same laws of production as psychotic hallucination. Finally, what position should we adopt? We cannot decide. We observe once more the extent to which pain slips between the fingers and evades reason. And we see that it is situated not only at the limit of the body and the soul, but also on the border between hysteria and psychosis.

Lessons on Pain

The pages that follow are the transcription of an oral seminar that was the basis of this work. In spite of the stylistic differences between these lessons and the preceding chapters, a single intention guides the entire book: to raise pain to the rank of a psychoanalytic concept. In the course of these lessons, influenced by Lacan’s theory, you will find a kind of thinking in progress, which is not the transmission of an already established knowledge. Also, in order to remain faithful to this spirit, I have preferred to maintain the oral tone, the unavoidable detours and questions that inevitably punctuate the paths of an elaboration. However, a clear hypothesis orients our entire project: pain is one of the most exemplary figures of jouissance; jouissance here is not understood in the sense of sexual pleasure, but as the maximal tension that can be borne by the psyche. Thus, pain is the final stage of jouissance at the limits of tolerance.

Lesson 1. Pain: The object of the sadomasochistic drive Pain is one of the forms in which sexuality appears in transference Let me outline the contour of our problem. Why should we study pain? Where is the question of pain to be situated? I remind you, first, that we are particularly attached to the thesis concerning the identification of the transference relation with the unconscious. We already advanced this idea some time ago, and I have tried to maintain it ever since: it is our point of departure. One could even state that transference, like the unconscious, is structured like a language. This seems to me to be a novel proposition that opens several fields of research. Specifically, I have had the opportunity to comment upon a work devoted to transference, written by Merton Gill, a famous psychoanalyst in the United States. In that article, I made the following suggestion to the author: in the final analysis, there is nothing more binding between two people than the thread of signifiers that is common to both. This implies that at different moments of the cure the analyst and the 77

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analysand are capable of speaking without knowing what they are saying. Nothing binds us more to others than responding to them without understanding the implications of this response. Such an intertwining of signifiers binds us far more than any love or hate. Transference is therefore far more powerful at the level of signifiers than at the level of affective relations. Now, in such a transference structured like a signifying network, sexuality emerges just as it does in the unconscious. Let us call this sexuality “jouissance,” and ask ourselves how jouissance presents itself in the analytical situation. How does sexuality manifest itself in the analytical relation? Is love sufficient? Is it enough to say, “there is a transference love,” to admit the presence of sexuality? These are the questions that lead to the issue of pain. I believe, indeed, that pain is one of the ways sexuality—and even jouissance— appears in the transference. This is what we are trying to investigate, uncover, and understand. Now, between these general questions that aim at identifying the various forms of jouissance in the transference (and, in particular, the question of whether pain is one of these forms), there is the following intermediate link: I believe—this is my hypothesis—that all forms of jouissance within the transference relation are dominated by the object. I call these different forms of jouissance “formations of object a.” This unifying expression is a way for me to seek a common logic. Thus, we investigate pain and are trying to determine whether it corresponds to the logic proper to the formations of object a, that is, whether the appearance of pain within the cure obeys the same laws as those of the manifestations of jouissance in the transference. It is therefore from this perspective that I will approach the theme of pain. Recall that we already stressed the characteristic of pain as excitation.21 We referred to the Project, where we found the definition of corporeal pain as a violent excitation erupting in the system that protects the psychical apparatus against excitations (SE I, 322–24). The only important point to retain here is that pain, considered as a traumatic excitation, does not belong to the criteria of pleasure and unpleasure. Certainly, it is an unpleasant affect, but it has a very different quality than unpleasure. We recall that the occurrence of pain means that the pleasure/unpleasure principle that regulates the functioning of our psyche has been abolished. We could thus claim that whenever there is pain, we are beyond the pleasure principle.

Unconscious pain is a sexual satisfaction We are now going to consider pain as an object. We can begin with two questions found in Freud’s work, although they were not very clearly formulated by him. I would like these questions to be yours as well: “How can pain provoke sexual satisfaction?” and, “How can pain be unconscious?”

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Let us begin with the first question, and let the second one insert itself in our discussion. We ask: “How can pain lead to sexual satisfaction?” Freud provides an answer to this question with which we do not agree. He answers by using the concept of facilitation, according to which a sexual excitation arises from a bodily excitation. For our purpose, we could say that sexual excitation is based on a painful sensation. Through various texts, Freud would claim that physical pain, as an excitation exceeding a certain quantitative threshold, can be the source of a perverse sexual pleasure. In fact, from a psychoanalytical perspective, all sexual pleasure is perverse since it takes place at the margins of the physiological life of the body. Sexual pleasure is an “excess” that is superimposed on the strict satisfaction of a need (or a disorder of the body): it is always a parasitic pleasure of the body. Thus, a physical pain can very well give rise to an excitation and a satisfaction of a sexual nature. This is the position held by Freud in two texts, “Three Essays on Sexuality” (SE VII, 123–43), and, twenty years later, “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (SE XIX, 159–70). Elsewhere, in “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (SE XIV, 117–40), Freud would take an opposite view, noting that it is physical pain that exceeds and encroaches on the sexual domain. But whether pain exceeds sexuality or sexuality exceeds pain, they are always combined. Freud names this relationship “libidinal co-excitation.” This is how he would answer your question: the libidinal co-excitation accounts for the fact that one can find a perverse pleasure in a painful experience. Such an answer, however, does not satisfy us; we must go farther. One needs to raise a question that is not often asked: What is the genesis of sexuality, from whence does it emerge? Freud’s answer and, later, Lacan’s are both quite similar. Sexuality emerges in our relationship with the orifices of the body, where there are edges, insufficiencies, palpitating lips, where the body trembles, opens and closes. Sexuality emerges where the body vibrates and opens in a gap that is not only orificial but also temporal. There is indeed a temporal gap between the drive erupting through partial and disorganized bursts and an immature ego that is not ready to manage these uncontrollable excesses of desire. Freud says as much when he situates the ego prior to the sexual drives it cannot manage and beyond these same drives, when the ego imagines the body to be more mature than it is. With Lacan, it is even more explicit insofar as he invents the wellknown mirror stage. What is at stake in such a stage is a discordance, a fundamental gap between a premature body and the anticipatory image of that body that is already mature. There is, therefore, a temporal gap between an incomplete body and its reflected image, one that is overly unified and elaborate. There is also a gap between a body that experiences the distressing swarming of internal sensations, and its image that, before it, reflects it in a unified and jubilant manner. Sexuality emerges in the discordance between

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our immature body and an imaginary order that anticipates a maturity that will never really be attained. It is in this gap between levels, between these two planes of the body and of the image, that we can situate the place of the emergence of the libido conceived of as a kind of hydraulic energy. But the mirror stage still does not offer us the complete matrix of the genesis of sexuality. What gives us this complete matrix is indeed discordance, but not between an immature body and an image, not between a lacking body and an anticipatory image, but between the desire of the child and that of the mother. For psychoanalysis, the essential, almost axiomatic discordance consists in the fact that the desire of the child is absolutely inoperative before the desire of the mother. One could almost say of these two desires that one is impotent, and the other impossible. One could also state that the impotence of the child’s desire—impotence of the physical means that are necessary for the sexual act—faces the impossible, that is, inaccessible character of the mother’s desire. It is in this discordance experienced by the child, between the impotence of his desire and the inaccessibility of the desire of the Other that, at the phallic stage—at the stage of the Oedipus complex—sexuality emerges. Let us change our terms, and instead of speaking of “the emergence of sexuality,” let us say “the emergence of the phallus as signifier.” On the basis of this fundamental discordance between an incomplete, premature desire—that of the child—and the intolerable and impossible desire of the mother, the phallus emerges as a signifier that indicates all dissymetries between impotence and impossibility, or between the immature condition and the imaginary illusion of a possible whole.

Pain: A new object of the drive On the basis of this situation where one sees the phallus emerge into prominence, psychoanalytical theory asserts that all objects that we characterize as objects of the drive—the voice, the breast, the gaze, etc.—follow exactly the same separation, the same detachment from the body as the phallus. In the same way as the phallus emerged, the breast will also appear as the object of the oral drive, the gaze as the object of the scopic drive, the voice as the object of the invocating drive, and the feces as object of the anal drive. I would suggest that pain is engendered in the same way and obeys the same conditions as the emergence of all these objects. Let us however note that the phallus, in contrast to the objects of the drive—pain included—not only detaches itself from the body, but above all constitutes itself as a signifier. The phallus is the only object that can become a signifier. Let me clarify this. The breast—as object of the oral drive—the gaze, etc., are certainly objects constituted in relation to the castration complex, but none of them have the possibility of becoming a signi-

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fier like the phallus. All are aborted phenomena that cannot become signifiers. It is different with the penis. At the oedipal stage, in the relation between the desire of the child and the desire of his mother, the penis is not an object that is lost, but only threatened. This threat provokes such anxiety that the child is forced to find a solution to this impasse. To remove the threat of the mutilation of his organ, he must find the most humane solution: that of inventing a signifier. To save his penis, he transforms it into a symbol. Now, the difference between the penis and all other objects that are consumed by desire and detachable from the body, is that the penis remains the only part of the body that is capable of becoming a signifier. There cannot be a signifying breast, a signifying voice, or signifying feces, for the simple reason that none of these objects can be detached under a threat or in a state of anxiety. Thus, none of these parts can accede to the rank of signifier. However, they will remain attached to erogenous orifices and will become inoperative in the domain of sexual desire. It is as if sexual desire was attracted to these objects, consumed them, then disposed of them. The object of the drive—such as the pacifier or even the mother’s nipple—is thus a disposable object: once it has been used by our desires, we drop it and move to something else, to another object. This is what Lacan would have called the “fall of object a.” The fate of the penis is quite otherwise; it does not fall but on the contrary it is raised to the status of the signifier of desire. Now, precisely when desire consumes an object and a residue remains, the fall of this remainder follows the logic of sexual desire and its signifier, the phallus. The relation of the child to the breast is a relation dominated by desire: the child seeks the breast, consumes it, and finally abandons it. We will say that weaning is a separation ruled by the phallic signifier for the simple reason that the phallus is the signifier of desire. Let us note that the attraction for the breast, from our perspective, is an expression of the sexual desire of the infant, and that the pleasure of sucking is also sexual. It is precisely this process of separation that we need to investigate, not by treating of the breast or the gaze, but of pain. The idea I would like to propose is that one should add pain to the list of the objects of the drive, and conceive of its detachment from the body as a separation brought about by the phallic signifier. Now what are the conditions that allow us to think and verify that pain is phallic, that is, that pain is an object that can be consumed? In other words, how can we understand the fact that pain satisfies an essentially sexual desire? There are three conditions that I would like to propose: • The Other must be present for sexual desire to exist. • For sexual desire to exist, there must be a motion of the drive following a circular trajectory composed of three curves: the first, an active one, goes toward the Other; the second, a passive one, comes from the Other; and the third, also active, is directed at oneself.

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• Finally, in order to claim that pain is an object of sexual satisfaction, it must prove to be an object-hole. It is indeed this last condition that is the most difficult to accept.

Is there an “eroticization” of pain? In the Freudian concept of libidinal co-excitation, we have the explanation of “eroticization of pain.” We know that a painful affect can be the source of a sexual pleasure. But we can also understand this “eroticization” differently. Let us imagine a fractured leg. The subject reacts immediately by investing the painful bone injury narcissistically. Freud would have said that the ego overinvests the painful spot in the body narcissistically. More precisely, it overinvests the psychical representation of the wounded and painful area. Freud does not say that there is a narcissistic overinvestment of the wounded place of the body, but of the mental representation of that place. Now, what is the psychical representation of the painful spot? It is nothing other than an isolated representation in the network of egoic representations. I remind you that one of the definitions of the ego presents it as a mental projection onto the surface of the body. The ego is, in effect, a topical mental projection. That is to say, the narcissistically overinvested representation is a mental image, a representation of a particular corporeal area. Probably the affective and energetic overinvestment of the psychical image of the wounded place can be understood as a libidinal overexcitation that is equivalent to the perverse sexual pleasure “based on” a physiological function. From this point of view, a corporeal pain would necessarily involve a certain eroticization. With respect to eroticization, I would like to cite a beautiful passage from Freud. To explain eroticization as the overinvestment of a representation, he uses the example of an erect penis. Freud writes: “Now, the familiar prototype of an organ that is painfully tender, that is in some way changed and that is not yet diseased in the ordinary sense, is the genital organ in its states of excitation. In that condition it becomes congested with blood, swollen and humected, and is at the seat of a multiplicity of sensations. Let us now, taking any part of the body, describe its activity of sending sexually exciting stimuli to the mind as its “erotogenicity” (SE XIV, 84).

Pain as object of the sadomasochistic fantasy Let us return to our question: how can we accept the idea that pain provides sexual satisfaction? We could have been content to respond that pain is a phallic jouissance. But it happens that these new elements require us to recon-

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sider things from the beginning. To identify pain with phallic jouissance means that pain is a sexual jouissance engendered under the aegis of sexual desire, and its signifier, the phallus. We should then find in the emergence of pain the same oedipal context where the powerless desire of the child faces the inaccessible desire of the mother. However, I already stressed that this response did not satisfy us and was in no way helpful for our understanding of the pain of melancholy or that of hysteria, for example. For a pain to be considered as sexual jouissance, there must be more than the reproduction of the phallic situation: the three conditions that I just stated must be present. Now, the three conditions are verified when we consider pain as the object of the sadomasochistic drive. Without dwelling on the general concept of drive, and before going to what I think is the heart of the matter, I would simply like to make a few remarks about the sadomasochistic drive. First, I say “sadomasochistic” drive and not “sadomasochistic perversions”; indeed, drive is not perversion. The difference is clear: in the drive, the object is present in a naked state, stripped of any semblance [semblant], while in the perverse staging, what gives coherence and coordinates the perverse scenario is precisely the semblance of the libidinal object. For example, the object of the scopic drive is the gaze, but what counts in the perversion of the voyeur or the exhibitionist is not the gaze in itself, but the form, the semblance of the gaze. Now, what is the semblance of the gaze in the case of the voyeur? It is the modesty of the other, the blushing of the little girl faced with the fact that someone sees her nude. Or even the surprise, the shame, and the anger of the lovers discovered while making love by someone in hiding. What the voyeur really seeks to come upon is not the intimacy of the couple, but the moment when the surprised partners will cover up in shame and react with violence. In this way, then, in perversion it is not the object that matters but the semblance of the object, that is to say, the effects that the object provokes and the situation it creates. In the case of the drive, it is the object itself that matters. There is a second difference between drive and perversion, namely, that in the latter case, the object is petrified and crystallized in its semblance and the actors in the scenario play stereotypical roles. For example, in sadomasochistic perversion, the place of the subject can only be that of the agent or the victim; in voyeurism, the pervert is the one who sees; in exhibitionism, the one who reveals. In the case of the drive, the subject does not occupy a clearly defined place—one should even say that the subject is not there, that there is no subject. The drive is an egoless montage reduced to the bare form of a circuit that gravitates around an object—whether it be the gaze, pain, or some other object. I therefore am speaking of sadomasochistic drive, and not of sadomasochistic perversion. This, of course, is only a theoretical difference, but it will always be difficult to discern precisely whether it is drive or perversion that is in question. It is already important that we clarified this distinction.

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Now, pain in the sadomasochistic drive only appears after three stages. Those three successive stages of the drive follow two of the four vicissitudes of the drive. These vicissitudes are, one recalls: repression, sublimation, turning back on the person, and finally the reversal of aims. The two that interest us here are the turning back, which concerns the source, and the reversal, which concerns the aim. Following the way processes of reversal and turning back take place, we will distinguish three stages: three stages that are defined according to the grammatical forms of the verb indicating the action of the drive. With respect to the sadomasochistic drive, the verb is “to torture,” and the three stages are therefore: the active form (“to torture”), the passive form (“to be tortured”), and the reflexive form (“to torture oneself”). Pain only appears at the end of the three stages (Fig. 4). The first stage of the sadomasochistic drive—“to torture”—corresponds to the movement of a purely sadistic tendency, sadistic in the general sense of the term. In this first active appearance of the drive, the aim is to torture the Other, but without the intention of making him or her suffer, nor of taking pleasure in the suffering. It is not a matter, strictly speaking, of provoking pain in the Other. Freud makes an important remark, in this regard, to which he returns often. Sadism of the first stage is an aggressive libidinal tendency, to be sure, but without the intention of provoking a suffering. He calls it the “drive to mastery,” that is to say, the drive to possess the object without intending to hurt it. There is a will to conquer the Other and dom-

4. The pleasure of torturing the Other (sadism)

To torture oneself

The pleasure of torturing the Other (aggressivity)

1. 3.

