Jacques Lacan Pt. 4
Jacques Lacan finally began analysis and started teasing out the knots of his own desires. With each untying, he only found more to unravel.
Analyst or Analysand?
Sooner or later, any psychoanalytic theoreticians bump up against politics when they choose to become an analysand and begin to explore their own unconscious. As insightful as Jacques Lacan was with paranoia, self-punishment, and sexual identity, there was a limit when he was not able to analyze a patient. News clippings and notes from other clinicians and investigators close off the unknown that could be explored in a true analysis. Even more important was the experience of transference, and counter-transference, after an understanding of the master-slave dialectic he received from his left-wing contemporaries. Authority figures are always treated as the "subject that's supposed to know," and Lacan's method of therapy would include a disillusionment of this dynamic to free patients of idol worship, or in another term, free them from transference. "In June 1932 he started his sessions with Rudolph Loewenstein. The analysis began just as he was finishing his interviews with Marguerite, prior to embarking on the final draft of his manuscript. It is easy to understand his regret at not having made use of Freudian techniques of treatment in the Aimée case. Being in analysis himself when he was finishing his thesis, he could see with hindsight that if he had that experience earlier it would have enhanced his understanding of his subject...Although neither Loewenstein nor Lacan ever revealed anything about what happened during the analysis, we know now that it was stormy. When Lacan first started going to 127, avenue de Versailles he had a very good opinion of himself, a flair for mixing with the cream of the Paris intelligentsia, and a brilliant academic record. Moreover, he knew he was more gifted than not only his contemporaries but also his mentors in the field of psychiatry. As for the pioneers of the French psychoanalytic movement, he loftily ignored them except when they could be useful to him in his career. With the exception of Edouard Pichon, whose influence he warmly acknowledged, he had little sympathy for his elders, who admittedly were no great innovators...Someone like this was unlikely to submit easily to rules and constraints, even if they were necessary for the realization of his ambitions. Lacan was by temperament a free man, and his kind of freedom brooked no restriction and accepted no censure. It was as if such independence, won by previous generations' sheer hard work through a century of industrial change and upheaval, had, in this last scion of the rising middle classes, become second nature. Lacan would acknowledge no outside authority whatsoever over his person or the managing of his desires. Not having had to bow to a father's command, unable to resist his own slightest whim, by 1932 he was driven by a will to power that a thorough and fruitful reading of Zarathustra, backed up by his passion for Spinoza, could only make more fierce—especially in combination with a supreme disdain for common or garden stupidity."
Social constraints were Lacan's enemy, even if the prior generation experienced literal enemies shooting at them with the total commitment and intention to kill. Roudinesco made fun of Lacan, but there was some serious questioning of what freedom truly was, what appreciation was, and if it was possible for humans to take advantage of that freedom and not waste it. There was also a connection between social constraint and war, so Loewenstein's experiences of exile as well as Lacan's struggles to be recognized were two sides of the same coin. Lacan was approaching therapy with the same kinds of complaints as many other patients had, which were about bureaucracy and the struggle to find a place in the economy, as well as a place where meaningful activities and relationships could be broached. When people experience powerlessness, there's a danger that they could grip onto newly found power, in the form of a psychoanalytic hierarchy, and tighten their grip on others and their freedom while thinking only of their own survival. "Lacan, then, had arrived at man's estate after suffering only the typical kinds of bourgeois tribulation: the pains of perpetual dissatisfaction, of impatience driven to the limit, of not yet being master of the universe. Imaginary suffering, in short, accompanied by the more ordinary neuroses. He had never known real privation: hunger, poverty, lack of freedom, persecution. Too young to have had to waste his best years under fire at Verdun, he had watched the war from the gardens of the College Stanislas, his only whiff of its epic madness brought to him in glimpses of shattered limbs and eyes awaiting death. He had never been choked by the stench of blood on a battlefield; he had never had to fight against real oppression. Pampered from the cradle by generations of comfortable merchants, he had inherited only the hardships of family constraints, and they had made him anything but a hero. But this lack of heroism came with a defiant refusal to conform in any way. Lacan was a kind of antihero, not at all cut out for a normal life, destined to eccentricity and incapable of knuckling under to the countless commonplace rules of behavior—hence his excessive interest in the discourse of madness, as the only key to understanding a crazy world...All this was very different from Rudolph Loewenstein, whose whole existence had been bound up with exile, hatred, and humiliation. Unlike Lacan, he had learned all there was to know about oppression, in the full sense of the word: first as a Jew in an empire where discriminatory restrictions on education and professional activity still applied and then as an emigrant without a homeland. Condemned to wander from country to country learning new languages as he went, he knew the price of freedom and felt no need to cheapen the word or squander what it stood for. At every stage of his long journey he had to take a realistic view of the dangers lying ahead, to be encountered with no companion but a battered passport."
