Inde Navarrette as Nikki Freeman OBSESSION (2026) Dir. Curry Barker

Moments where the real Nikki breaks through the wish OBSESSION (2026) Dir. Curry Barker

Jacques-Alain Miller underlines two definitions of the symptom. On the one hand, “the symptom is an advent [avènement] of signification. It is in this capacity that it is eminently interpretable. This definition says nothing else”. This is the classic symptom with its effects of truth. On the other hand, “the definition of the symptom as a body event [évènement]] that I have promoted is necessary and inevitable in so far as the symptom constitutes a jouissance as such.” This definition “makes the status of the interpretation that could respond to it much more problematic.”

From the moment the symptom is grasped by jouissance and affects the body “insofar as it enjoys itself”, it is an event of the body. And then it develops as meaning. But at its root it is “a pure reiteration of the One of jouissance that Lacan calls sinthome.” The One is repeated in the iteration and there is the body that appears as Other , the body event being the conjunction of the One and the body.

The event does not bear witness to a truth to be discovered. Rather, it refers to excess, surprise and the contingency of the encounter. It leaves no room for interpretation in terms of meanings. It is therefore about staying away from sense. “Indeed, these are meanings that first present themselves in listening; they are what capture and permeate you. It is already a great deal to succeed in detaching oneself from these enough to isolate in them the signifiers, and to interpret, on the basis not of signification, but of simple homophony, not of sense but of sound. On occasion, this interpretation can be reduced to making a sound resonate, nothing more.”

Psychoanalysis announces that you are no longer the centre of yourself, since there is another subject within you, the Unconscious. It was, at first, not well-accepted news. The so-called irrationalism which has been used to define Freud! When it is exactly the contrary: not only did he rationalise all that had resisted rationalisation until he came along, but he even showed that in action there is a process of reasoning going on; I mean, something that is reasoning and functioning logically, without the knowledge of the subject. All of this, viewed classically, as being in the field of the irrational; let’s call it the field of passion.

This is precisely what he was not forgiven for. His introduction of the notion of sexual forces that take over the subject without warning, nor logic, was still admitted; but that sexuality is a place of speech, that neurosis is an illness that speaks, here is something strange, and even his disciples prefer that we speak of something else.