EGO

2. The pleasure of being tortured by the Other (masochism)

FIGURE 4

The four modes of the sado-masochistic drive: 1. to torture (aggressivity); 2. to be tortured (masochism); 3. to torture oneself; 4. to torture (sadism).

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inate it without making it suffer. Freud gives the example of “sadistic” children who destroy all they encounter without, however, seeking to provoke pain. We can refer to this sadism—destructive but not malevolent—as “original sadism.” The second stage—“to be tortured—is that of turning back this sadoaggressive tendency on oneself. It is in this turning back on the person that the ego truly experiences pain and masochistically enjoys the experience. This would be the pain and the pleasure provoked by the torture that the supposedly sadistic Other would inflict on him or her. What Other? The ego itself or, more precisely, a part of the ego. The ego splits in two: one part that causes pain and the other that suffers and experiences jouissance from the pain. I just said “ego,” although earlier I claimed that there was no subject in the drive. We will nonetheless use this term during our explication and one will see how the ego disappears as a subject. The second stage is the masochistic stage. But it is necessary for me to make a remark here. Freud significantly modified his conception of masochism. In 1915, he formulated things as I have explained them, while in 1924, in the “Economic Problem in Masochism,” he added a further specification. He thought it would be better to conceive of masochism as no longer appearing after the sado-aggressive drive, but as already there, even before that first stage. This is what Freud called “primary masochism.” But, I suggest—so that we not confuse our paths—we set this remark aside and come to the third stage, as described in metapsychology (SE XIV, 127–29). The third stage is to “torture oneself”: “When once feeling pains has become a masochistic aim, the sadistic aim of causing pain can arise also . . .” (SE XIV, 128). In the third stage of “secondary sadism,” the tendency is to make the Other suffer and to take pleasure in its pain. But Freud’s thinking is not so simple. Until now, we have not discussed sexual pain. In this last stage of sadism, properly speaking, the pleasure of making the Other suffer could only be understood if we accept that the victim is first and foremost . . . the ego itself. The humiliated other, beaten, humbled, or soiled, is the ego, as if there had been a second return upon the self. In fact, the drive returns twice on the ego: a first time, when it takes masochistic pleasure in being tortured by the Other (second stage), and a second time, when it is a matter of experiencing the same pain that the tortured Other experiences. The ego tortures itself and hurts itself, in order to know what the tortured Other would experience. It is in this case that Freud uses the verb in its reflexive form: “to torture oneself.” One sees that the third stage of sadism, properly speaking, involves two parts: that of hurting oneself and that of causing the Other to experience the same painful feeling. Let us dwell for a moment on this third stage, “to torture oneself.” When I say “oneself,” I mean that it is the ego itself who is both victim and agent of

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the torture. I ask that one not take this reasoning to be fancy theoretical footwork: this is in fact a central notion from the clinical point of view. Why? Because, if we accept this idea, we must draw several conclusions from it. What, finally, does this stage of “self-torture” mean? Whether it is a matter of pain that one inflicts without malevolent intention (first stage), or of a pain that one submits to masochistically (second stage), or of a pain that one identifies with the Other subjected to sadism (third stage), we are always dealing with a masochistic pain, that is to say, the pleasure of a pain suffered by the ego. This is why Freud tells us that there is an identification of the ego with the Other who suffers. In the context of the sadomasochistic drive, pain is always felt by the ego, either because it suffers it, or because it identifies with the one who suffers it. We can conclude that sexual jouissance, in the context of the sadomasochistic drive, always remains a fundamentally masochistic jouissance. Thus one should no longer speak of a “sadomasochistic” drive, but only of a masochistic drive. We must make a remark here. Even in the case of perversion properly speaking, the sadist who tortures his or her partner also undergoes a masochistic jouissance. Why? Because he or she acts following the will of an Other. In other words, I can undergo jouissance masochistically as the victim of a punishment, but can also undergo jouissance by being submitted to the law or the will of a master. Since the sadist acts following the will of a supreme master, he or she undergoes jouissance masochistically through his or her servility. These remarks are clinically important because they alter our psychoanalytic listening. I am not necessarily speaking of perverse patients, who rarely seek analysis, and, if they do, do not stay long. The true pervert only seeks consultation at certain moments of collapse and such moments last a very short time. This is why it is so difficult to have a clinical experience with subjects who act out perverse actions. Nevertheless, they teach us a lot about the perverse fantasies of neurotics. Thus, when we receive a patient who presents the symptoms of a perverse sadist, we try to make him or her understand that the jouissance that permeates him or her is in fact a masochistic jouissance, since it is the object of the will of the Other. Let us come to our conclusion, namely, that pain only appears in the third stage: causing oneself pain, torturing oneself; pain only appears when the ego identifies with the other who suffers and, beyond that, with the one who provokes the pain. As soon as the ego identifies with the masochistic and sadistic Other, as soon as it assumes the two roles, it inscribes the characters of the sadomasochistic fantasy on the scene of its psyche: a sadistic superego and an ego that is always masochistic. In the case of hysteria, we find the same duplication: recall Freud’s text “Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality” (SE IX, 166). He describes the example of a

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fantasy where the hysteric is both the violator of the young girl and the violated young girl. Freud drew this conclusion from a case of a patient who mimicked a rapist with one hand, and mimicked the call for help of the victim, with the other hand. From this example, we understand that a fantasy always implies an interchangeable double position: subject-violator and subject-violated, executioner and victim. In the case of the sadomasochist, we find the same complexity: the ego is the one who causes pain, who inflicts pain on itself, and the one who endures the pain. What is important in each case is that the subject undergoes jouissance masochistically. Why? For the simple reason—I insist—that he or she undergoes jouissance from being, at one and the same time, the victim and the agent. Let us summarize: as sexual jouissance, pain emerges precisely when the ego abandons external reality to live through the characters of his or her fantasy alone. A convergence and condensation appears between three terms: the ego who suffers the pain, the sadistic ego who tortures itself (sadistic superego), and pain itself. We therefore have three terms that are merged in one element: the ego that undergoes jouissance from its own suffering. In sum, we are faced with a convergence of Ego/Other/Pain, the three becoming one and the same thing in the fantasy. But in what does pain consist? Pain is the object around which the libidinal complex is organized and around which the libidinal circuit turns. Pain is—this is how I defined it in my book L’Inconscient à venir 22—an in-between, a body-interval. Pain detaches from the body and falls in the intermediary space between the ego and the Other, between the ego who undergoes jouissance from suffering and the one who undergoes jouissance from causing suffering, or, more simply, pain falls between the masochistic ego and the sadistic superego. We can certainly consider pain as an object with which the ego identifies, but pain remains in itself an absent object around which the libidinal circuit turns. That is what is difficult to understand: apart from the fantasy, we have no clinical representation of the drive, and even less of the libidinal object. If you ask me where pain is located in the transference, one would need to look into the sadomasochistic fantasy in the analytic relation and imagine that pain—the libidinal object—has no substance. It is a painhole, a pain-interval.

What do you think of the sadism of the tormenter? There is a better word to designate the tormenter: the “torturer.” In the light of our discussions, I would say that the sadism of the torturer is a masochistic jouissance. What becomes of the torturer? His or her fate is to realize—at

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times quickly, at times slowly—that he or she was only the miserable instrument of someone else. When he or she tortured the victim, he or she ignored the fact that he or she underwent jouissance masochistically from being the instrument of a supreme master who commanded him or her. Beyond his or her coldness and cruelty, the torturer is something of a monstrous puppet. The pervert encounters the same limit when, for example, the masochist realizes that the pain must not be too intense—for that would mean death— or when the sadist realizes that he or she is nothing other than a puppet guided by the hands of a master. It is at this point that he or she anguishes before his or her own clown-like image. This confrontation of the pervert with its own limit is called “the denial of castration.” Such an expression means that the perverse subject recognizes that he is castrated while denying his limits and believing himself capable of going beyond them. Now, precisely, no speaking being can undergo jouissance fully. This is why masochistic jouissance remains a partial jouissance in relation to an incommensurable jouissance, that of the will of the Other. This is where the problem lies: the notion of the Other functions as much for the pervert as it does for the psychotic and the neurotic. For the neurotic, there is a jouissance of the Other, but it is not, as it is for the pervert, the jouissance of a God or a Master. The Other of the neurotic is a father who enjoys and possesses all women, it is a fantasmatically perverse father. For the perverse subject, on the other hand, the jouissance of the Other is the insatiable will of a master who commands him or her. For the neurotic, the jouissance of the Other is the debauchery of the father. Before concluding, we can introduce the theme that will be developed in the next lesson. I just stated that, in the drive, the object appears stripped of any semblance, while in perversion, semblance occupies the center of the perverse scenario. Now, the semblance that crystallizes in the sadomasochistic scenario—the semblance of pain—is the scream. What is fetishized, what is crystallized, that around which the perverse scene is arranged, is a scream that simulates pain as well as pleasure. The simulacrum of pain, that is, its fetishized feature, is the scream.

Lesson II. Pain in the negative therapeutic reaction We find five libidinal trajectories represented in the schema in Fig. 5. Each of them corresponds to an object of the drive. The first is the oral object, then the anal, followed by the scopic object or gaze, the voice, and, finally, pain. The two first libidinal trajectories correspond to the demand of the Other; the first four correspond to the desire of the Other, and all of them—specific pains—correspond to the jouissance of the Other. As a whole, we would say

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Objects of the drive

Oral

Demand of the Other

Anal

Pleasure principle

Desire of the Other

Glance

Jouissance of the Other

Voice

Pain

FIGURE 5

Pain is a new object of the drive, when the drive is out of control and is no longer ruled by the pleasure principle.

that all these libidinal trajectories are ruled by the pleasure principle, except for pain, which supposes the neutralization of this principle. We previously identified the three conditions that would allow us to approach pain as an object of the sadomasochistic drive. Following the four stages of the libidinal trajectories, we found that the ego, the Other, and

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pain merged in one phenomenon: pain as an object of the drive. Now this identification is called “fantasy.” More exactly, it is called masochistic fantasy. I do not say “sadomasochistic fantasy,” but only masochistic. I will not go back over what we have already established. As an object, pain only appears at the source of the drive, after the double loop of the circling of the libidinal trajectory, when the second little loop closes. Let us recall the three stages of the libidinal motion: “to torture,” “to be tortured,” and “to torture oneself.” It is when the second loop closes—“to torture oneself”— that the ego identifies with the object-pain. It is at that point that pain is finally constituted as an object of the drive, that is to say, as sexual pain. But let us not forget that pain, as a libidinal object, is also a fantasmatic pain, an object of fantasy. As a libidinal object, pain is a hole, an absence; and as an object of fantasy, it is that same hole, but filled by the subject (identification of the subject with the object). Now, whether as a vacant hole or as a hole inhabited by the subject, whether as real or fantasmatic, pain remains invariably unconscious, as unconscious as the “originary fantasies” of which Freud spoke. We thus propose to add pain to the list of libidinal objects (objects a). If the breast is detached from the body, following the cut of the demand for the Other, the feces detached following the cut of the demand of the Other, the gaze following the cut of the desire of the Other, and the voice following the cut of the desire of the Other, pain, on the contrary, is the ultimate object, the ultimate fantasy. That fantasy does not face the demand or the desire of the Other, but its jouissance. What does this mean? This means that pain is the part that is sacrificed to avoid suffering, and to avoid confronting intolerable jouissance—even if this jouissance is an unrealizable threat. The extreme and intolerable jouissance—the jouissance of the Other— remains for the neurotic the background of all his or her fantasies, from the primal scene until what concerns us now, the sadomasochistic fantasy. In the case of the latter, in contrast to the other fantasies, this unimaginable and unattainable suffering becomes imminent and perceptible. The most caricatured human figure by which the neurotic represents the Other in a masochistic fantasy of flagellation, for example, is that of a perverse Other. Now this Other laughs about my suffering, is cruel and severe, demands and commands. What does he or she command of me? He or she commands that I undergo jouissance and suffer, and undergo jouissance from my suffering. “Undergo jouissance!” [Jouis] screams my perverse superego, “Undergo jouissance from everything beyond your pain and beyond your very life. Experience death while still alive!” In relation to the absurdity of such an exhortation, the actual jouissance that I draw from the sadomasochistic fantasy—the pain and the pleasure of feeling it—is only a “lukewarm satisfaction,” a very restrained response to the unrealistic commands of a perverse superego. In a

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word, pain is a dam against the jouissance of the Other in two ways: I undergo jouissance from the pain in my flesh so as to avoid suffering the mad jouissance of death. But I also suffer the pain of the whip in order to appease the perverse will of the Other. Let us conclude that, for psychoanalysis and for psychoanalysis alone, pain is a peculiar relief for two reasons: first, because pain is a suffering in order to escape suffering, a partial suffering associated with a fantasy in order to avoid an unlimited and dangerous suffering. This partial suffering is also a peculiar relief, because this pain satisfies a strong need to be punished.

The strange need to be punished What need? What is the nature of the imperious necessity requiring a pain to appease it? This need is nothing other than an intrasubjective tension that we call unconscious guilt. Guilt is that tension between the ego and the superego, more precisely, an anxiety. Guilt is indeed an oppressing anxiety that demands an urgent discharge and its immediate exteriorization. Now, what better way to relieve the tension and the guilty anxiety than to be punished and hurt? This is why the pain that I feel in my masochistic fantasy is a relief. This relief is all the more definitive if a part of dramatic reality is added to my fantasy. It indeed happens that an accident, sickness, or death, occurs at the right moment for us to endure a real pain, and thus justify the guilt that was, until then, latent. It is as if unconscious guilt waited for misfortune in order to be externalized and relieved. There was a time in the history of psychoanalysis when a few of the first psychoanalysts were quite preoccupied with this fantasmatic guilt, a guilty and unconscious anxiety that is externalized in a pain, a pain that is sought after and experienced as a relief. After the publication in 1923 of the essay “The Ego and the Id” (SE XIX, 12–66), a few psychoanalysts such as Reik, Tausk, Reich, and Alexander were concerned with the problem of how a pain could offer relief. To the Freudian expression of “unconscious feeling of guilt,” Reik would add the qualifier “painful,” and would invent the expression, “painful feeling of guilt.” Tausk would speak of painful pleasure. In these expressions, we see the superimposition of three emotional states. First, guilt, which is an anxiety that can be described as painful (“painful feeling of guilt”). Second, there is the pain felt in a fantasy or in reality following a mishap. It is this pain that we believe to be the object of the drive. And finally, the third emotional state, that of the pleasure experienced by the subject when he or she endures a pain—real or fantasmatic—that relieves the tension of the anxiety of guilt. We call this pleasure of pain masochistic partial jouissance. These matters are complicated by the fact that not only is the

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subject capable of undergoing jouissance from the pain provoked by punishment, but also from the distressful feeling that guilt itself represents. Freud calls this pleasure of feeling guilty “moral masochism.”

The negative therapeutic reaction: A model for the formations of object a There are many clinical forms of masochistic fantasy that transform the guilt of anxiety into a relieving pain that brings jouissance. But the most important one is the “negative therapeutic reaction.” This is a question that mobilized analysts significantly in the 1940s and even in the 1920s. In what does the negative therapeutic reaction consist? One finds that, against all expectation, after the analysand has followed a sustained treatment and his or her condition has improved, suddenly his or her symptoms worsen. Why is this the case? What accounts for the sudden occurrence of a relapse such that the patient is worse than when he or she began treatment? Freud dismisses two possible reasons. The first is narcissistic inaccessibility, that is, an excess of narcissism that oftentimes leads the patient to confront the analyst and interrupt the cure. The second reason, which he also dismisses, is what he calls the secondary benefit of the sickness: the state of the analysand worsens in order to attract both the attention and the love of the psychoanalyst. But none of these reasons are satisfactory to explain these negative reactions, such as a relapse in the therapy. Freud interprets the sudden worsening of the symptoms otherwise. He believes that this relapse results from the (mute) unconscious need to be punished. I mean “mute,” in the sense of a state of need without obvious indications that might be detected. But Freud’s hypothesis goes farther. He proposes the striking idea that the unconscious need to concretely experience pain, and thereby suppress the distress of the anxiety of guilt, is perhaps borrowed from another person. Indeed, the subject would assume the guilt of another, would feel its distress, and would assuage it by a curiously alleviating suffering. Someone has given the patient an unconscious feeling of guilt, but it is the patient who pays the price. Now, given the conditions of transference, why not say that the unconscious feeling of guilt of the analysand has been transmitted by the psychoanalyst? I do not say it is necessarily the analyst, but neither do I exclude it. I wonder, and Lacan also wondered (in his commentary on “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”) with respect to the stumbling block of castration—that is, the subject’s refusal to assume its femininity for narcissistic reasons—whether it was not the way Freud had conducted the therapy that led the patient to hide behind his narcissistic femininity and interrupt the treatment? If we keep in mind the transference principle, I do not see why we could not accept that the unconscious feeling of guilt comes from the psychoanalyst. But let us not go farther for now.