Sectarianism continued with Lacan's choice of control analysts, who would view Catholic Frenchmen from their own angle. "Lacan hadn't hesitated in his choice of an analyst. Not only was Loewenstein, after seven years in France, the best training analyst in the SPP and the most typical representative of the alluring Freudian world Lacan so longed to join; he also shared Lacan's materialism. And when the time came for Lacan to go on to a control analysis, he would turn to another analyst of the same bent: the Swiss Protestant, Charles Odier, trained in Berlin by Karl Abraham and Franz Alexander, two eminent figures in the Freudian saga. And so Lacan, a Catholic from the Aisne and the Loire, the heart of ancient France, was initiated into analytic practice by a Jew living in permanent exile and a Protestant whose ancestors had fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685...At the same time, by going to two practitioners who belonged to the pure orthodox line, Lacan became indirectly, across a generation, the pupil of three of Freud's most illustrious disciples: Hanns Sachs, his analyst's analyst, of Viennese origin and the great organizer of standardization in the IPA; Karl Abraham, the first analyst of his control analyst, a specialist in psychosis and the founder of the Psychoanalytic Society in Berlin; and Franz Alexander, his controller's second analyst, who was himself analyzed by Sachs and who was to pioneer a technique for reducing the length of treatments."
Analyzing a revolutionary
Loewenstein was to publish a lot more after his sessions with Lacan, but some of his early papers revealed an understanding of transference and the typical dynamic found in a therapy session. He wanted these sessions to be a form of literal entertainment, in that all contents from the patient were allowed to be released without pouring on it the cold water of reality. It was assumed by the analyst that the client was not going to act on these materials right away, and there should be no suggestion by the therapist that they should. It's all about collecting. One had to "not to react to the manifest content of the patient's thoughts and emotions. By this means, they are placed on the level appropriate to analysis: these thoughts and emotions are then considered by the patient as material belonging to the analysis, remaining part of the game, so to speak; moreover, this attitude of the analyst encourages the patient to increasingly share their daydreams, by reducing the feeling of guilt with which they are usually charged." Any feelings of guilt, judgment, and shame have to be avoided to not derail the therapy from the patient's life to that of resentment toward the analyst.
Being too quick to correct errors that the patient is making in how they are assessing the analyst's emotions, or that of others, means that important information on how they are transferring prior experiences into the present gets muted. Those errors, reactions, and resistances, should also allow a certain amount of intensity to clarify what is bothering the patient. "It is standard practice to maintain this same wait-and-see attitude in situations where the patient interprets some of the doctor's words in a way they did not mean, or imagines things about the doctor, or attributes completely erroneous feelings to the doctor. Such ideas naturally correspond to the patient's unconscious thoughts; therefore, before or instead of correcting them, it is necessary to understand their meaning. For this reason, I prefer to clarify such ideas only when necessary, and when I can link it to an explanation of their unconscious meaning."
Like the influence of alcohol, when there's disinhibition induced by the method of free association, the gap between the unconscious and consciousness shortens. Internal battles come out of the unconscious and are reenacted. As material comes out, with these affects, one can see repressions, and battles against these repressions. It clarifies a desire, how it's blocked, and anger based on a lack of skill and concomitant powerlessness to do anything about these obstacles. "Analysis, through its method of free association, breaks down the gap between the conscious symptom and its unconscious determination into a number of much smaller gaps, just as a staircase breaks down the difference in level between the ground and a floor of a house into a large number of small differences in level, the steps. As it progresses, analysis overcomes a number of small resistances, each of which must, in order to manifest itself and be exhausted, undergo a development that requires a certain amount of time. Consequently, one would not overcome a resistance by preventing it, through early intervention, from completing its development."
There's a balance needed to keep the patient from being overwhelmed. Each explanation of content that connects to an unconscious meaning leaves the analysand in a meditative distance from the material, but at the same time, there needs to be enough intensity and a holding back from interpretation to clarify the struggles, without getting lost in defenses that cover everything up. Too much fear of judgment from the analyst strengthens the censor and the released material becomes inauthentic. "This solution, in my opinion, allows the analysis to remain in the situation described at the beginning: the analysand relives affective states with all their intensity, without their emotions invading their personality to a point that could be dangerous for the analysis."