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This example of the negative therapeutic reaction led Freud to wonder in what clinical form the unconscious feeling of guilt appears most often. From reading “The Ego and the Id,” one has the impression that the clinical context that corresponds to sadomasochistic fantasies would be obsessional neurosis. But Freud says no! The unconscious feeling of guilt does not appear in obsessional neurosis; it can appear there, but this would not be its distinguishing feature. The exemplary case for what concerns us here is hysteria and the hysterical states. Unconscious guilt hardly appears in obsessional neurosis because the obsessional subject is better prepared and has more defenses. It is as if the obsessional was able to master and contain his or her guilt, whereas the hysteric remains quite exposed. If we evoke, for instance, the case of a suicide, we know that a suicide is more likely, for the same reason, for a hysteric than an obsessional. We should also note that the hypothesis of an unconscious guilt and an alleviating pain is already clearly formulated in Freud’s letters to Fleiss.23 The first time Freud mentions Hamlet, he characterizes him precisely as a clinical case of the unconscious feeling of guilt. In sum, the negative therapeutic reaction is the clinical expression of a sadomasochistic fantasy, or of a masochistic fantasy alone. But what is the relation between a fantasy that we say is unconscious and its clinical manifestation? The problem I am concerned with is that of the “expression” or the “externalization” of the unconscious. It is precisely this problem that led me to propose the hypothesis of the formations of object a. Indeed, the negative therapeutic reaction is certainly a phenomenon that can be easily observed, and that both analyst and patient can notice without difficulty. However, the unconscious guilt and the fantasmatic pain that alleviates it remain elusive. I conclude from this that pain, however unconscious and imperceptible it may be, returns to the subject as a clinical formation. A clinical formation, in the eyes of the patient, seems to have no connection with the unconscious painobject (libidinal and fantasmatic object). The observation of both analyst and analysand is that the symptom worsens. Yet, they establish no connection between this worsening and the underlying pain. When I say, “pain returns to the subject,” I simply mean that pain is perceived, but in a disguised manner. The object appears to the subject to be outside, like the perception of a mishap with no connection with its true unconscious cause.

The leap of the libido from an unconscious fantasy to consciousness Here, I must stop for a moment to outline a logic of the formations of object a. I am thinking in particular of one of Freud’s texts, in which he tries to distinguish paranoia from schizophrenia. This essay—a few manuscript pages

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sent to Jung around 1907—is an attempt to systematize various “vicissitudes of the drive” and various “forms of repression.” These are his very words: “vicissitudes of the drive,” and “forms of repression.” At that time, all the analysts, whether in Vienna or Berlin, were concerned with the question of narcissism, which was then the dominant theme. Freud himself wanted to understand the mechanisms of various clinical structures with the aid of metapsychology. Paranoia, schizophrenia, hysteria, hypochondria, and melancholia were explained as movements of withdrawal of the libido. According to Freud, the withdrawal of the libido varies according to the ego to which the libido returns. The libido withdraws in different ways according to the pathology of the ego. Recall that we have defined various kinds of egos and emphasized the shattered ego—that of a schizophrenic—that is characterized by an essentially autoerotic agency toward which the libido returns. We also emphasized a hypotrophic and megalomaniacal ego as a model for primary narcissism. I will not insist on this, but I will discuss Freud’s most interesting remark when he proposes that, in paranoia, the libido leaves partially the representation of the object and returns to the ego. Now, the frequent error, when we say “withdrawal of the libido,” is to suppose that the libido leaves the external world to return to the ego. But the libido does not detach itself from the external world! The libido detaches itself from a psychical representation of an external object, and this is an essential nuance. Why? Because the movement of the libido is intrasubjective and not intersubjective: it moves exclusively within the ego. Given that, for Freud, the representation of the object is equivalent to a fantasy of desire, we shall say that the libido leaves a fantasy partially and not the external reality. To what source does it return? Let us put this question aside for the moment in order to consider a second remark that seems important. Libido partially leaves the representation of the object, which is not the external world, and not the external object, but rather, a fantasy. And the following proposition seems particularly advantageous for our hypothesis concerning the formation of the object. Freud advances this: the libido leaves the representation of the object, which, unburdened of its libidinal investment, is transformed into a conscious perception. Thus, the representation passes to a state of perception. And he specifies—an essential remark—that when a representation is invested libidinally, it is a matter of an endogenous endopsychic perception. In other words, the representation of the object, the fantasy of desire, or endogenous perception, would be one and the same thing. However, when the endogenous perception, that is, the representation, is freed of its investment, it becomes a perception of an external object. Freud adds that in the case of paranoia, the libido partially leaves the representation of the object, which then becomes a conscious perception. Thus, the libido that had partially left its representation, returns onto the ego and strongly invests its perceptual sur-

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face, which is nothing other than consciousness. By investing consciousness intensely, the libido renders every external perception excitable. It is with this argument that Freud explained the phenomena of delusion and hallucination. In other words, it is very interesting that hallucination and delirium only emerge and constitute themselves following the leap of the libido: it leaves the fantasy in order to invest consciousness exclusively. I take this occasion to clarify my approach to Freud. My references to the Freudian texts, although quite faithful and carefully articulated, are not strictly literal. I read Freud in the movement of his thought into my own and in the movement of the life of my patients. Thus, I can only give you my own reading, or, more exactly, what in Freud nourishes my reflections. I will now apply the same logic to our sadomasochistic fantasy and recognize in it the same internal displacement of the libido. In this way, we can understand the mechanism of the formations of object a. Let us be clear: the idea of the formation of object a came to me as an echo of the formations of the unconscious. These are characterized by their strict conformity to the law of signifying combination: each signifier of the formation of the unconscious remains linked to the other signifiers metonymically (displacement) and metaphorically (condensation). I will not go over this again because most of you are familiar with the Lacanian logic of the signifier. On the contrary, what we lack is an argument to explain the place of the object of the drive, in a suicide, for example. We lacked a hypothesis to take account of pain in the negative therapeutic reaction. Why? Because all the clinical phenomena where the drive seems out of control [affolée], such as suicide, delirium, hallucination, acting-out, or even the negative therapeutic reaction, are psychical formations that are self-sufficient and do not refer to anything else. We already established the distinction between formations of the unconscious and formations of the object in Les Yeux de Laure, but what I want you to consider now—and Freud’s text gives us an argument that is helpful—is the relation between unconscious pain as either an object of the drive or as a fantasmatic object, on the one hand, and the negative therapeutic reaction, on the other hand. I will classify the negative therapeutic reaction in the same category as a hallucination, a delirium, or an acting out. Because, in fact, these formations are more than just clinical examples; they constitute psychical formations that only refer to themselves and consist in the following: the pain-object, to take up the negative therapeutic reaction again, is not only a libidinal and fantasmatic object. The said reaction is also that which transforms itself into a sudden worsening of the symptoms. Suddenly, my patient takes ill, becomes aware of it, and I, the analyst, perceive it as well but neither of us understands what is going on. Acting out is the same sort of thing. All these are psychical formations, returns of the libidinal object that, while internal, appear to the subject as coming from without: the subject perceives

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the guilt and the pain in the guise of a worsening of his or her symptoms. Now, precisely, why not apply here the Freudian idea of the displacement of the libido that withdraws from the fantasy in order to invest consciousness? We would say that the masochistic fantasy is disinvested and reappears outside, transformed in a reality perceived as external. Unconscious guilt and pain appear, then, in an external and disguised form. The negative therapeutic reaction would be, then, the perceptible simulacra of these two unconscious affects. That being the case, there is a mask that pain adopts frequently, one that is very different from clinical pathological formations: the scream and tears. The scream and the tears are semblances that are the most attuned and closest to that object that is unconscious pain.

Drive, fantasy, and perversion I would like to discuss three problems, three questions derived from the following remark: all objects refer—more or less—to the jouissance of the Other, but pain is its purest case, its most homogeneous exemplar. In other words, the jouissance of the Other is an immense suffering experienced by the subject as a hypothetical danger. The mere idea of excessive jouissance causes great fear. Now, pain is also a suffering, but a partial one, and reduced to the boundaries of a fantasy. From this point of view, pain is the most evocative representative of an inaccessible jouissance/suffering. This juxtaposition, however, raises three problems. The first problem is that of masochism. How do we define masochism? Masochism is a position from which the subject maintains a certain relation with satisfaction, that is say, with sexual satisfaction, and even better, with partial sexual satisfaction. Clearly, “sexual,” does not mean “genital,” but a pleasure that is other than the pleasure procured by the satisfaction of a need. Masochism consists in the following: the subject takes pleasure from being in the place of the object with which the Other undergoes jouissance. We have characterized the Other as a super-egoic pervert. It is, in effect, the two faces of the superego that act, on the one hand, sadistically, and, on the other hand, as a master who commands. Now, this definition of masochism can be applied to all cases of fantasies that are constructed around various objects: the breast, voice, and gaze. Each time that the subject takes the place of the object in the fantasy, as a voice, the gaze, pain, or a breast, it adopts a masochistic position. Structurally speaking, any fantasy is formed from the subject’s identification with the object; consequently, any fantasy is basically masochistic. Henceforth, the following question arises: how can we distinguish the properly masochistic fantasy from the other fantasies, in which the

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subject adopts a masochistic position? We have already given the beginning of a response by proposing that masochism is an identification of the subject with the object, more precisely with the object of a perverse Other: the Subject undergoes jouissance from subjecting itself to the will of the Other. The second problem is that of the erogenous zone. What is the erogenous zone that corresponds specifically to the libidinal pain-object [l’objet pulsionnel douleur]? In “Three Essays on Sexuality” (SE VII, 201), Freud located it in the skin. I believe that this is not sufficient, and that one should say instead: it is the skin, but also the muscles, the muscle tone, to the extent that the action of striking provokes pleasure, namely, the muscular pleasure of flagellating the Other and of giving it a thrashing. But apart from the two erogenous zones—skin and muscles—that specify pain, another aspect defines masochism even more: screams and tears. The scream, as we stated, is the most intimate semblance of the pain-object. We will speak of the scream in the next chapter. At this point, I need to raise a third problem. What difference is there between masochism such as we have defined it in the fantasy—as being the object with which the Other undergoes jouissance—that is, what difference is there between fantasmatic masochism and the properly perverse masochism? Indeed, as we have indicated previously, drive and fantasy are not perversions. Perversion is not fantasy. What distinction can be established between fantasmatic pain, in all of its clinical forms, and perverse pain? There is a fundamental misunderstanding with respect to perversion. One believes, because of a hasty description of perverse behavior, that perversion only exists on the condition that there is an Other [l’Autre]. One does not imagine a pervert without a partner. Now, from the structural point of view, one must think the opposite, namely, that the other [autrui] in the scenario of the perverse act only counts to the extent that he or she provides the basis for a form. He or she is only important because he or she has a body with a precise visual or auditory figure, and because he or she embodies a silhouette that one can move in space and that one can manipulate. The perverse world is a world without others, or rather a world in which the other is reduced to the role of a soulless puppet in the service of a director. The perverse world is a lifeless world, inhabited by mimes and inert mannequins, full of masks and costumes, movements and staged positions. In sum, it is a theatrical universe filled with forms and their combinations. If we wanted to translate this cold and regulated presence of perversion into our analytic terminology, we would say: perversion is the universe where repetition prevails, and perverse action is a bizarre behavior designed to master repetition. At times, the mannequin is the masochist who obeys the instructions of the sadistic pervert; at other times it is the inverse: the mannequin is the sadist who follows the instructions of the masochistic pervert.

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You see now why the masochist is not, properly speaking, a slave, but a master, a master “manipulator” of the forms and semblances of pain. The pervert is the master of the semblance; he or she discerns and isolates the semblance, fetishizes and appropriates it. These are the three moments of the perverse operation: detachment of the semblance from the lived experience of the partner, fetishization and appropriation. Now the semblance that the masochist masters best is the scream. The pervert is the one who succeeds in disassociating semblance from jouissance, or, better, the one who succeeds in disassociating semblance from partial-pain jouissance, or, rather, the libidinalpain object. In other words, the pervert excels in the art of semblance, he or she is the master of the scream. The masochistic fantasy is exactly the opposite. While in the perverse world, the Other is absolutely rejected outside, in the masochistic fantasy the Other is absolutely assimilated. The Other is so present, so included, and so absorbed by the ego, that the ego identifies with it. The other gives substance to the fantasy. While the pervert separates semblance from jouissance, the neurotic, on the contrary, blends semblance and jouissance in his or her fantasy. If, as we have said, the world of the perversion remains the world of repetition and of the fixed code of forms, then the world of fantasy is the world of the possible: anything is possible in the fantasy since the subject makes the Other play all the imaginary roles, and the subject plays them as well. This is exactly how we must think clinically about the fantasy. When we work with a patient and think of the fantasy, we must suppose that the subject is everywhere and takes every possible position. I would like to speak of the scream and suggest this formula: the scream is the semblance of pain. But before being a mask, the scream is a demand, a call, the most primal and primitive call, and the most inarticulate. The scream is already a statement, but an ultra-condensed statement, almost an interjection. I asked a linguist recently if he understood the scream as an interjection. He responded that some of his colleagues in fact considered it in that way, and that some others considered it even more elementary than an interjection. From the economic point of view, Freud considered the scream as a release, a release of an excess energy. Given a high level of excitation (which is nothing other than pain), the scream is a dissipation of energy. But this release has a secondary function. The scream is a call directed toward two recipients: first, toward the Other, and then toward oneself. The scream will be considered as a theme in the next lesson.

Is there a relation between the direct perception of the exterior and the image? There are two ways to respond to the question. This question is quite opportune because it allows me to clarify the logic of the formations of the object.

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My first response borrows from Freud’s text, which we just discussed, and in which he explains that an endopsychic perception can become an external perception. One can consider, in effect, that the new investment of the conscious perception is an overly immediate apprehension of the external object. It is as if the intermediary of an image was lacking. To offer a better response, we could examine the relation between conscious perception, representation of the object, endopsychic perception, and, finally, the image. Freud, at the time, was not concerned with the image; the only image that mattered to him was the ego ideal. The ego ideal was the ego to which the libido returned. The second response, which seems more accurate and more complete, borrows from Lacan’s optical schema. It would be necessary to clarify that, in the case of hallucination, delirium, or the negative therapeutic reaction, the virtual image disappears. More precisely, the virtual image and the object it reflects are disassociated. Normally, in the sadomasochistic fantasy, such as we have described it, the Other is absolutely included, absorbed by the subject, and the subject by the object. Now, this absorption of the Other occurs due to the virtual image that the Other reflects back to me and, particularly, through the hole of the virtual image. What hole? The one Lacan calls (– φ) or “imaginary phallus.” It is through the image reflected by the Other, and the hole in this image, that I appropriate it. In fact, there is only a fantasy on this condition: the imaginary dimension. In other words, one sees that when we speak of the imaginary, it is not simply a matter of an image but of an image with holes [trouée], pierced [trouée] by the imaginary phallus, that is to say, affected by a missing part. What is missing in the image, that is, what is not reflected there, if not the libido that invests the image? As energy, the libido cannot have an image. It is not specular. While the masochistic fantasy takes the form of the negative therapeutic reaction, it is perceived without the mediation of a virtual image. In order to use your adjective “direct,” there would be in fact a sort of “direct perception” of the external object that would constitute the primary operation of the formations of the object. In other words, the formation of the object, unlike the fantasy, is devoid of both a virtual and phallic image. There is no imaginary mediation, whether in acting out, in hallucination, or, in the negative therapeutic reaction. Therefore, I concede that there is no imaginary; but above all, that there is no virtual image with holes. What matters in the image is not the image itself, but that it has holes, otherwise, it would not be a sexualized image. Why insist on this? Because to state that an image has holes means that it is the constitutive surface of a sexual fantasy. If there was no (– φ), if the Other was a full image without holes, the scenario of the fantasy would not be sexualized and, to speak in Freudian terms, there would be no libido. Psychoanalytically speaking, the image only interests us to the extent that it is invested with libido, that is to say, sexualized and with holes.