One of the obvious dangers is when the therapy becomes only an exchange. The patient wants something valuable from the therapist, and the therapist wants something valuable from the patient. Loewenstein pointed out that therapists want to publish and patients passively want all their problems solved by the therapist. Both also want to win and can devolve into a competition of wits. "This desire creates in the analyst an impatience to know the smallest details of the patient's history, an impatience that is difficult to reconcile with the necessity we face of gathering material only in fragments. This desire can provoke in the analyst an inappropriate curiosity," and an impatience to hurry the therapy to conclusion out of zeal and a premature belief that everything has been understood. Therapy is more like a movie that has too many endings, except that those endings in reality will continue until the natural death of the patient. Life goes on, and so does insight. Therapists need tact and to exercise "a certain degree of renunciation of unconscious [craving] satisfactions found in the analysis itself, a degree that must not exceed a certain level, in either direction." One of the worst outcomes is unconsciously releasing a judgment towards a patient that is based on personal preferences and then the patient acts on the suggestion out of an appeal to authority, which would be inauthentic. Premature interpretations may include judgmental material that prevents further material from being released. "The analyst must always pay attention to the latent meaning of the interpretation he gives, and avoid one that implicitly contains a prohibition or a reproach towards certain feelings or thoughts of the analysand."
An important influence on Lacan, is this exchange where the patient is making demands of the therapist. At times they want reactions from them and have little interest in introspection, especially in seeing how their desire is fused with the desire of others. During bouts of transference, where the patient is caught in the reenactment of something in the past that is still unconscious, it's best to provide explanations when enough repetition has happened that the patient finally starts becoming curious as to why they are reacting in this monotonous way. There's no relief from an interpretation provided, when not asked for. When the therapist refuses to provide punishments or love, it triggers the question in the analysand as to why the therapist is not reacting, and the answer can be a relief to the patient. "I am thinking of the moment in analysis when the patient seeks to elicit affective reactions from the analyst: either punishments or expressions of love. In this case, it is best to interpret the meaning of these reactions only when the patient, having encountered a refusal from the analyst, essentially wants nothing more than to understand the reason for these reactions, when an explanation would bring them relief."
Therapists can also wander astray when their personal life history takes them inward and they fail to follow the patient's coordinates. Their hardships can reward or punish the patient, like how parents who lived through the depression can shelter their children too much or punish them because they appear spoiled. This can subtly change the body language and vocal attitude of the therapist, because they are focused on what they want out of it, not on what is best for the patient. "This superego can, as in the lives of men, respond to particular renunciations suffered in childhood, or, in the cases we are considering, during didactic analysis, either with compensatory indulgence or with exaggerated severity. And in these cases, the analyst will not be able, in the manifestations of their psychological tact, to sufficiently take into account the emotional state of their patient. Now, what is important to note is that these attitudes of the analyst can be expressed as threats perceptible only to the unconscious of the patients. And in many patients, these nuances can unnecessarily delay or complicate the course of treatment."
Many therapies can easily fall into categories like friendly advice from a neighbor, a tip sheet, or suggestions from a doctor for a change in diet. For example, grabbing a random person off the street to provide life advice would bring in a lot of corruption through suggestion, based on the stranger's peculiar interests and predilections. The patient returns to being a repressed cipher and nonentity. "Many of the analyst's interventions, including those that err against psychological tact, share a common basis. It is the regression of analytic therapy to a more primitive stage of psychotherapy—that of acting on the patient through good advice, appeals to the will, and persuasion—that makes the physician forget that he must first and foremost understand his patient."
While Loewenstein was trying to relieve Lacan in the classical way "...he would lose patience with Lacan's continual fluctuations between on the one hand a frenzied desire to act and know and on the other a maddening [weighing of facts, options, and consequences], when it came to working out and elaborating ideas...Loewenstein referred only once in writing to the problem Lacan's analysis represented for him, and his comment then was negative. But he often expressed his opinion orally to the people around him: the man was unanalyzable. And Lacan was unanalyzable in those conditions. Personal and theoretical differences stood in the way of transference, and Loewenstein wasn't flexible enough to adapt his methods to suit such a patient."
Lacan was under the inspiration of Kojève and radical politics, so his materialism was more about the inequality of the situation and the helplessness that patients feel, whereas Loewenstein's materialism was more in the realm of therapy. How does one find a lasting relief if desires are fused with authority figures? How does one find relief when desire always renews itself with another bout of craving signaling emptiness and lack once again? That was a hidden transference that was more about human existence itself, and not something Loewenstein was prepared to interpret. At the time, Lacan was yet to grapple with his own dissatisfaction, which would be a universal dissatisfaction that all people feel, including psychoanalysts frequenting the inner circle. "Lacan once told Catherine Millot what he thought of his analysis. In his opinion Loewenstein was not intelligent enough to analyze him." This impasse led to conflicts over Lacan's acceptance into psychoanalytic organizations without the appropriate seal of approval. "All the time he was in analysis, Lacan went on with his theoretical work, outside the sphere of official psychoanalysis. True, he took part in the spp's internal discussions and mixed socially with his colleagues, but he was acquiring knowledge neglected at that period by the Freudian community itself. So he remained a marginal figure, whose development was followed with a mistrustful eye and the oft-expressed opinion that he was no ordinary psychoanalyst."
To lack or not to lack? That is the question.
When one starts sessions in analysis, there's a life inventory conducted, and Lacan was undergoing the question of authenticity and trying to figure out what he really wanted. One of the dangers in being in a relationship with a person undergoing analysis is that all the unconscious registers of the marriage, and its flaws, come into consciousness with an impetus to do something about it. It can lead to an ambivalence towards commitment, but there's always a struggle no matter who one chooses to partner with to remain continuously satisfied. "At the end of August 1933 Lacan left Olesia in Paris and went off with Marie-Thérèse for two weeks' vacation. They went by train from Saint Jean-de-Luz to Madrid, via Salamanca, Burgos, and Valladolid. Lacan wrote passionate letters to his mistress back in France. He read a lot. His old voracious curiosity had revived after all the 'lousy years' spent in the ridiculous 'clinical' rat race. He told Olesia she was perhaps a better friend to him than he deserved. For 'friend' he wrote 'ami' the masculine form of the word...After referring to his beloved in the masculine gender, Lacan told her in another letter what a wonderful time he was having. He said he felt like getting up to the most 'quixotic' antics. He declared his hostility to Christianity and in the same breath said he'd like to go to see his 'patron saint,' St. James of Compostela. He described the charms of the Spanish railroads and an excursion to the monastery of San Domingo de Silos. In Valladolid he went into raptures over a piece of polychrome sculpture: it was 'strident, heartrending, soul-searing.' Finally, in Madrid, he went to the Prado and found that the paintings of Velazquez no longer touched him as they used to do. On the other hand he was moved to tears by Goya's intelligence, and his palette reminded Lacan of the artists who had once made him 'hear the call of Venice.' After this lyrical flight Lacan turned to the past and gave free reign to his feelings for Olesia. He still promised happiness to come, mingling expressions of affection with the language of passion—burning kisses, moments of ecstasy, breathless desire. He asked her to wait for him, to be beautiful for him, to forgive his constant hesitations and evasions. They would have a winter full of warmth and happiness."
Lacan tried to bridge relationships based on letting loose, or what he called abandoning oneself to passion. He would get depressed when situations didn't align with his idea of happiness, and he was filled with the fear of missing out. That fear tracks opportunities for escape, and one of the ways to escape is by developing new relationships. "When he got back to Paris he returned to the analyst's couch, and elation was replaced by depression. He was in a dilemma. He didn't want to leave Marie-Thérèse, and he loved Olesia best when they were apart. He couldn't bring himself to be either off with the old love or on with the new...On October 24, just before a session with Loewenstein, Lacan wrote Olesia a letter that contrasted strangely with those he had sent her in August. The lovers were on the verge of a breakup, and Lacan didn't try to disguise his melancholy mood. He complained that he always missed out on happiness, blamed himself for his attitude in the past, and trusted, without much hope of success, that he could make up for lost time. Over lunch at the Auberge Alsacienne in the avenue de Versailles, he remembered a bad patch he had gone through the previous year and how upset he had been. He told Olesia how unhappy he was and suggested she too might be due for a wild passion, a chance to let herself go. As ever, he wanted to make up for wasted time. But dreams and longings didn't mend matters between the lovers. Just as he was trying to exorcise his misery, Lacan was awakened from it by a new love...Marie-Louise Blondin—Malou for short—was nearly twenty-seven. Lacan had known her for a long time: she was the sister of an old friend and fellow intern, Sylvain Blondin. Sylvain, born on July 24, 1901, came from a respectable republican family belonging to one of the higher strata of the French bourgeoisie. His roots lay in Charente on the mother's side and in Lorraine on the fathers. After a brilliant school career at the Lycee Carnot, Sylvain had decided to become a doctor, like his father. When he came second in the interns' final examination in 1924, he decided to make a career in surgery. He started off in the clinic at the Hotel-Dieu and stayed there until 1935, when he passed another examination to become a surgeon in the general hospital service."