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A response to a practitioner who asks for clarification concerning a patient’s dream It is difficult to publicly analyze a particular dream. When the analyst listens to a patient narrate a dream, the analyst may have the impression that his or her thoughts return from the outside. I hear a dream and it is a voice from outside that expresses my thoughts as if they were spoken out loud by someone else. Your patient narrated his or her dream by describing a scene. But while listening, you were, at that very moment, rewriting that scene as you rewrite it now by asking your question, and as we all rewrite, inevitably, when recalling our dreams. We all rewrite our dreams. Without going into the details of the narrative as you reported it, I will make an observation. You should know, first, that we are in a public context and not in a supervision. If we were, my interventions would depend on the transference established with the analyst who would have shared his or her analysand’s dream with me. My first observation brought on by this dream refers to primary erogenous masochism and its relation with the psychoanalyst. Let me explain. We can recall a Lacanian saying on which we have often insisted, “The analyst is in the place of the semblance of the object,” and thereby reconsider what we said above. First, we could deduce from it that if the analyst were to be in the place of the object, he or she could adopt a masochistic position. I am not saying that in the analytic relation, one is a masochist and the other a sadist. I simply mean that the position adopted by the analyst in the transference is to take the position of an object, an object by which the Other undergoes jouissance. But unlike the perverse masochist, the analyst finds him or herself in a semblance that eludes him or her. The other day, when we spoke of the smile of the analyst, we said that what mattered was to consider his or her smile as the resonance of the speech of the analysand. It is that speech that leads the practitioner to position him or herself in a certain manner. It is that speech that causes him or her to take on the living mask of the smile. When the analyst is silent or smiling, that is to say, when he or she adopts the position of the semblance, it is not a question of pretending [faire semblant]—as the hysteric would—nor of mastering the semblance—as the pervert would; no, the analyst is subjected to the semblance that imposes itself upon him or her. The analyst lends him or herself to it. The analyst fits into the semblance as into a harness by mimicking the object. This leads me to a last consideration regarding the masochistic aspect of the work of the psychoanalyst: What is my satisfaction in the work that I do? Why this question? I take, without knowing it, the place of the semblance of the object but never that of the object itself. I could never be the object itself so long as I am a human being, for the simple reason that to become the object would amount to rendering oneself as inert as marble. The question

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that the analyst must pose to him or herself fairly often—because it would allow him or her to intervene better and to settle into the transference more effectively—is the following: What is my share of the satisfaction in the action I engage and that engages me? There is a surprising citation from Freud that is pertinent here (SE XIX, 56). Freud is interested in the function of the ego in its relation to the Id and to reality. Thus, he is led to compare the function of the ego to that of the psychoanalyst. Here is what he writes: “The ego offers itself . . . as a libidinal object to the Id.” You can replace “ego” with “analyst” and say: “The ego (analyst) offers itself as a libidinal object to the Id and aims at attaching the Id’s libido to itself. It is not only a helper to the Id; it is also a submissive slave who courts his master’s love. Whenever possible it tries to remain on good terms with the Id; it pretends that the Id is showing obedience to admonitions of reality; it masks the Id’s conflict with reality. In its position midway between the Id and reality, it only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunistic, and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favor.” This is extraordinary because, in fact, the analyst can, in certain circumstances, allow him or herself to be tempted and, like the ego, become a liar, opportunistic, or sycophantic. I will conclude by reconsidering the theme of masochism on the basis of this citation from Freud. He continues: “Toward the two classes of instincts the ego’s attitude is not impartial. Through its work of identification and sublimation it gives the death instincts in the Id assistance in gaining control over the libido. . . .” Then he reconsiders what we have read earlier. The ego is the assistant of the Id but “runs the risk of becoming the object of the death instincts and of itself perishing. In order to be able to help in this way it has had itself to become filled with libido; it thus itself becomes the representative of Eros and thenceforward desires to live and be loved.” In conclusion, he warns: “But since the ego’s work of sublimation results in a defusion of the instincts and a liberation of the aggressive instincts in the super-ego, its struggle against the libido exposes it (ego or analyst) to the danger of maltreatment or death.” You will agree that these lines devoted to the ego are eminently evocative of the action of the psychoanalyst, of his or her joys and sorrows, and of the struggles and temptations to which he or she remains vulnerable.

Lesson III. Pain and the scream Freud considered pain to be an enigma. This is what he stated during a meeting of the Psychoanalytic Society of Vienna in 1910 following a lecture on

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masochism: “Our deficient explanation of the derivation of sadism and masochism lies in our lack of knowledge concerning the nature of pain in general, with its half-psychic and half-physiological determining conditions. This enigmatic character [of pain] is very clear. . . .”24 Thus, Freud himself encountered this mystery, which we would formulate in the following way: What is this inassimilable pain, experienced as if it was not ours, and yet, the place where what we are and what is most proper to us, is condensed? Further, what is a pain that would not be recognized by the one who suffers? How can one speak of a pain that is unconscious? We are, thereby, confronted with a twofold difficulty: on the one hand, to make these questions intelligible, that is to say, to state them in such a way that they concern us personally, without being too abstract. On the other hand, to understand how the psychoanalyst can apprehend in his or her work an object—pain—that conceals itself from the senses and from thought. Perhaps we must first use the concepts and then without hesitation immediately forget them thereafter. This is how we will proceed in this section. We are going to work with theory, but we will then attempt to apprehend pain in another way. We cannot discover the essence of intimate pain either immediately, theoretically, or even clinically; it never presents itself in a manifest form. We will encounter it, rather, by taking an unusual route, the very one that Freud advised Lou Andréas Salomé to follow in a letter of May 24, 1916: “I know that in writing I have to blind myself artificially in order to focus all the light on one dark spot.”25 This is a remarkable sentence, which can be interpreted in the following way: in order to see clearly, we must enclose ourselves in darkness. We can offer yet another interpretation: the essence of pain is invisible to us; let us push the paradox to its limit, and be led by what lies at the heart of pain: the scream.

The scream is a motor discharge The scream is so intimately linked to pain that most adjectives describing it belong to the register of resonant space: one speaks of a “shrill scream,” “an acute pain”; one speaks of an insistent scream, an insistent pain. But what is a scream? Are we even sure that a scream is only a sound? We encounter here the same difficulty that we did when we approached the question of pain, and are faced with a new paradox that will constitute the limit of our reflection. Let us begin with what Freud teaches us about the scream. He particularly speaks of it in the “Project” where he characterizes it, for the most part, as a motor discharge, an outlet through which the intolerable accumulation

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of excitations is dissipated. In other words, it is an outlet for pain. But let us move beyond this idea, according to which the scream would be a simple motor discharge and ask: Why not imagine the scream as a flux of energy gushing through the hole of the mouth considered as an erogenous ring? If we accept that the mouth is a libidinal orifice, we can consider that the flux of energy that runs through its center is a force defined in relation to another flux, to another force that runs along the lips. In other words, there would be a relation between the energy that passes through the center of the hole and the energy circulating around its edges. This relation between the scream and the erogenous edges of the mouth—between the gushing flux of the hole and the circulating flux on the border of the hole, between the surface (that is the void of the hole) and the orificial edge—was established by Stockes’s theorem in electromagnetic physics.26 With the aid of this theorem, we can conclude that the flux flowing through the hole is equal to the flux running along the edge of the hole. Thus, there would be an equivalence between the energy of the scream and the sexual pleasure of the erogenous lips.

The scream is an action that changes the environment Let us return to Freud now. After having postulated that the scream is a motor discharge, he immediately specifies that this definition is only a fiction. In fact, if we think that the scream is an outlet for pain, that would mean that any pain could be resolved by a scream; it would suffice to scream in order to alleviate pain. Now, Freud emphasized that the motor discharge does not resolve the tension. He also adds that if, on the one hand, you place the scream in the mouth of the infant, and, on the other hand, between the infant and its mother, you have introduced the reality principle. In what does this principle consist? Its function is to transform the motor discharge into directed energy, into an indication of a reality that allows the infant to situate itself in its environment. The infant screams in an effort to modify its environment and to satisfy its need. The scream is thus no longer a discharge because it serves a useful function and takes on a definite meaning. Freud calls this modification of the environment, as well as all the means employed by the infant to produce that change and reduce its internal tensions, a “specific action.” The scream-discharge becomes the specific scream-action. This is a very interesting remark for our study concerning the concept of “acting out,” since Freud allows us to see the scream as the first action of a speaking being. In this work, we must articulate this scream-action in relation to the notion of the drive to mastery [pulsion d’emprise] and further resituate the scream in the relation between the drive to mastery and sadism as aggression.

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The scream strikes the ears of the one who utters it and inscribes itself in his or her memory In what does the specificity of the scream consist? It is twofold. On the one hand, the scream is an address to the Other, a call directed to the caretaker; we will return to the function of the call at the end of this lesson. On the other hand, the scream is also a sound perceived by the one who utters it. Thus, the scream goes to the other, but as a sound it comes back to the ears of the one who uttered it. We will first consider the scream-sound that we hear before treating it as a call to the Other. As a sound-discharge, the scream returns to the one who utters it as a novel echo and is inscribed without his or her knowledge in the system of memory neurons (“ϕ” neurones). The one who screams out receives it as it returns and inscribes it in his or her memory. But of what is the scream a memory? Let us defer this question for a moment and approach now the “marking” function of the scream. The sound uttered by the one who suffers does not only represent his or her pain, but it also confers on the agent—the cause of the wound—its fundamentally dangerous and aggressive character. The scream does more than represent pain and the agent who provokes it— it indicates the intolerable character of one and the injurious character of the other. This shows, indeed, that the essence of pain is realized in a scream. The scream would not only be the semblance of pain but also the resonant substance giving pain its consistency as an unpleasant affect. This opens an immense question. You will see that Freud goes even farther and makes a supplementary leap, which we will follow. But let us remain for a moment where we are now. I say that it is an important conceptual development to say that the scream incarnates pain (as opposed to simply representing it), communicates to it its nature as an unacceptable affect, and sustains and founds it. This leads us to our thesis in the last chapter, according to which the scream is the semblance of pain. I established a relation between the scream as semblance of pain and the perverse scenario in masochism. We defined the masochist as a master of the semblance-scream, as someone who really knows how to scream. In this respect, I associate the Lacanian notion of semblance with the “simulacra” of Lucretius. In De Natura Rerum,27 he borrows the concept of the simulacrum from his master Epicurus. I advise psychoanalysts to study it. They will see that it is absolutely fascinating on a theoretical level, but not only that. I advise them to read these pages of Lucretius on the simulacrum and then undertake the work of listening to their patients. What Lucretius tells us is that the simulacra are strange emanations from objects, kinds of light membranes, detached from the surface of the bodies, floating in the air, and flying in all directions. He adds that these membranes

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are in some cases images, and others not; in some cases visible, but not always. These are often impalpable images, strange exhalations, and, above all, rapid irradiations that emerge, spread and dissipate very quickly. This text of Lucretius would demand that we devote an entire seminar on the very crucial concept of “semblance” in Lacan’s work by comparing it to the Epicurean notion of simulacra. Such a seminar could be inspired by the following idea, which is already sketched in Lucretius: that of a causal relation, almost physical, between the thing and its semblance, between pain and the scream.

The scream is an emanation of pain, but also the breath that enflames it Let us return to our earlier hypothesis: the view that the scream is not only a symbolic representative of pain, but that it also marks pain as well as the agent that provokes it (and its harmful and noxious nature). In this respect, Freud made an advance in his thinking. He tells us first that the scream is a representative of pain, then that it gives the pain its distressing tone, and above all—it is here that he makes the leap—he tells us that the scream is capable of reawakening the pain. Until now, we stated the inverse: that pain produced the scream. Now we are saying that the scream produces pain. How is this the case? Here, we can respond to our question: Of what is the scream a memory? As Pavlov’s bell is capable of arousing hunger and making dogs salivate, the scream is just as capable of reawakening pain, as well as the fear of seeing the cause of the attack reappear. Once uttered, the scream remains associated, in memory, with the agent of the harm and with the pain. Henceforth, each time that a sharp screaming strikes the ears of the subject, whether a scream proffered by the other, or a new scream from the subject itself, the pain reappears as a memory in the flesh. By hearing the scream, the subject feels an inexplicable physical pain. The scream is thus not only a figure of pain, it can also be, because it is a memory, an excitation that leads to a painful sensation without an identifiable organic cause. It is as if the sensation was a hallucinated pain. The sequence of our reasoning would be as follows: the scream reflects pain, the scream refracts pain, and then the scream triggers pain. It shows it, marks it, and engenders it as a hallucinated production. To read these pages of Freud in light of what Lacan has taught us, we recognize clearly two important articulations. The first is as follows: the relation between the scream and the hallucinated pain is a perfect example of the foundational relation between the signifier and the affect. Lacan has often been reproached for his intellectualist privileging of the signifier to the detriment of the affect. It suffices to read Freud with this reproach in mind to see that he himself responds to such a charge. This is not an interpretation on my

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part; it is present throughout the Freudian writings. In fact, the psychoanalytic definition of the affect repeats the Darwinian perspective. It was Darwin who influenced Freud’s thesis that any affect is a repetition, the repetition of a very old traumatic event. In this respect, an affect experienced today is the reminiscence of a past experience. More precisely, it is a symbol of an originary trauma. The affect is thus a symbol or, better, a signifier. Why? Because it is reproducible. Our idea that the scream generates a hallucinated pain clearly illustrates a very Lacanian principle, namely, that the signifier “takes place.” In effect, it is not sufficient to say that a signifier represents the subject for another signifier, or that the signifier is different from the other signifiers that compose the system; it is not enough to say that the signifier is only a signifier for other signifiers. One must rather say that the signifier is what takes place and constitutes the place. Therefore, the relation between the signifier and the affect is that the signifier constitutes the affect and constitutes the place of the affect. Here is a principle that is incontestably Lacanian. The second connection that we establish between Lacan and the Project refers to a passage where Freud proposes that the scream—once uttered as a sound—is registered in memory and associated with the painful sensation that was felt by the subject at that time and with the perception of the agent who inflicted the wound. I utter the scream, I hear it, and it is inscribed in my memory while bringing back the pain and its cause. Freud remarks elsewhere that the same phenomenon takes place with language. The words heard are the necessary pathways for thought to remain, thanks to the memory of language, a constantly active process. If there were no verbal productions in the space of sound, there would not be any trace of thought and, consequently, thinking would not be possible. This sonorous materiality of language, which renders it apt to inscribe itself in our memory and preserve the dynamism of thought, reminds me of the Lacanian conception of language, not as a symbolic system but as a physical and real organ. Allow me to elaborate on this point. When Deleuze and Guattari advanced Artaud’s thesis of the “body without organs,” Lacan replied that the psychotic is not deprived of organs, since he possesses one fundamental organ with which he coexists as we all do: language. There is here a conceptual twist, a change in perspective. We usually take language to be a symbolic structure. This is quite right, and there is no going back on it. As a network composed of different elements obeying a rigorous logic, language indeed belongs to a symbolic order. But it is not exclusively symbolic, it is also something real, a real that flies around us, as Lucretius wrote, with respect to the simulacra. Furthermore, it is a real that flutters about constantly in the analytic session, within the analytic chamber. Language is an organ, not in the instrumental sense of an efficacious tool—as Chomsky

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believes—but an organ that prolongs and extends the body. When I make this statement, the myth of the lamelle, of the libido as lamelle, comes immediately to mind. Such a libido radiates from the body like an emanation of its vital force and goes beyond its limits. Rather than situating language in the symbolic dimension alone, it is appropriate to conceive of it as a real sound organ that extends our body indefinitely. If I emphasize this real aspect of language, it is in order to show that language is not only a material utterance of the subject, but is also stored in memory. This summarizes our comments with respect to the scream as a physical, sonorous, and cumulative entity.