Peak experiences coincide with elements of snobbery where potential relationships are assessed by the kinds of worlds one can command and stabilize. The super-ego can be activated when status and distinction are encountered, and the sense of freedom becomes connected with trading up. "Sylvain Blondin was extremely attractive: tall, slim, and lively. He affected bow ties and hid his fair wavy hair under a hat tilted back at an elegant angle. A keen collector, he spent his first paychecks on pictures by modern artists such as Braque, Léger, and Picasso. He performed operations with his left hand, wrote with his right, and could draw with both. He always refused to learn to drive and preferred to travel around by taxi or in a chauffeur-driven limousine...Lacan got on famously with him, and their relationship, based on mutual fascination, was a factor when Jacques fell in love with Malou. She was devoted to her brother and ready to find all the qualities she admired in him in his friend: talent, beauty, originality, and intelligence. She herself, narcissistic and unyielding, with a self-image that was grandiose but volatile, managed to detect distinction behind the mask of eccentricity. And so she chose Lacan from all the rest. She saw in him a man who measured up to her ideal of superiority, and she set out to conquer him. Sylvain, who had no sympathy for Freudian theory and thought it was in psychiatry that his friend would carve out a brilliant career, was delighted to see the sister he was so fond of in love with the friend he looked on as his own double."
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 5: https://rumble.com/v4ur5j9-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-5.html
Like an aristocratic woman of the past, with fashion sense, artistic talents, and charm, Malou offered more than sexual pleasure, but was someone who could enhance self-esteem by being a woman to be proud of loving, and scandal free. "Even when she was still quite young she stood out from her background: she had a gift for painting, a flair for style that showed in her knack for dressing up and making her own clothes, and an original sense of humor that made her see the funny side of everything. Her friends were astonished by her knowledge of traditional French songs. All these elements of a real artistic temperament prevented her from ever dwindling into an ordinary wife. But her natural nonconformity stopped short of genuine intellectual independence, and she clung to the conventional ideal of marriage still accepted by most women of her generation. She was modern in her tastes and aspirations but fettered to the old order by her conception of love and the family...This was the woman whom Lacan fell for in the autumn of 1933, when he was still hoping to win Olesia back. And to possess the sister of the friend he admired as his own alter ego, he was ready to do anything. He knew that a woman such as Malou, with no experience of the physical side of love, was not the type one asks to be one's mistress. The question of marriage therefore came up almost at once."
Ego-ideals can crowd each other out, and Lacan grew up with a Catholic heritage, but associated with revolutionaries, yet nevertheless he married into a family where he could put up a front of normalcy. Egos try to hold things together, but the unconscious can betray that weak structure very easily. "At the end of 1933 Lacan let himself in for a regular marriage with all the trimmings, blessed by the Roman Catholic Church. Had he forgotten that only a few months earlier he had been writing to his mistress from Spain about his strong anti-Christian convictions? Lacan himself was fascinated by the rituals of the church and wished to keep up Catholic appearances. And he didn't want to disappoint his mother, who would never have accepted the idea of her son being married without the blessing of the church...Jacques and Malou went on the traditional Italian honeymoon, traveling as far south as Sicily. It was the first time Lacan had seen Rome, and he was enchanted with it. As soon as he got there he started throwing his weight around. 'I am Dr. Lacan,' he said to the astonished hotel porter, who had never heard of him. He went to see Bernini's studies in ecstasy; the baroque sculpture of the fountains gave him so much pleasure he had qualms of conscience: on February 10, right in the middle of his honeymoon, he felt guilty at having abandoned Olesia and sent her a telegram: 'Worried about you, dear. Wire general delivery Rome. Jacques.'"
Ego-ideals, when they are perceived by partners as matching up, the intensity of desire increases, but many of these ideals have the problem of matching up in the time dimension. Pulls and habits from the old life can return. The place that at first seemed like an escape can turn into another prison as desire seeks the right kind of friction to once again bring back another bout of intensity. "It is unlikely that Malou had recognized how far Jacques was from believing in her own ideal of love and fidelity. And he, impatient as always to capture the object of his desire, probably hadn't understood that a woman like her would never consent to share him. The apparently happy couple was headed for disaster. Lacan, polygamous by nature but wanting and needing a conjugal life, was as incapable of leaving a woman as he was of being faithful to her. So, determined not to pretend to be other than he was, he began to lead his own life according to the same dialectic between the true and the impossible that he was later to expound so famously in his work. As for Malou, she saw too late that the man she revered could never fulfill her aspirations. She held on to her ideal but paid for her persistence with despair...For the time being, however, Lacan seemed to have made a success of his transition to man's estate. The newlyweds moved into a well-appointed apartment on the boulevard Malesherbes, a stone's throw from where Henri Claude lived. Malou's elegance, dress sense, and lifestyle had a visible effect on Lacan. His clothes were now more fashionable, even recherché, and he got used to living in ordered and comfortable surroundings."
Crayfish or Lobster?
No matter where the ego lands in its real situation, the unconscious is processing what's missing, what was lost, and opportunities for the future, and these often manifest in dreams. Lacan jotted down two of his own dreams and wrote down one from Malou. There are parts that are unintelligible, so reading interpretations into these may be open to further insight as more information about Lacan's life is discovered.
Already from what was published, one can see a lot of his future theories about desire in nascent form here.
Dream 1:
Last night, a long dream, of which only the last scene is accessible to me upon waking (around 8 a.m.). After some aquarium-related themes, I discover inside my foreskin the presence of a small octopus: I tear it off (legs first). My glans, finely scarred by the creature's beak, spurts blood which sprays fine droplets onto the very light, new trousers and jacket I am wearing. More precisely, I first notice that part of the skin of my foreskin adheres to my glans, as if glued by the healing of the lesion. I leave move about, awkward in my gait, by the care I take with the injured part of myself. Then Rouart [psychoanalyst] intervenes: I cannot leave this as it is. Quite abruptly, he pulls back the foreskin from the glans, revealing the fine scarifications, and precisely causing the fine sprays to splatter onto the thin, new suit. I am at there is no pain. But I'm saddened by the thought that we'll never be able to properly clean this new suit. (I won't have another one for a while.)
I wake up, and in a distinctly parahypnotic state, I try to complete what only I remember and understand of this dream.
The castrating significance of the dream appears to me [incomplete?]. A reflection shared last night over dinner with Malou—an oral satisfaction of envy—at [restaurant] La Crémaillière, that my analysis hadn't progressed until now except through my vital actions; my marriage, for example (the wonder I felt at my choice—even in love). The assumption arose that perhaps because of this realization that I am currently living for the moment in my marriage (“for only 3 days!” said Malou) then my analysis will begin...
Lacan was already looking at his suit as a symbolic result of castration, which is a symbol of humiliation that was focused on by psychoanalysts for how shame affects sexual potency. The octopus represents the vaginas he had access to, but these women all had separate claims on Lacan. His suit reddened by blood was like a stain on his reputation that he couldn't clean away. He already moved on from two women he made false promises to, and onto the third that he married. He was injured, but not totally castrated in the dream, so there was a resistance to the shame, like it was a false imposition.
At the restaurant, he was describing how he was living in the moment in his marriage, hinting that it wasn't always so easy, and requiring those "vital acts," even if it was only 3 days. The oral envy was satisfied at a fine restaurant like a replacement for the lack of progress he had for the last 2 years in his analysis with Loewenstein. He was trying to find happiness and peak experiences in the relationship, but they were found only on occasion. There was also a sense of wonder in his choice of Malou for his wife, like he could be surprised by his own desire, like desire is not something that is sourced from the ego alone. Yet his "vital acts" hinted that one needed to generate desire through projects and a set time to unleash a "wild passion." Lacan seemed to experience marriage not as steady fulfillment, but as brief eruptions of presence and satisfaction that could not stabilize. For Lacan, marriage may have offered not continuous peace, but flashes of arrival—three good days, a fine meal, bodily satisfaction, the sense that life had finally begun. Yet because the underlying conflicts remained, the happiness could only appear intermittently. It seems that the purpose of analysis for Lacan, and his expectation at this time, was to gain more frequent experiences of happiness, and especially pleasure without shame. There was also a sense that shame and morality had to be confronted one way or another. It either had to be accepted as something good, or rejected as a false imposition. Lacan was torn between unashamed hedonism, that he associated with masculinity, and the morality of his upbringing.
Blur - The Heights: https://youtu.be/6tyqxmIxIH4?si=S1x90F4VKzjKitvx
The suit is identified - it's the suit from the last vacation, the one I shared with those two women, Marie-Thérèse and Olesia. I couldn't tolerate, justifying myself several times, this posture of a "happy scoundrel" (a phrase derived from a conversation with Marie-Thérèse).
Marie-Thérèse, from the day I ceased to love her, symbolizes the prohibition against surrendering myself completely, against loving—to speak precisely (not making love)—with other women. Moreover, initially, and this is what I first thought, the Christian prohibition against any exercise of the flesh outside of marriage was perhaps the reason for my remaining close to Marie-Thérèse. This prohibition still weighs upon me and plays a role in my commitment to marriage, in my current behavior within it. The authenticity of the disgust I felt towards Sw.W. (?) The extraordinary ambivalence of my attitude towards Olesia. The prohibition (fear experienced) on the verge of a realization already perhaps present in the minds of my partners, the Red Valve restaurant that I dare not open for fear of blood. My emasculated attitude in this room between the other two. My heavy sleep over which Olesia watches and [stupidly?] makes her resolutions.