The scream is an appeal to the Other Now we will approach the scream as an appeal to the Other. To begin, I would like to read you an important passage from Freud. It is drawn from the Project (SE I, 318). He speaks there of the scream and ends his paragraph in the following way: “In this way this path of discharge acquires a secondary function of the highest importance, that of communication. . . .” The screamdischarge thus has a secondary function, that of encouraging the mutual understanding between the infant and the mother. Freud continues with this difficult proposition, “and the initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives.” But what is a scream if not the most authentic expression of our powerlessness? Our screams always express our rage at being subject to our limits and to our inability to overcome them. Thus, we can say that, if the scream expresses the primordial powerlessness of being human, it also expresses the primary source of all moral sentiments. But what are these moral sentiments? In psychoanalysis, they carry a particular name: the superego. Indeed, the source of the superego is this powerlessness and the scream that incarnates it. Why? Because this primordial demand, the most inarticulate of all pleas, this interjection that is the scream, this ultra reduced statement, in short, this appeal with which the infant announces its powerlessness, reaches the Other, the mother and in return, provokes a caring response. What sort of response? First, one that consists in interpreting the scream of the infant and giving it a meaning, and then, above all, in naming for the infant that which the scream expresses. The inarticulate scream of the infant is thus transformed, thanks to the articulated voice of the Other, into speech. This speech is received by the infant as an imperious voice that later becomes the inner voice of its own superego. The scream directed at the Other thus becomes the inner scream of the superego. Recall Freud’s insistence in emphasizing the acoustic origin of the superego. With the scream, we are at the very root of the superego. The birth of the superego is only possible within the relation with another that Freud

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describes as mutual understanding. This understanding is, in fact, quite limited, since the infant only communicates with a single aspect of the Other. Indeed, the Other appears to the infant in two different ways: as a being that is accessible and familiar, but also as one that is unknown and inaccessible. I need to recall here the Freudian notion of the “perceptual complex of the other person.” According to this notion, the mother or titular adult appears to the eyes of the infant as an other [prochain] who lives, changes, and moves, and, on the other hand, as one who, in spite of the coming and going, always remains the same, inalterable. The perceptual complex has thus two parts: one where the other changes, and the other where the other is stable and immutable. The Other who changes appears as an other whose characteristics mirror my own characteristics, whose gestures mirror my own gestures, and so forth, in an interminable coming and going. In these permanent reflections, there is a work of rememoration, for these gestures recall my own, and when he or she is upset, his or her screams remind me of my own screams that cause me to relive my first painful experiences. It is precisely in this confrontation with the changing face of the mother that Freud situates, not only the origin of the superego, but also and especially the origin of judgment.

The scream is an appeal to the silence of the void the other is the intolerable imminence of jouissance —Jacques Lacan

However, we are equally interested in the other part of the “perceptual complex of the other.” We are interested in the immutable and unknown face of the Other. This Other appears, no longer as a similar human being, but as an inaccessible Thing (das Ding), that thing that Lacan spoke of so often. The Thing is the inassimilable part of the Other, an uncanny and unchanging presence. This is the point that I would like to stress. The scream is situated between the two parts of this complex of the other—between the perception of the Other as a double helping me recognize myself and the perception of the Other as an absolute and impenetrable Thing. The scream gathers these two aspects of the Other in the form of scream with two sides. One, which we have just established and that we accept most easily: the child screams and the mother responds, the mother screams and the child remembers his or her screams and pains. While the other side of the scream, that which corresponds to the second part of the complex of the other, is no longer communication with the Other but an appeal to the Thing, a lightning flash that reveals it. One only needs an intense and visceral scream to perceive, at the core of the bond with the mother, the silent

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immensity of das Ding, the absolute and inassimilable Thing. This Thing, external to me, is however that which is most central and intimate for me, since the Thing is nothing other than an absolute void, impersonal and common to the two partners who share a bond of love and desire. Lacan invents the neologism “extimacy” [“extimité”] to refer to the Thing, both external and intimate at the same time. This Thing, however, neither resonates nor vibrates, it is silence, pure silence: I scream, he or she screams and it is the silence of the Thing that bursts forth and imposes itself. We began with the following question: How can one conceive of a pain that is not felt? You see, it is not a question of physical pain nor of the pain of the sadomasochistic fantasy that we studied earlier. Nor is it a question of the various clinical forms that this pain takes, such as the negative therapeutic reaction. Now I would like to go further, to push the paradox to its limits. We considered the scream as a motor discharge and in this respect we were on solid ground. Then we defined it as a scream-appeal and then as a sound inscribed in memory. But now we are faced with a new threshold to cross, faced with a completely different domain: a scream that appeals to the Thing and makes silence emerge. We have twisted things a bit and found a paradox: a scream that engenders silence and a pain that is not felt. How can a scream that engenders silence be manifest? How can this fragment of the real be visualized? We need a painted scream, the painting of a scream. This evening, I brought a picture of a scream. There is only one painter, and I would say only one painting, that has given me the feeling of being in the presence of the scream I was seeking. It is a painting by Francis Bacon, a well-known artist. It was painted in 1949 from the portrait of Pope Innocent X, which was completed in 1650 by Velasquez during a trip that he took to Italy. This work of Bacon, entitled Head IV, has been considered at length in a remarkable book of interviews between the artist and the journalist David Sylvester.28 The painter evokes his relation to the scream. But let us allow Bacon to speak before I tell you why this painting represents exactly what I was looking for. David Sylvester is surprised that the painter had painted a scream from a pope and asked him if there was a relation to the father. Bacon responded that he never made the slightest connection between the father and the pope, but that he always had been fascinated by the smiling mouth painted by Velasquez, a mouth he had many times attempted to reproduce in vain. One senses a mixture of regret and humility in Bacon’s response when he confesses to have drawn a badly formed mouth because he was unable to paint a smile, or expression of joy on the lips. Next, he explains that in the end, he wanted to represent a screaming mouth instead of a smiling mouth. But it is, above all, the rest of the interview that interests me. He confides the following: “You could say that a scream is an image of horror; in fact, I wanted to paint the scream rather than the horror.”

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If you look well at the painting you will see that it gives the curious impression that no sound is coming from the open mouth, that no shrill scream seems to form there. Something else is at issue. Don’t you feel with some dread that this mute and deep scream is not a brutal expiration of the breath but is in fact an inspiration—even more, a violent aspiration of the air shooting into the head and exploding it. Look at the head of this person. It is an atomized skull as if the silence prevailing in this container were absorbed in one breath by the gaping, aspirating mouth, of that strange pope. What I describe was confirmed by a patient. At the time, I was taken by it. I was preparing this lesson and seeking works representing a scream. In fact, Bacon himself tells us that for him the most beautiful scream in a painting is that of Poussin in the “Massacre des Innocents” that one can see at the Chantilly Museum. I went to see the painting but it did not cause the same effect in me as it had in Bacon. At that same time, a session took place with a patient who had the particular problem of not being able to stop screaming and who suffered greatly from it. This symptom vanished after her pregnancy. Here is the conversation I had with her: “You see,” she said, “I no longer scream now, the police no longer come to the house in the middle of the night.” “How do you explain it ?” I asked her. “I don’t know,” she responded. “But what did it mean to you, to scream?” “To scream? “ she responded. “Each time that I wailed I felt the scream rise in my head and fill a void; as if I would scream with my whole head, or, as if my whole head was a mouth. I do not know.” Is this not the best and most sensitive description of the painting? It is a mute scream, a scream of silence, an absorbing scream. It is not a scream that exhales. It is a scream that inhales and empties space. Now, when I say this word inhalation, I am thinking of the Freudian conception of melancholic pain understood as an internal hemorrhage provoked by a violent inhalation of air. Freud uses the expressions “valve,” and “sucking-pump,” to represent the force that sucks and empties all libido. It is precisely the powerful suction of the interior that is painful. Indeed, this silence, this scream drawn by Bacon, is a scream that absorbs silence; this is just such a scream, it is a hemorrhage toward the inside. I would not want to end without discussing what the introduction of a painting in our seminar means to me. My gesture aims at something other than a mere illustration of theoretical knowledge about the scream. It is more than that. It is an indication of the position the analyst can assume in the face of pain and the scream of his or her patients. We have a theory that only has value, in my view, in that it makes us ask good questions. You could read any number of texts, but the only important thing is that you ask the right question. For me, the relation between theory and practice takes place in the question. The analyst’s “know-how” is to know how to question. But, here, we are elsewhere; we are in another register than that of knowing how to ask

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good questions. Certainly, we have engaged pain and the scream theoretically; we have used concepts and we have posed good questions, such as: What is a pain that is not felt? But I insist that the introduction of a painting in a seminar does not seek to illustrate what we know theoretically or what we think we know. For psychical formations such as pain and the scream, reflections and questions are not enough. Something else is needed: to focus—“I have to blind myself artificially in order to focus all the light on one dark spot,” and then see, that is to say, visualize the real, and nearly hallucinate it. These words will seem surprising to those who have not worked with patients. But I think the analysts who practice listening or the analysands who have been through analysis understand me. It can happen that practitioners are no longer satisfied at certain moments with their knowledge and are led to visualize or hallucinate the fantasies that emerge in the transference. When I heard my patient tell of the pain she suffered when she was screaming, I must say I was surprised for, at the precise moment when I had this painting in mind I was hearing the voice of someone who was describing the very painting to me without ever having seen it. There is no better way to tell you about the desire of the analyst.

Why did the artist paint the scream rather than the horror? Recall Bacon’s reply. “You could say that a scream is an image of horror; in fact, I wanted to paint the scream rather than the horror.” It is precisely because the painter wanted to depict the scream rather than the horror that the Thing is revealed. I believe that if he had wanted to represent horror, he would have made a figurative painting of horror and we would have been deprived of the emotion of an exceptional scream, a mute scream. He does not paint horror, but the scream, and presents the horror in the form of an absorbed silence.

Is the scream exclusively the expression of pain? Certainly not. We all know how a scream can also express joy and many other emotions. But I preferred to focus on the relation of the scream to pain. That being the case, the question reminds me of a text by Hegel that he wrote when he was very young; in fact, it is from his travel notes. He devoted a page to pain where the scream is defined as the absolute expression of pain. Pain, he added, expressed so purely by the scream, can curiously be appeased by another scream. He gives the example of mourners who, at funerals, wail from the pain of losing a loved one and he wonders how to explain the way in which this

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wail—that, in the end, is nothing but a sublimated scream—can be a balm for suffering. Now, the idea came to me while reading these notes that a rhythmic relation must exist between the mute pain felt by the mourner and the complaint of the other who gives voice to it. I think that it is this rhythmic accord that exorcises pain. We have said that the scream represents pain, then, that it does more than represent it, it gives it its substance, and finally, that it is capable of engendering a hallucinated pain. And here we say that, with the mourners, we discover that the scream can also alleviate pain.

Can the scream have a therapeutic function? I will consider the example of autism and raise two problems. First, what function will the scream have in the treatment of an autistic child? Rest assured, I am not saying that autistic children should scream; I am consciously wondering about the function of the scream from the perspective of articulated words. Indeed, one could imagine that the autistic child who does not articulate a word ought to begin by screaming, as we all do when we enter life with a scream. My second remark touches on the problem of the relation of the mouth to the scream with the autistic child or, rather, of the relation of the mouth to words. In the course of a supervision, while the analyst was telling me about the few syllables an autistic child was able to utter, it occurred to me that, in the end, one should not try to make him pronounce words, but rather position oneself as a therapist to elicit certain sounds, certain phonemes from the child that would constitute a mouth. I suggest that an emerging sound forms the mouth, creates the mouth. It is not the mouth that lends itself to the sound, it is the sound that hollows the mouth and shapes it. Do you remember our earlier discussion on the relation between the scream as flux and the flux around the lips? It would be necessary to study with respect to the autistic this relation between the sound and the mouth, between the scream, the phonemes, and the erogenous edges of the mouth. Why not think that, with the autistic child, one should create an erogenous zone where it is lacking? I return to what we said with respect to Bacon’s painting, where the mouth seems to lack a third dimension. This is exactly the idea that we should have of the mouth of an autistic child: to incite him to utter sounds in order to create the erogenous hollow of a mouth with edges.

Lesson IV. The pain of mourning I would like to address the theme of the pain of mourning. This form of pain remains, as in the case of all others, a persisting enigma. There are two cita-

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tions with which I would like to begin the lesson. The first is taken from “Mourning and Melancholia,” a text that will be our principal reference. While speaking of the work of mourning, Freud wrote: “Why this compromise by which the command of reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics” (SE XIV, 245). Six years later, we read almost the same sentence in “Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety”: “In discussing the subject of mourning on a previous occasion I found that there was one feature about it that remained quite unexplained. This was its peculiar painfulness” (SE XX, 169). It seems to us nevertheless obvious that the separation from the object is painful.

Normal mourning and pathological mourning This is our question in this lesson: How is it that mourning is so difficult and painful? Although we will not exhaust such a question, we will attempt at any rate to address it. What is mourning? It is the reaction to the loss of a loveobject. This short sentence includes the two major axes of mourning that we will consider in this lesson. The first concerns the very object of mourning. What exactly is the love-object whose loss causes suffering? And, in the case of the second, what is the nature of the reaction to this loss? In what does the process of mourning consist? We begin with the object. It is precisely with respect to the nature of the object that Freud distinguishes normal mourning from pathological mourning, that is to say, normal mourning from melancholy. We will first distinguish between them, only to later qualify the distinction. We will do so because in the course of his elaboration Freud himself abandoned the difference that he had established. Also, if we refer to Melanie Klein, for example, we find that she considers the distinction between normal and pathological mourning a matter of degree and not of structure. Finally, Lacan himself, when speaking of mourning, at times speaks of it as if it there was only one form of mourning—pathological mourning. That being the case, what are the differences that Freud establishes? He states that, while in normal mourning the loss is conscious, in pathological mourning, the loss is radically unconscious. The melancholic can know whom he or she has lost, but not what has been lost with the deceased person (cf. SE XIV, 245). We note immediately that these sentences contain the entire problematic of object a. We know whom we have lost but we do not know what we have lost with the disappearance of the loved one. This is a first distinction, which, as you see, is not sufficient to distinguish normal mourning from pathological mourning because one always finds this unconscious aspect in all forms of mourning.

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The second difference between normal and pathological mourning is based on a clinical finding. We know that melancholy was one of the first mental maladies identified and treated by medicine. The melancholic’s selfreproaches are not always encountered in normal mourning. On the basis of the observation that the complaints of the melancholic are not addressed to the lost object, but at him or herself, Freud concludes with the celebrated hypothesis that the melancholic ego identifies with the lost object. Incidentally, it is because of the melancholic’s self-criticism that Freud, inspired by Abraham, concludes that in fact these critiques are not genuine selfreproaches. The critiques concern the object that has been incorporated into the ego (Cf. SE XIV, 247). He proposes, then, a thesis that up to this point has not been discussed: the ego of the melancholic incorporates the lost object and identifies with it. Next, we see that the entire problem lies in the definition of the love-object that is lost; an object that, moreover, is the basis of the Lacanian notion of object a. However, this identification is not the sole feature of melancholy. Consequently, it remains difficult to clearly distinguish between melancholia and normal mourning. Clinically speaking, we know that self-reproach is not specific to the melancholic; certain obsessional depressions are very frequently accompanied by self-contempt without being, for that matter, a depressive psychosis. The thesis of an identification with the lost object thus remains a very general thesis that is useful for melancholia—whether pathological or normal.