Lacan wanted to say cruel things to his partners out of disgust, but had enough shame to hold himself back. His ambivalence continued, where the mind assessed losses, but also the possible freedom to achieve new gains if a hoped for loss was realized against his control. His attitude towards driving and cars was him trying to take responsibility for his desires, even if "hysterical."
My tears in the evening or on Mondays when she threatens to leave me. My joy at being free, my hatred for having been forced, those tears: one day to find Marie-Thérèse [on the fender of the?] car. Why Rouart? He drove us to Lagache's the day before. His finger wrapped in a black sheath. I spoke of this finger, which only fire prevents from growing so vigorously that it sprouts a 4' phalanx—he spoke of the car situation, of which one only has the enjoyment [jouissance], as if he knew it intimately. Specific drawbacks: car complex. My "hysterical" car—I will soon find it again. I will then assume the responsibility of owning it (enormous, which I didn't do sooner): a significant, accepted dependence.
I then physically experience an amputation of half of my right forearm (I am writing in the notebook for the first time today, after wanting to do so for a long time). I remembered an earlier part of the dream. The turtle, drawn with broad strokes, increasingly given a [character], then its ventral armor of scales completed. Who should wear it in the dream?
Isn't that right, Malou? — I unfasten this breastplate from the back. "It's from the back that the clever ones open it." Near the head, it tears slightly at an angle. A bare back emerges, and slips out. Malou again? Evocative of the long-necked, multi-legged orange turtle, resembling a kind of marine ostrich.
I associate the tortoise with Marie-Thérèse. My hostile expression: tortoise—the bodice that comes undone in the back. I saw Marie-Thérèse yesterday in a crisis, most likely a seizure, that her son experienced. She paid me 150 francs that was owed to me by her mother. Malou would succeed her in a certain castrating function. But not prohibited by nature...which separated me from Marie-Thérèse.
Marie-Thérèse represented a moral attitude about relationships that Lacan rejected, and the possible request for help from a psychiatrist, because of her son's epilepsy, may have appeared to Lacan as just a manipulative ploy to use pity to keep the relationship going, as well as the paying back of the small debt. Malou was slightly more permissive of flirting, which made her more freeing to be with than Marie-Thérèse, but she still tried to control him. Tortoises are often symbolized in dreams as stability, protection, etc. Orange can be symbolized as a warning if treated negatively. Lacan judged that the clever ones undo the bodice from the back, like he wanted to get beyond the moral code that was represented by Marie-Thérèse.
I sleep again: dream until dawn. Sadistic deeds with Malou. Called forth an image yesterday of women with beautiful breasts, beautiful skin, ugly heads - [J.C.?], EP.
The sadism signaled a pleasure in control, and a wrestling away from it, and Lacan's reaction to being controlled by women in the dream was noticing their physical beauty, and wanting only that connection, but their personalities, restrictions, and demands ruined the lustful allure. Even when there was some lustful satisfaction, Lacan wanted more.
My wife tells me when I wake up about the childlike appearance I have when I sleep. I did indeed sleep next to her yesterday, reading. She had her period and had masturbated me. Persistence of erection after masturbatory enjoyment.
Deep in the kernel of desire and lust, both Malou and Jacques revealed a similar kind of envy that operated independently of each other, but coming to the same conclusion: the envy of self-containment, ease, confidence, security, and emotional regulation.
She notices, while I sleep, the frequency of a sucking sound. She tells me: 'It is men like you whom women must torture (scald) while they sleep'—very wicked men, childlike in their waking state, and trusting in their sleep. She is in horror, and doesn't know why she said this. The role of the historical moment in my analysis where I [arrived?]...of psychoanalysis.
After the session with Loew[enstein]. The octopus: penis, vagina. Enigma? Don't forget the condom. The starfish of my poem. The turtle - as a symbol of the pelvis where the organ is imagined and from which it is imagined - (the little turtles of my childhood) - as a symbol of women - rigid pelvis, rigid trunk - of pelvises, of "plates" (according to Malou's shape) Valentine, and through her perhaps Marie-Thérèse. Malou's pelvis, her illness which immobilizes her on her back like the overturned turtle (she has been out of illness since Saturday, regaining her mobility) - as a symbol of the human being hidden under their clothing - the horror of nudity - the Christian man. Envy - as a symbol of narcissism and of return. Mine.
The turtle, cradle-sea (my loving words to Malou on her hips.)