The identification of the mourner with his or her lost loved one But in what exactly does this identification consist? What does it mean that the ego identifies with the object? This so-called narcissistic identification is explained by a mechanism that interested Freud greatly between 1915 and 1917, namely, the withdrawal of the libido onto the ego. The entire libido of the lover who cathected the object when it was alive would return to his or her ego after the death of the loved one. This is the movement underlying the narcissistic appropriation of the love-object that has disappeared. I situate the discovery of this mechanism of identification between 1915 and 1917, but it was in fact since 1900 that Freud concerned himself with formalizing a logic of the various modes of libido-withdrawal according to various clinical structures. Whether in paranoia, melancholia, or hysteria, we invariably observe a withdrawal of the libido. Recall that we already considered this question. But now we will treat it from a different perspective. If there is a withdrawal of the libido, we wonder whence and whither this withdrawal occurs. Clearly, it moves from the object to the ego. But what is this object that we refer to as loved and lost? Our immediate response: it is

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not the deceased, but rather his or her representation or image in my unconscious. It is thus not his or her person as such that was the object of my affective investment, but his or her mental representations in me. What representations? The “representations of unconscious things” relative to the loved one who is now gone. To return to our question, then, whence issues the withdrawal of the libido? The response is as follows: the libido falls back onto the ego from the representations of things that were related to the love-object that was lost. Loved, that is to say, selected by a narcissistic choice. In other words, the libido withdraws from the representations of the love-object in order to arrive at a very precise part of the ego that Freud calls the “realitytesting.” One might object that the ordeal is not a place. Clearly the ordeal of reality is above all a function of the ego, a sort of screening by which the ego differentiates internal perceptions from external perceptions. However, this reality-testing operates in a quite limited area in the ego: the system of conscious perception. I refer here to passages that I suppose are well-known; in particular, I refer to the schema in chapter VII of “The Interpretation of Dreams.” In this chapter, Freud makes the following remark: “perceptual identity is established by the external world” (SE V, 566–67). But there is also an internal reality-testing. Imagine the bark of a tree with two sides—an outside for the perception of external reality and an inside to perceive . . . what? To capture the movements of the drives endopsychically and to reflect them in consciousness as feelings. We have already used the term feeling in the second lesson, when trying to identify “the unconscious feeling of guilt” produced by the endopsychic perception of incestuous desire. We need to clarify this. The withdrawal of the libido onto the ego is in fact a displacement within the ego itself. This shows how minimal the displacement of the libido is. But it is precisely in these minimal movements that the true work of mourning occurs. Let us change the context for a moment to consider the same identification with the love-object that is lost, but in a different form. Freud tells us that mourning is the “reaction to the loss of a loved object” (SE XIV, 245). I insist this is not just any object. One does not mourn a person that is indifferent to us, but a person that we have chosen and loved intensely; “the object choice has been effected on a narcissistic basis” (SE XIV, 249). But what is the narcissistic object par excellence? I mean: what is the object that has been privileged by a strictly narcissistic interest, then lost? What is the paradigmatic object of mourning? The most narcissistic object for which we mourn is the penis. In this respect one should read simultaneously “Mourning and Melancholia” (SE XIV, 239), and another short piece entitled “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (SE XIX, 173–82). One will connect immediately the mourning for a loved one with what can be considered as the mourning for an organ that is also loved: the penis. This mourning is

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well-known. It is as follows: faced with the threat of castration, the child chooses to save his penile organ by renouncing his incestuous desire for his mother. But he saves it in such a way that he loses it after all. He renders it useless for incestuous desire. The penis is thus saved from the threat of castration, but it is lost as an organ to be used for forbidden desire. In brief, the child preserves his penis as a part of his body, but loses it as a means and agent of incestuous desire. One can analyze this loss in two parts. First, it suppresses the organ in order to raise it to the level of the signifier; it transforms the penis into the phallic signifier. We will no longer therefore speak of the “penis,” but now only of the “phallus.” Second, it is no longer a question of a suppression and elevation—as in the case of Hegel’s Aufhebung—but a movement of identification with the penis as a loved object. This is where we find, not the signifier, but the phallic object. The phallus is here the imaginary phallic object of a symbolic castration. In short, the boy’s penis is lost in two ways: first, the child neutralizes his organ and raises it to the level of the signifier—that is, he puts words in place of his penis—and, unable to sleep with his mother, he declares his love for her. Second, in what would be a second fate or a second loss, instead of invoking signifiers, instead of symbolizing, the child puts himself in the place of the object, that is to say, he identifies with the penile organ. It is from this identification that the imaginary phallic object will emerge. He does not have the phallus: he is the phallus. These are the two fates of the penis: becoming a phallic signifier, the symbol of sexual desire, or becoming the imaginary phallic object of castration. The narcissistic identification at the core of mourning precisely concerns the second fate, that is, the fact of the identification with the lost object. In his reflection on mourning, Freud uses this model of the identification of the child with his penile organ, an identification that leads to, I insist, the constitution of the imaginary phallic object. It is at this point—we still need a link—that the formation of this imaginary phallic object is produced in the field of the Other, that is, within the field of the castration of the Other. Why? Because the “castration of the Other” means, simply, that the mother does not have everything that she desires either; she is castrated and therefore desiring. The child makes himself an object in the hollow of the mother’s desire. Now we can better understand Lacan’s beautiful comment in the seminar on Anxiety when he treats of mourning: “We are in mourning for those for whom we have been, without knowing it, the object they lacked.”29 I translate this as: “The imaginary phallus.” We mourn for those—the few and the rare—for whom we have been the support of their castration. Let us make a leap and say that we mourn those for whom we have been object a. I anticipate the reader’s question: How can one identify object a with the imaginary phallic object? In fact, I do not really

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identify them, because the imaginary object of the castration of the Other is only the guise, the imaginary mask, of object a. I cannot dwell on this point and so I leave it in suspense for now, but indulge me in making this leap in understanding Lacan’s sentence in the following way: “we mourn those for whom we have been object a.” The death of the loved one shows us—during a funeral, for instance, with the striking view of his or her inert body—that we have been his or her lack, that we were the object of his or her desire. It is as if before the other died, we had been his or her object without knowing it and, after his or her death, we discover painfully that we had always been the object and we will continue to be the object, for a time, the time of mourning. In other words, it is something like a deferred revelation of a place that we did not know we occupied in relation to our own desire and the desire of the Other. This is what we can say about the process of identification with the object : it is an identification that takes place, not only in mourning, but well before the death of the loved one. To conclude, we can state that when the other dies—who was my chosen one and for whom I was the chosen one—I lose, not only the person, but also the place of object a and of the imaginary object, a place that I occupied for him or her. But a question arises: what does it mean to lose one’s place as objet a and as the imaginary object? And, in this respect, how is this loss related to mourning? I will respond in two ways. What is lost with the loss of the loved one is first of all my own image that he or she gives me to cherish. What I lose, above all, is the love of myself that the Other made possible; that is to say, what is lost is my ideal ego or, more exactly, my ideal ego as linked to the person who has departed. I say “person,” but who is he or she, really? Certainly, we can agree that with the death of someone who is dear to us, I lose the ideal ego proper to our love relation and to our desire. However, is that the only thing lost? I was the object, to be sure, but who was he or she exactly? He or she was not my ideal ego, but the real support of that ego. However, something else has vanished with his or her death. What has vanished is not only my ideal ego, but the living support provided by his or her person, namely, his or her smell, the sound of his or her voice, the charm of his or her presence. What I lose by losing my loved one is the drive, the drive of the body, or, more exactly, the object of the drive that gave consistency to my image—ideal ego—and which nurtured my love. This leads us to reread Lacan’s formula, “We mourn those for whom we have been the object, that is to say, the lack.” We reformulate it in the following way: “We mourn those who, in turn, have been the object for us, as well as the lack, the drive/support of our ideal ego.” Nevertheless, I cannot claim that, by losing my loved one, I lose the drive, since I continue to live. Yes, I lose that voice, that object of the drive,

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but the drive is displaced and transposed. I am thinking of Freud’s article “On the Transformations of the Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism” (SE XVII, 127–33), in which he teaches us that the objects of the drives are displaced. Well, pain would be—this is my hypothesis—a transitional, provisional object of drive, as if it was necessary for the subject, traumatized by the death of the other, to continue to exercise its drive in spite of the inhibitions proper to the mourning phase. In summary, between the voice that departs and the one that perhaps will come, I insert pain. I propose to reflect on this new aspect of the pain of mourning as the object of the drive. Freud does not situate pain as being exclusively linked to loss, but to the work of mourning. This is a subtle nuance that has great importance. He does not ask why the loss is painful, but why the work of mourning is painful. It is on this very subtle distinction that our inquiry will now focus.

The pain of mourning is not the pain of separation but the pain of love Pain is generated and released in the activity of compromise and transaction that is proper to the work of mourning. Why, Freud asks, is this transactional activity that is governed by the reality principle—the mourner must separate him or herself from the one who has died—so painful? In what does this work consist? What is the work of mourning? It is a slow and laborious reconsideration of each of the details of the bond that linked me to the loved object that has been lost. In this work, each memory of the deceased is treated by the ego in three ways. First, there is a focusing and a delimitation of each memory and of each image associated with the lost object. Once the image is clearly delineated, a disinvestment of that image takes place. The first operation: focus. Second operation: disinvestment. Third operation: the libido, detached from the mental image of the other, is transferred onto a large part of the ego. It is this movement, specifically, that produces the identification with the object or, more exactly, with the image of the object. Let me emphasize straightaway a very important aspect for what follows, namely, that the focus on each of the unconscious representations of the object—which we also call “memory,” or “image”—consists in an affective overinvestment. We can thus enumerate the three stages of the work of mourning: overinvestment, disinvestment, and finally, the transfer of the affect onto the whole of the ego, that is to say, identification. But how is pain involved here? When one reads “Mourning and Melancholia,” one has the impression that the main task that the ego must accomplish in mourning is to detach itself from the memories connected to the deceased, that is to say, to undertake an affective disinvestment. After this reading, one would conclude that if there is pain it is due to the disassocia-

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tion, separation, and dissolution of the bond. If we wanted to express this process in classical Freudian terms, one would say that pain is engendered in the displacement of investments that leave the representation of the object in order to diffuse themselves in the ego as narcissistic investments. Other authors, such as Melanie Klein, considered pain as being the result of loss, properly speaking. This is the classical position of those who, having studied the phenomenon of pain, determine that it is provoked by a wound of the ego. According to this hypothesis, pain would be understood according to a substantialist conception of the ego, an ego conceived of as a suffering body to the extent that the loss of the loved one tore away a part of him or her. However, by rereading “Mourning and Melancholia” as we have just done, one can note that pain is not directly linked to the loss, but to the work of mourning, if we understand that the word mourning does not signify loss but reaction to the loss. Now, we find that in “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (SE XX, Addenda C), Freud at first seemed to tell us the contrary, but in the end concluded with a compromise between his initial thesis in “Mourning and Melancholia” and the apparently opposed thesis in Addenda C. In that little text, he remarked first that “pain occurs in the first instance and as a regular thing whenever a stimulus, that impinges on the periphery breaks through the devices of the protective shield against stimuli and proceeds to act like a continuous instinctual stimulus, against which muscular action, that is as a rule effective because it withdraws the place that is being stimulated from the stimulus, is powerless” (SE XX, 170). He adds, “But finally this definition of pain does not count as pain of mourning.” How, then, can we correlate the definition of corporeal pain with that of psychical pain, in particular, the pain of mourning? He writes: “When there is physical pain, a high degree of what may be termed narcissistic cathexis of the painful place occurs” (SE XX, 171). One may note that it is not a matter of the representation of the object, as was the case for mourning, but of the painful place of the body. Then, comparing these two categories of pain (physical and psychical), he states, “For the intense cathexis of longing that is concentrated on the missed or lost object creates the same economic conditions as are created by the cathexis of pain that is concentrated on the injured part of the body” (SE XX, 171). Here is what I take to be significant: Pain is not due to a detachment but to an overinvestment. The representation of the object is just as much overinvested in the pain of mourning as the representation of the painful place of the body is in the case of corporeal pain. In a word, pain responds to a high concentration of libido on the psychical representation of an object that, in reality, has been lost or wounded. One can see that the affective overinvestment of a representation signifies a greater attachment to the internal psychical object that is no longer outside.

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Conclusion: The pain of mourning is not the pain of separation but the pain of bond. This is what must be emphasized at this point. One must consider that what causes pain is not the separation but the attachment to the lost object, an attachment that is stronger than ever. Thus, in these three stages that we have characterized just now, it seems that pain is engendered not in the operation of detachment but in the focusing and overinvestment of the psychical bond with the object. If with this thesis in mind you listen to an analysand who speaks to you of a pain with which they have been afflicted since the loss of a loved one, you will be no doubt surprised. You will be surprised to find that the pain is not so much from the absence of the loved other, but from having him or her present like never before. The pain is not the pain of losing but of sealing too strongly the bonds with the representation of the absent other. That said, let us note that Freud, a few pages later, concludes that the cause of pain resides as much in detachment as in overinvestment. We must conclude that Freud settles on an ambiguous position, a solution, a compromise without revealing the true economic dimension of pain. I would like to consider a final question now. In his commentary on Hamlet, Lacan formulated a fruitful hypothesis concerning the phenomenon of mourning. Hamlet was not able to mourn for his assassinated father, for most of the funeral rites were not respected. His mother, especially, did not observe the necessary time between the death of her husband and her remarriage. Lacan refered to such rushed mourning, which led to Hamlet’s madness, as an “incomplete mourning” [non satisfait]. With another expression borrowed from Freud, he also calls it a “hole in the real” (I should say, on the basis of an expression from Freud, since it is an expression taken from the G Manuscript [SE I, 205] that considers the pain of melancholia as an internal hemorrhage). It would be like a brutal decompression of excitations that rush through a hole in the psyche. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” he used again the image of the in-drawing hole: “The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies—from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished” (SE XIV, 253). It is thus a kind of suction of the internal energy. But here is Lacan’s complete sentence that I would like to comment on: “As a hole in the real, mourning is the inverse of psychotic foreclosure.” While mourning would be a hole in the real, operating like the core of a whirlpool (like an abyss around whose edges the symbolic system revolves), foreclosure, for its part, undertakes the rejection of a signifier in a centrifugal movement so that it falls into the real, thereby rejected from the system. In other words, the sucking hole in the real of pathological mourning is the inverse of the rejection of foreclosure. Let us note, however, that this opposition is only legitimate on the condition that one identifies foreclosure as a

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movement of rejection. But I am not so certain that it is necessary to conceive of the operation of foreclosure as an operation of exclusion. But this is another question that I have treated elsewhere.

What relation do you establish between “foreclosure” and your thesis of pain as an object of transitory drive? If one suffers pain, it is because there is no foreclosure and the system of signifiers remains coherent and active.

Can one say that the pain of mourning is conscious as well as unconscious? It is troubling to affirm that the pain of mourning is not only the one we feel when our loved one has departed, but that it is also a suffering of which we are not conscious. The expression “unconscious pain” immediately suggests a contradiction in terms. This is the same difficulty Freud encountered when studying “the unconscious feeling of guilt.” He advised us that it was difficult to modify his expression, although he knew that the words feeling and unconscious are contradictory. Without solving the problem, there is a concept that can be useful to us, that of “endopsychical perception.” Both the unconscious feeling and pain would result from the endopsychical perception of the movement of the drives.

Does the work of mourning have an end? Mourning, conceived of as a work, allows us to think that we have not lost someone when he or she dies, but we lose them only after a long elaboration. The stakes of mourning are the same as those of analysis. The last session is never the end of an analysis, and one does not complete the mourning of the analytic relation after having ended it. There is a whole work of mourning that we could designate as “the decline of analysis,” or “the decline of the analytic complex.” This decline implies a laborious process of reparations, of various returns of the repressed, of symptoms and fluctuations in the life of the subject, even including “acting out.” But one question remains: “When does our work end?” Does it ever end? For women, according to Freud, it never ends. The decline of the feminine Oedipus complex lasts an entire lifetime. Why? Because a woman is always becoming a woman. With respect to a man, the boy completes his masculine identity with the menace of castration. It is the moment when the Oedipus Complex disappears. Clearly, there

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is a period of latency that we should not forget, but the Oedipus complex culminates with the anxiety of castration, then declines to be finally put to rest. But the woman never escapes Oedipus. It is what gives her the possibility of becoming woman. But mourning, perhaps, is just as interminable.

What difference can be established between normal and pathological mourning? The difference would be as follows: in normal mourning, the withdrawal of the libido is progressively displaced onto another object. The libido leaves the representation of the lost object gradually in order to invest the representation of a new chosen object. In pathological mourning, the libido, once detached from the lost object, is disseminated into the whole of the ego and crystallizes in the form of a congealed identification with the image of the lost object.

Excerpts from Freud and Lacan Concerning Psychical Pain

Freud and Lacan have rarely addressed the theme of pain and never devoted an exclusive study to it. The citations that follow are drawn from short passages from the works of these authors. The lines in italics are Dr. Nasio’s commentary.

What is physical pain? For Freud, pain results from a sudden internal hemorrhage of psychical energy. There may come about an in-drawing (as it were) in the psychical sphere, which produces an affect of suction upon the adjoining amounts of excitation. The associated neurons are obliged to give up their excitation which produces pain. Uncoupling associations is always painful. There sets in an impoverishment in excitation (in the free store of it)—an internal haemorrhage, as it were—which shows itself in the other instincts and functions. This in-drawing operates inhibitingly, like a wound, in a manner analogous to pain. . . . A quite similar impoverishment takes place owing to the excitation running out, as it were, through a hole . . . in melancholia the hole is in the psychical sphere. (SE I, 205–206) [Melancholia is] a psychical inhibition with instinctual impoverishment and pain concerning it. (SE I, 205) The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathectic energies . . . and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished. (SE XIV, 253)

We are never so badly protected against pain as when we are in love dependent . . . on . . . his chosen love-object, [he] exposed himself to extreme suffering if he should be rejected by that object or should lose it through unfaithfulness or death. (SE XXI,101) 123

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To lose the love of the loved one is also to lose the organizing center of my psyche. If he loses the love of another person on whom he is dependent, he also ceases to be protected from a variety of dangers. (SE XXI, 124)

Mourning and the pain of mourning We only mourn for the person who has shared our fantasies. We have been the source of his or her insatisfaction and he or she has been the source of our own insatisfaction. If the object does not possess this great significance for the ego—a significance reinforced by a thousand links—then, too, its loss will not be of the kind to cause either mourning or melancholia. (SE XIV, 256) The object for which we mourn was, without our knowledge, the object which made itself, and which we made the basis of our castration. (Lacan, 1‘Angoisse, lecture of 16 January 1963) We are mourning for someone about whom we can say: “I was his or her lack.” We are mourning for people who we treated either well or badly, without knowing that we fulfilled the function of being in the place of their lack. (Ibid., 30 January 1963)

What is mourning? Mourning is a withdrawal of the affective investment of the psychical representation of the object that was loved and lost. Mourning is a process of the withdrawal of love [désamour]. It is a slow, meticulous and painful work. It can last days, weeks, and months, or even a lifetime. Its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy. (SE XIV, 245) Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it. (SE XIV, 245)

The pain of mourning remains an incomprehensible phenomenon. Mourning is a forced and painful movement of withdrawal from the one we have loved so much and who is no longer. We are forced to detach ourselves, within ourselves, from the loved one whom we have lost outside us. Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved . . . seems so natural to the layman that he regards it as self-evident. But . . . mourning is a great riddle. We possess, as it seems, a certain amount of capacity for love—what we call libido . . . directed towards our own ego. Later, though still at a

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very early time, this libido is diverted from the ego onto objects, which are thus in a sense taken into our ego. If the objects are destroyed or if they are lost to us, our capacity for love (our libido) is once more liberated. . . . But why is it that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us. . . . We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost. . . . Such then is mourning. (SE XIV, 306–307)

Mourning is a permanent struggle between a love that refuses to give up the lost loved one, and a force that separates us from him or her. One cannot terminate mourning, perhaps because it is truly an unconscious love. (Les Premiers Psychanalystes [Paris: Gallimard, 1983] t. iv, 139)

In the course of mourning, the ego identifies with the image of the lost loved one: the shadow of the object falls on the ego. This identification is a form of love. If one has lost a love-object, the most obvious reaction is to identify oneself with it, to replace it from within, as it were, by identification. (SE XXIII, 193)

Psychical pain is the overinvestment of the mental representation of the lost loved one The transition from physical pain to mental pain corresponds to a change from narcissistic cathexis to object cathexis. (SE XX, 171)

In mourning, pain blends with love and hate In mourning, we are inhabited not only by pain but at times by hatred against the deceased and also by the guilt of feeling hateful. It not infrequently happens that the survivor is overwhelmed by tormenting doubts (to which we give the name “obsessive self-reproaches”) as to whether she may not herself have been responsible for the death of this cherished being through some act of carelessness or neglect. . . . It is not that the mourner was really responsible for this death or was really guilty of neglect, as the self-reproaches declare to be the case. Nonetheless there was something in her—a wish that was unconscious to herself—which would not have been dissatisfied by the occurrence of death. (SE XIII, 60)

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Just like melancholy, mourning is a struggle taking place in the arena of the unconscious between a determined love for the image of the lost loved one and the hatred that allows us to part from it. Unlike melancholy in mourning, the struggle can also be felt consciously. In melancholy, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain the position of the libido against the assault. . . . In mourning, too, the efforts to detach the libido are made in this same system; but in it nothing hinders these processes from proceeding along the normal path through the Pcs. to consciousness. (SE XIV, 256–57)

The death drive is at work in mourning We believe that the force which, in mourning, pushes us to part from the deceased is one of the expressions of the death drive as we conceive it. Indeed, we propose that the death drive is that internal force that tends to free us from all the hindrances to the movement of life. The death drive conserves life. Therefore, mourning is a slow process of vital separation from the deceased and of a regeneration of the entire ego. Mourning occurs under the influence of reality-testing; for the latter function demands categorically from the bereaved person that he should separate himself from the object, since it no longer exists. (SE XX, 172) Mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead . . . disparaging it, denigrating it, and even as it were killing it. (SE XIV, 257) This withdrawal of libido is not a process that can be accomplished in a moment, but must certainly, as in mourning, be one in which the process is long-drawn out and gradual. (SE XIV, 256)

The ultimate pain would be to undergo jouissance without limit Pain is not to be unsatisfied but, on the contrary, it is to be delivered to a boundless satisfaction. The insatisfaction of the drives restrained by repression is, in fact, less painful than the absolute satisfaction that these drives would obtain if they were stopped by censorship. Without the censorship of repression, we would know the ultimate pain of an unlimited jouissance. Thus, repression protects us against the hypothetical pain of the a dissolution of the person. This interpretation of Freud’s text can be expressed in Lacanian terms: pain is the object of the jouissance of the Other.

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A certain amount of protection against suffering is secured, in that non-satisfaction is not so painfully felt in the case of instincts kept in dependence as in the case of uninhibited ones. (SE XXI, 79)

The infant, anxiety and pain Freud claims that the infant experiences anxiety and feels pain. In certain circumstances, the nursing child has the two affects confused because it cannot yet distinguish the temporary absence of the mother from her definitive disappearance. It confuses the fact of losing sight of its mother with her real loss. At that moment, it experiences a mixed feeling of anxiety and pain, It is only later—at around two years of age—that the child is able to discern a temporary loss from a definitive loss, that it can differentiate between anxiety and pain. That it does have anxiety there can be no doubt; but the expression of its face and its reaction of crying indicate that it is feeling pain as well. Certain things seemed to be joined together in it which will later on be separated out. It cannot distinguish between temporary absence and permanent loss. As soon as it loses sight of its mother it behaves as if it were never going to see her again; and repeated consoling experiences to the contrary are necessary before it learns that her disappearance is usually followed by her reappearance. (SE XX, 169)

A dangerous situation is different from a traumatic situation. While danger awakens anxiety, trauma provokes pain. The traumatic situation of missing the mother differs in one important respect from the traumatic situation of birth. At birth no object existed and so no object could be missed. Anxiety was the only reaction that occurred. Since then repeated situations of satisfaction have created an object out of the mother; and this object, whenever the infant feels a need, receives an intense cathexis which might be described as a “longing” one. (SE XX, 170)

The anxiety of the woman: To lose the love of her loved one In the fantasy of the woman, the most precious object—the phallus—is the love coming from the loved one and not the loved one himself. Thus, specifically feminine anxiety is the fear of losing love and being abandoned. It is precisely in women that the danger-situation of loss of object seems to have remained the most effective. All we need to do is make a slight

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modification in our description of their determinant of anxiety, in the sense that it is no longer a matter of feeling the want of, or actually losing the object itself, but of losing the object’s love. (SE XX, 143)

To undergo jouissance from pain For we have every reason to believe that sensations of pain, like other unpleasurable sensations, trench upon sexual excitation and produce a pleasurable condition, for the sake of which the subject will even willingly experience the unpleasure of pain. When once feeling pain has become a masochistic aim, the sadistic pain of causing pain can arise also, retrogressively; for while these pains are being inflicted on other people, they are enjoyed masochistically by the subject through his identification of himself with the suffering object. In both cases, of course, it is not the pain itself which is enjoyed, but the accompanying sexual excitation. . . . The enjoyment of pain would thus be an aim which was originally masochistic, but which can become an instinctual aim in someone who is originally sadistic. (SE XIV, 128–29)

The skin is the erogenous zone from which perverse pain emanates. In scopophilia and exhibitionism the eye corresponds to an erotogenic zone; while in the case of those components of the sexual instinct which involve pain and cruelty the same role is assumed by the skin. (SE VII, 169) Professor Freud observes . . . that one can only subscribe to the idea that the organic substance of sadomasochism must necessarily be the surface of the skin. (Les Premiers Psychanalystes, 6 November 1912, 139) Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, it has been well known to all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of buttocks is one of the erotogenic roots of the passive instinct of cruelty (masochism). (SE VII, 193)

Pain and the scream The scream expresses, above all, a present pain, but it returns to the ears of the one who emits it and awakens the memory of earlier pains, and confers a hostile character to the object that hurts us. If, for instance, he screams—[the scream] will awaken the memory of his [the subject’s] own screaming and his own experiences of pain. (SE I, 331)

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There are objects—perceptions—that make one scream, because they arouse pain; . . . this association of a sound emphasizes that object as a hostile one. (SE I, 366)

The pain of existence Lacan identifies pain with the insatisfaction of desire, and calls it “pain of existence.” For Lacan, pain would not be the immediate reaction to a sudden loss, as we have claimed in this book, but an indefinite state that lasts as long as life itself. The two points of view, pain considered as a reaction and pain considered as a state, are not incompatible but perfectly complementary. It is this excentricity of desire with respect to any satisfaction that allows us to understand . . . its profound affinity with pain. This means that desire purely and simply borders . . . on the pain of existence. (Lacan, Les Formations de l’inconscient, lesson of 9 April 1958)

The pain of existence is the pain of being submitted to the determination, the repetition, indeed, the destiny, of the signifier. This is a sort of pure feeling of existence, an existence which is, if you will, indefinite. From within this existence a new existence always surges anew. . . . Existence is apprehended and felt as something that by its very nature can only end by re-surging elsewhere, and this precisely is accompanied by an intolerable pain. (Lacan, Le désir et son interprétation, lesson of 10 December 1959)

Nothing is more intolerable than existence reduced to itself, to a concatenation, to a chain of successive events that dominate and overwhelm me. This is where desire to live vacillates. The experience of this pain of existence when there is nothing else that inhabits it but this very existence, and when everything in the excess of suffering tends to abolish this ineradicable fact of the desire to live. . . . There is nothing ultimately to existence but the pain of existence. (Lacan, Le désir et son interprétation, lesson of 10 December 1959)

Unpleasure is desire, but not pain. It remains for us, on this basis, to conceive of pleasure as necessarily permeated with unpleasure and to distinguish in it what separates the pure and simple unpleasure—desire—from what we call pain. . . . To the extent that this surface [the Möbius strip] is capable of crossing itself, in the prolongation of

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this necessary intersection, it is at that point that we would situate the case of narcissistic investment, the function of pain, otherwise logically properly speaking in Freud’s text, where although admirably elucidated, it is unthinkable. (Lacan, Problèmes cruciaux de la psychanalyse, lesson of 10 March 1965)

Pain and masochism Masochism is the jouissance of being reduced to the object of the jouissance of the Other. [T]he height of masochistic jouissance does not lie the fact that it may or may not support corporeal pain, but in that extreme singular fact . . . of masochistic fantasmagory, that cancellation properly speaking, of the subject insofar as it makes itself a pure object. (Lacan, L’Identification, lesson of 28 March 1962) Masochism, in effect, is defined precisely by the fact that the subject assumes the position of an object in the radical sense we give to that word, that is, that of a dejection or remainder of the subjective advent. (Lacan, La Logique du fantasme, lesson of 10 March 1967) There is no sadistic position which, in a certain way, is not accompanied— in order to be called sadistic properly speaking—by a certain masochistic satisfaction. (Lacan, Les Formations de l’inconscient, lesson of 2 February 1958)

Excerpts from Freud Concerning Corporeal Pain

Corporeal pain Freud thought that physical pain resulted from the violent eruption of great quantities of energy that reach the heart of the ego where the memory neurones are located, that is, at the level of the unconscious. Pain in the body is inscribed in the unconscious. The specific unpleasure of physical pain is probably the result of the protective shield having been broken through in a limited area. There is then a continuous stream of excitations from the part of the periphery concerned to the central apparatus of the mind. (SE XVIII, 30) Pain consists in the irruption of Q’s into ψ. (SE I, 307) (TN. Q = large quantities of energy, ψ = system of impermeable neurones) Pain sets the φ as well as the ψ in motion, there is no obstacle to its conduction, it is the most imperative of all processes. (SE I, 307) (TN. φ = system of permeable neurones)

Freud defined corporeal pain as a massive eruption of energy in the ego—like a bolt of lightning—that suppresses all resistances and reaches the core of the memory neurones where it leaves a trace. Q [the quantity of energy] produces a facilitation, pain no doubt leaves permanent facilitations behind in ψ [memory neurons]—as though there had been a stroke of lightning. (SE I, 307)

Corporeal pain means a serious disturbance of the ego and a paralysis of the pleasure principle, the guardian of our psychic equilibrium. Pain reaches beyond the pleasure principle. It shocks the ego but does not destroy it. 131

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Such an event as an external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set in motion every possible defensive measure. At the same time, the pleasure principle is for the moment put out of action. (SE XVIII, 29)

Pain is a pseudo-drive In the rare cases where Freud defined corporeal pain, he compared it to a drive. The external and unusual aggression that provokes the pain evokes the internal and normal aggression of the drive. In both cases the excitation is constant. We know very little about pain either. The only fact we are certain of is that pain occurs in the first instance and as a regular thing whenever a stimulus which impinges on the periphery breaks through the devices of the protective shield against stimuli and proceeds to act like a continuous instinctual stimulus. (SE XX, 170) The specific unpleasure of physical pain is probably the result of the protective shield having been broken through in a limited area. There is then a continuous stream of excitations from the part of the periphery concerned to the central apparatus of the mind. (SE XVIII, 30)

Corporeal pain is comparable to the drive. When the external aggression which has provoked a pain leaves its traces in the unconscious, it becomes a constant internal excitation which can reawaken the pain again at any time. Here again, drive and pain are comparable due to the constant excitation of the source. It may happen that an external stimulus becomes internalized—for example, by eating into or destroying some bodily organ—so that a new source of constant excitation and increase of tension arises. The stimulus thereby acquires a far-reaching similarity to an instinct. We know that a case of this sort is experienced by us as pain. (SE XIV, 146)

But, in truth, pain is not a drive. Their aims are different: pain is a red flag to stop the affliction while the drive seeks pleasure. The defenses of the ego differ in both cases: faced with the drive the ego opposes repression, faced with imperious pain it remains powerless. The aim of this pseudo-instinct, however, is simply the cessation of the change in the organ and the unpleasure accompanying it. . . . Further, pain is imperative; the only things to which it can yield are removed by some toxic agent or the influence of mental distraction. (SE XIV, 146)

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Pleasure and unpleasure express the rhythm of the drives. On the contrary, pain (as we have defined it) is a rupture of this rhythm. For a long time, Freud considered pleasure and unpleasure as the qualitative expressions of a diminution or augmentation of psychical tension. In 1924, after having determined that there were cases where the lowering of tension was unpleasurable and where the raising of tension was pleasurable, he altered his criteria. Thereafter, the sensations of pleasure and unpleasure no longer corresponded to the intensity of tensions but to the rhythm of the variations of the tensions. It is this new manner of viewing pleasure and unpleasure—not yet fully developed—which led us to define pain as a rupture of the rhythm of the drives and to distinguish it from unpleasure. Pleasure and unpleasure, therefore, cannot be referred to an increase or decrease of a quantity (which we describe as tension due to stimulus . . .). It appears that they depend, not on this quantitative factor, but on some characteristic of it which we can only describe as a qualitative one. . . . Perhaps it is the rhythm, the temporal sequence of changes, rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus. We do not know. (SE XIX, 160) What is felt as pleasure or unpleasure is not the absolute height of this tension but something in the rhythm of the changes in them. (SE XXIII, 146)

The memory of pain The past experience of a violent pain provoked by a real incident is one thing, its revivification as a painful affect is another. While pain of the past has been provoked by an external agent, the painful affect of today is provoked by an internal stimulation, one that is often imperceptible. In the case of an experience of pain it is evidently the irrupting Q (quantity of energy) from outside; in the case of an affect it is the endogenous Q released by facilitation. (SE I, 335)

The earlier traumatic pain has rendered the memory neurones so sensitive that the slightest internal stimulation reactivates them and a new pain appears. Freud called this new pain “affect” and the phenomenon of the sensitizing of the neurones “facilitation.” Pain passes along all pathways of discharge. . . . Pain no doubt leaves permanent facilitations behind in ψ [memory neurones]—as though there had been a stroke of lightning. (SE I, 307)

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Like any affect, a pain that is experienced is the memory of an earlier pain. [Affects are] . . . reproductions of very early, perhaps even pre-individual experiences, experiences of vital importance. (SE XX, 93) Affective states have become incorporated in the mind as precipitates of primeval traumatic experiences, and when a similar situation occurs they are revived like mnemic symbols. (SE XX, 93)

Any pain is the memory of an earlier pain and any loss the reproduction of a first loss that is already forgotten The capacity to represent a corporeal lesion and to experience pain was acquired in the course of different losses in childhood: birth, defecation, or weaning. These experiences have taught the child that these essential things are missing. When the boy comes to represent the loss of his penis to himself, an anxiety of loss occurs, an anxiety that we know as “castration anxiety.” [T]he child gets the idea of a narcissistic injury through a bodily loss from the experience of losing his mother’s breast after nursing, from the daily surrender of feces, and indeed, even from his separation from the womb at birth. Nevertheless, one ought not to speak of a castration complex until this idea of a loss has become connected with the male genitals. (SE XIX, 144) Sooner or later the child, who is so proud of his possession of a penis, has the view of the genital region of the little girl, and cannot help being convinced of the absence of the penis in a creature who is so like himself. With this, the loss of his own penis becomes imaginable, and the threat of castration takes its deferred affect. (SE XIX, 175–76)

Unconscious pain Freud defined unconscious pain as a link between an internal perception and an external perception. The trace that a past pain has left in the unconscious can become an internal excitation capable of triggering another pain. The earlier pain was provoked by an external perception while the new pain is awakened by an internal perception. In the same way that the tensions arising from physical needs can remain unconscious, so also can pain—a thing intermediate between external and internal perception, which behaves like an internal perception even when its source is in the external world. (SE XIX, 22)

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Corporeal pain is the overinvestment of the mental representation of the injured part of the body Physical pain . . . can be accounted for by there being a concentration of cathexis on the psychical representative of the part of the body which is giving pain. I think it is here that we shall find the point of analogy which has made it possible to carry sensations of pain over to the mental sphere. (SE XX, 171)

Corporeal pain is an excess of love for the injured organ to the detriment of the other objects of love The ego reacts to the trauma caused by a breaching of protective tissues in the following way. It garners all its available forces and, at the price of weakening itself, it concentrates them (countercharges) on a single point, that of the wound, more exactly, on the point of the psychical representation of the wound. And how shall we expect the mind to react to this invasion? Cathectic energy is summoned from all sides to provide sufficiently high cathexes of energy in the environs of the breach. An “anti-cathexis” on a grand scale is set up, for whose benefit all the other psychical systems are impoverished. (SE XVIII, 30)

Pain is an affect that results from the overinvestment of the representation of the injured organ and, simultaneously, from the disinvestment of the external world. When there is psychical pain, a high degree of what may be termed narcissistic cathexis of the painful place occurs. This cathexis continues to increase and tends, as it were, to empty the ego. (SE XX, 171) A person who is tormented by organic pain . . . gives up his interest in the things of the external world, insofar as they do not concern his suffering. . . . He also withdraws libidinal interest from his love-objects: so long as he suffers, he ceases to love. (SE XIV, 82)

Pain shapes our ego and teaches us to discover our bodies When we feel pain, we represent the body to ourselves and, in this way, we constitute our ego. The ego emerges from all the sensorial perceptions and representations that form in the psyche.

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A person’s own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring. . . . Pain, too, seems to play a part in the process . . . we gain a new knowledge of our organs . . . [and] we arrive at the idea of our body. (SE XIX, 25–26)

The ego is a surface in two ways: the mental image of the surface of the body and the perceptual surface of the psychical apparatus. The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego, it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. (SE XIX, 26)

Psychogenic pain Psychogenic pain is here the somatic expression of a drive inhibited by repression; in the place of the repressed drive, a corporeal pain without organic cause appears. If repression had not stopped the drive, it would have expressed itself fully as a moral pain. We may ask: “What is it that turns into physical pain here?” . . . A cautious reply would be: “Something that might have become, and should have become, mental pain.” (SE II, 167) The mechanism was that of conversion: i.e. in place of the mental pains which she avoided, physical pains made their appearance. (SE II, 166)

Corporeal pain can be a symptom, that is, the substitute satisfaction of a repressed drive. Let us take as an example a case of hysterical headache or lumbar pain. Analysis shows us that, by condensation and displacement, it has become a substitutive satisfaction for a whole number of libidinal phantasies or memories. (SE XXIV, 391)

Pain and jouissance For Lacan, corporeal pain is the purest form of jouissance. [F]or what I call jouissance, in the sense that it is experienced by the body, is always a matter of tension, forcing, defense and maybe even exploit. There is jouissance incontestably where pain begins to appear, and we know that it is only with pain that an entire dimension of the organism—which otherwise remains concealed—can be experienced. (Lacan, “Psychanalyse et médecine,” in Lettres de l’école freudienne, no. 1 [1966])

Notes

1. Juan-David Nasio, The Book of Love and Pain: Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan, trans. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), herein as LP followed by the page number. The Book of Love and Pain: Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan is a translation of Juan-David Nasio’s Le Livre de la Douleur et de I’Amour (Paris: Editions Payot et Rivages, 1996). 2. Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, trans. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 75–76. 3. Is it necessary to recall that the narration of an experience that we have had, although faithful, remains inevitably a fiction, a fiction of the writer? 4. A term we have already employed and that we will often find in what follows is that of “drive” [pulsion]. In this chapter, we take “drive” and “desire” to be equivalent. In spite of their differences, we prefer to use these two concepts interchangeably by taking into account what is essential to each of them, that is, the fact that they designate movement within the unconscious, more exactly, any drive that has to discharge and express itself. 5. We remember that it is one of these symbolic representations that is strongly overinvested by the ego when it tries to contain a libidinal upheaval provoked by the loss of a loved one. However, the use of the Lacanian term symbolic refers to the following. The symbolic dimension always has two parts, a network of elements—called “signifiers” or “unconscious representations”—and a unique element, situated at the periphery of the network, which constitutes both its limit and cohesion. Lacan names this organizing principle of the network, the “signifier of the Name-of-the-Father.” Now, as we will see, the special person has a double symbolic existence: as a network and as a “one.” It is symbolic when we propose that its person is fixed in our unconscious by a multitude of unconscious representations. It is a singular limit of the network, as signifier of the Name-of-the-Father, when it guarantees the cohesion of my psyche. We will see in a moment that the function of the limit corresponds to the rhythm of the pulse of desire. 6. This deformed loop of the fantasm has been “fabricated” for a very long time, from our very first vital trembling, from the first encounter with the special, primordial Other, whether the mother or a titular adult figure. 137

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7. “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974), herein cited as SE followed by the volume and page number as applicable. We see by rereading the “Project” that one of the most striking features of this seminal text is its current relevance. This is a relevance that is confirmed by recent hypotheses in the neurosciences on the transmittal of pain. 8. The body is experienced by the ego as a periphery that is either external (skin, fluids) or internal (internal organs). To illustrate the relation between the ego and the body, we can imagine that the ego is placed at the center of a space surrounded by a Möbius strip. This circular strip would represent the body perceived by the ego as an edge, which, alternately, offers its external side (visual and tactile sensations) and its internal side (internal sensations). 9. For the sake of the clarity of my demonstration, I prefer to use the terms psychical representations, image, and even symbol interchangeably. It is true that each of these terms designates different psychoanalytic concepts, and nevertheless all take account of the psychical presence of the other within the ego. The difference between these concepts has been discussed extensively in l’Enseignement de 7 concepts cruciaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Payot, 1992), 143–87. 10. These peripheral cells, the function of which is to perceive excitations coming from the external world, are covered with a superficial protective layer that Freud calls “a protective barrier” against excitations. It is precisely this layer that is breached by a painful injury. 11. In the Project, Freud defines the ego by focusing on the memory neurons. The ego, he tells us, is a particular state of the memory neurones when, having been sensitized by successive energy pulses (facilitation), they are subject to the regulation of their excitability and to the quantity of energy that they contain. The ego is the name for a regulative agency of the excitability of the memory neurones and of the charges with which they are invested. 12. The neuroscientists do not hesitate to suppose, as Freud did, that human beings would know pain due to a deep memory of the species. Damasio declares that painful sensation follows “innate neuronal mechanisms” transmitted by the genetic messages proper to human beings. Pain holds an important place in the genetically coded survival strategies of the species. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1994). 13. Cf. infra, p. 54. 14. The imaginary contents of the representation, while mainly visual, are also auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc. 15. Damasio, op. cit. 16. J. P. Changeux, “Les neurosciences,” in Bulletin de la société française de philosophie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1982).

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17. The reader will find the two passages in which Freud defines pleasure and unpleasure according to the rhythm of the drives, on page 133. 18. Damasio, 296–306; 329–34. 19. Pierre Benoît already considered a possible reversal of the well-known Freudian formula that takes conversion hysteria to be “a leap from the psychical to the somatic.” Cf. his article “Le saut du psychique au somatique,” in Psychiatrie française, no. 5 (1985). 20. Maine de Biran, De l’aperception immédiate (Paris: Vrin, 1963), 89–106. 21. This lecture by J.-D. Nasio, not published here, presents in particular the Freudian hypotheses from the Project concerning corporeal pain. These developments have been reconsidered at length in the chapter on corporeal pain. 22. J.-D. Nasio, L’Inconscient à venir (Paris: Rivages, 1993). 23. SE I, letter 71, Oct 15, 1897, 263–66. 24. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society Volume I, 1908–1910, trans. M. Nunberg (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1967), 449. 25. Ernst Freud, ed., Letters of Sigmund Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 312. 26. Lacan refers to Stockes’s Theorem in “Position de l’Inconscient,” in Ecrits (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), 838–39. 27. Lucretius, “The Nature of Things,” in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers. The Complete Extant Writings of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, ed. Whitney Oates (New York: Random House, 1940). 28. D. Sylvester, L’Art de l’impossible. Entretiens avec Bacon (Paris: Flammarion, 1996). 29. Lacan, L’Angoisse (unpublished seminar), lesson of 3 July 1963.

Index

affect, 48, 58, 59; as painful, 70 amputation, 39 analyst, 100, 110 anxiety, 47, 127; as reaction to the imaginary lack, 47; three forms of, 47 Artaud, Antonin, 106

disinvestment, 21, 23, 118 drive, 26, 96; to mastery, 84, 103; and pain, 132; turmoil of the, 36; the rhythm of the drive, 68–69; as sadomasochistic, 77; as scopic, 80; vicissitudes of, 84

Bacon, Francis, 23, 109, 111 Biran, Maine de, 75 body, the, 4, 14, 19, 30, 51, 71, 79; and drive, 72; endowed with memory, 71; as incomplete, 79; orifices of, 31 breast, the, 80, 96; detached from the body, 90; and the sexual desire of the infant, 81

ego, the, 4, 19, 21, 45, 46, 50–53, 60, 63, 69, 75, 101; contraction of, 21; as exhausted, 21; emptying of, 21; as libidinal object for the Id, 101; as “meta-ego,” 70; protective envelope of, 54; as split 23, 24 emotion, 58; as archaic 59; as painful, 70, 71 “endopsychical perception,” 121 energy, 21, 34, 37, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 80, 98, 103; and lack, 26; and melancholia, 120; as psychical, 23, and the scream, 98; as unrepresentable, 32 “extimacy ” [“extimité”], 109

castration complex, 80 “castration of the Other,” 116 cathexis, 119 Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 66 consciousness, 16, 19, 21, 52, 54, 55, 68 corporeal pain, 49, 55, 57, 61–62, 65–67, 131–136; and psychical pain 14; as wound, 39 “counter-investment,” 61

facilitation [Bahnung], 57 fantasy, 29, 30, 35, 43, 44, 90, 96; fracture of, 36; of the loved one, 29; as masochistic, 96; as sadomasochistic, 82, 90 feminine Oedipus complex, the, 121 foreclosure, 25, 76, 120, 121 “formations of object a,” 78, 92, 93, 95 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 50, 51, 55, 56, 58, 61, 66, 67, 69, 99, 105

Damasio, Antonio R., 66, 70, 71 Darwin, Charles, 106 death drive, the, 126 Deleuze, Gilles, 106 desire, dynamic of, 26, 27, 81; as force of, 29, 32; and insatisfaction 27, 29, 35; object of, 27; as object-less, 37

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gaze, the, 83, 88; semblance of, 83 Gill, Merton, 77 guilt, 47, 48, 56, 57, 93; unconscious feeling of, 92 Hamlet, 120 hate, 29, 48 humiliation, 48 hysteria, 75–76 identification, 114, 118 Id, the, 26, 42, 52, 101 imaginary, the, 30, 31, 35, 51, 52, 64, 65, 74 imaginary phallus, 99; as hole, 99 in-between, the, 35 jealousy, 48 jouissance, 4, 26, 33, 43, 46, 47, 77, 78, 83, 86, 88, 90, 91, 96; as absolute, 43; without limit, 126; as maximal tension, 77; of the Other, 89–90; of pain, 77; as partial, 27, 91; of the transference, 78 Klein, Melanie, 113, 119 Lacan, Jacques, 59, 79, 99, 106, 116, 120 lack, 26, 36 as imaginary, 47 language, 106 libidinal cadence, 17 libidinal disturbance, 19 libido, 93, 94, 115; withdrawal of, 94, 115 local foreclosure, 6 loss, 24, 36, 37, 44, 46; of the loved one 21; of the object, 23 love, 11, 19, 28, 31, 64, 67, 118; narcissistic, 34; and suffering, 20 loved one, 4, 14, 30, 43; fantasy of, 4; as guarantee of a limit, 4; imaginary presence, 33; as lost, 24; as phantom, 25 Lucretius, 17, 104

masochism, 47, 85, 92, 96, 97, 100, 101, 104, 130 masochist, 97, 100; as master of the semblance-scream, 104 melancholic, the, 114; self-reproaches of, 114 memory, 68; and the unconscious, 68 memory neurons, 55–57, 66–67, 104 metapsychology, 15 mirror stage, 79 mourning, 23, 28,43, 45, 46, 113, 125; as incomplete, 120; as pain of love, 118; as pathological, 44, 47, 120 mutilation, 27 Name-of-the-Father, 33 negative therapeutic reaction, 92, 93 neuron, 56 neurosciences, the, 65–66 nostalgia, 46 object a, 28, 90; “fall of,” 81 objects of the drive, 89 Oedipus Complex, 115, 121 other, the, 28, 32; as symbolic, 33, 36, 38; the body of, 34; unconscious of, 35 Other, the, 29, 80, 89–90, 96, 107; demand of, 89; desire of, 88; as image full of holes, 99; jouissance of, 88; and sexual drive, 81; provoking pain in, 84; will of, 97 overinvestment, 21, 23, 62, 118 pain, 48, 101; of abandonment, 14; and the certainty of the irreparable, 44; corporeal, 49, 76, 89; as a form of sexuality, 3; of disinvestment 21; as enigma, 102; “eroticization” of, 82; of existence, 129; field of, 50; of humiliation, 14; inner mechanisms of, 66; of jouissance, 136; as limit-phenomenon, 2, 4; as masochistic, 86; as object of the drive, 80, 89; pleasure of, 91; as pseudo-drive, 132; of mourning, 113; in the negative ther-

INDEX

apeutic reaction, 88; as primordial, 60; psychical, 37, 41; psychogenic, 71–73; of reaction, 60–63; and the scream, 101; semblances of, 98; and suffering 15; of trauma, 19; as “ultimate affect,” 1; as unconscious, 42, 59–60, 73–75; unconscious memory of, 53–56 penis, the, 81, 115; transformed into phallic signifier, 116; as imaginary phallic object of castration, 116 perversion, 96, 97 phallus, the, 80 Phantom loved one, the, 22, 24, 25 pleasure, 79; as sexual, 79 pleasure principle, the, 16, 17, 89, 131 primary masochism, 85 psyche, 14, 15, 17, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 41, 49, 50, 53, 55, 60, 71, 77 psychical energy, 21, 23 psychical pain, 14, 16, 37, 41, 123–130; distinguished from anxiety, 20; and love, 2 psychosis, 4, 75–76 psychogenic pain, 136 real, the, 31, 32, 35, 52; as energy, 32; as the unrepresentable, 32 repetition, 55, 58, 59, 97 repression, 33, 94, 98, 106 rhythm, 13, 38; of the drive, 69, 133; as symbolic, 32 sadism, 84, 103; of the tormenter, 87 sadomasochistic fantasy, 82 scream, the, 101, 128; as an action, 103; as an address to the Other, 104; as an appeal to the Other, 107; as an

143

appeal to the silence of the void, 108; as emanation of pain, 105; as a motor discharge, 102; and therapeutic function, 112 scream-action, 103 scream-discharge, 103 semblance [le semblant], 7 sexuality, 77, 78, 79, 80 sexual pleasure, 15 signifier, 59, 80, 106; as phallic, 81 speech, 41 superego, the, 96, 107; and the scream, 107 Sylvester, David, 109 symbolic, the, 31, 35, 52 tension, 16, 17, 19, 26, 32, 33, 37, 42, 68, 69, 91, 103; of jouissance, 47; as libidinal, 53, 64, 70, 71; as maximal 77; as psychical, 56 Thing, the, 108 torturer, the, 87; as self-torture, 86; and sadism, 87 transference, 77, 78 trauma, 19, 42, 46, 54; pain of, 19, 53, 54 unpleasure, 17, 25, 65, 68 voice, the, 80, 88; as object of the drive, 117 Velasquez, Diego, 109 withdrawal of love [désamour], 45, 46, 124 wound, 39, 50, 51, 60; mental representation of, 52; perception of, 52; symbol of, 63