Malou represented fullness, a protected and a controlled access to pleasure. She wasn't always available, due to illness, and feminine sexuality, including other women in his life, like Marie-Thérèse, were guarded by cultural mores, as found in Christianity, which made it an obstacle that unintendedly increased desirability. Lacan confessed his envy of the feminine body, and it's narcissistic possession was something that promised wholeness for him, which explained his desperate search for different women. Their marriage appeared less as harmony than as a mirror of a reciprocal lack of wholeness.
A competitor to Jacques Lacan was René Girard, but in reality, there's more wisdom when one integrates both views on narcissistic desire. Emotional regulation can appear like a deity, where momentarily, the subject appears at ease and without lack. The illusion is that it's permanent, when in fact it is ephemeral. The sense of lack returns again and again when something fragmentary appears in the wholeness, requiring a new object to pursue, to only find something missing in the object once again, when the new object becomes familiar. That familiarity will find some flaws sooner or later about what could be improved or what isn't as good as before, etc. Girard talked about people having an ontological disease, which is a dissatisfaction in being, and the chase of trying to improve self-esteem through associations with prized people, it can turn parasitic. Transgressions against morals leads to shame, and then shame taints the memory of any pleasure from the transgression. Low self-esteem continues as well as the chase for a new object, and if low self-esteem bottoms out in a downward spiral, then there's a possibility of violence, as seen in Christine Papin's situation where she literally wanted to erase the taint of her shame by removing the eyes of the employers.
Jacques Lacan Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v78sjms-jacques-lacan-pt.-3.html
Girardian Primer:
Totem and Taboo - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gsmvn-totem-and-taboo-sigmund-freud.html
The Origin of Envy & Narcissism - René Girard: https://rumble.com/v1gsnwv-the-origin-of-envy-and-narcissism-ren-girard.html
Case Studies: Dora and Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gu2dt-case-studies-dora-and-freud.html
Stalking: World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day: https://rumble.com/v1gvhk1-stalking-world-narcissistic-abuse-awareness-day.html
Love - Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gv5pd-love-freud-and-beyond.html
Psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gvgq7-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v1gvuql-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-2.html
Object Relations: Fear Of Success Pt. 7: https://rumble.com/v3ub2sa-object-relations-fear-of-success-pt.-7.html
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v50nczb-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-8.html
Plato: Apology: https://rumble.com/v6tvdm3-plato-apology.html
Malou's dream:
In an apartment that is both mine and Aunt Valentine's. She is deeply bored by the presence of authority—strangely marked by an enigmatic valet named Leveau (this is both Royan, France and here). The scenes in the street: a small donkey making advances to a female dog (which defines both its size and its mannerisms)—suddenly becomes seized by an erectile frenzy. It rubs its belly against the ground—very cute. It runs enraged down the street—Malou takes refuge behind me to follow me. The gate to the Royan garden is quickly opened for her (by a friend of Leveau). She takes refuge there. Then she gently extracts herself from the (double) opening of her trachea with icy control—algae that had entered it threatened to obstruct it.
Oral meaning of the end of the dream. The donkey (acting like a donkey to get what it wants) — = me. She admits it: to unite by Leveau (all my [prohibited?] side)
Here Malou had oral desires, which are usually about control of nourishment and a longing for closeness. She was being suffocated by algae that represented toxicity, being stuck and trapped. She allied with Leveau in the dream to control Lacan's bad tendencies.
2nd dream:
December 2, 1934. Last night, dream: Following forgotten events, a woman who seems to be my wife, Malou (it's probable, but only probable), tries to procure 100,000 to 150,000 francs for me through a somewhat sordid act of kindness towards X. I take advantage of this to become violently irritated and initiate my breakup. My parents rage in my favor, quite contradicting what I suppose to be their real attitude in my dream, and my own. Suddenly, I realize that I must break up and that it will be very pleasant to take advantage of this to make love with this woman, who suddenly becomes Olesia, and satisfy the perverse desires associated with her. The person I see then, and with whom I will satisfy these desires, is my secret, then Olesia...I don't remember anything after that, and it seems to me that there is nothing more to the dream than this surrender to impulses. Perhaps my room on Rue Montparnasse is there.
Dreams take locations, buildings of the past, and old stomping grounds to make a landscape, or cityscape of the foundational self where the drama plays out. An indecent proposal was made for money that would obviously end the relationship, and Lacan appeared to be searching for any excuse to allow him to do what he really wanted. His desire was searching for excuses to let go of repression, and in this case he described them as perverse, which can be taken to mean many things, but they all have in common a desire that increases with anything forbidden.
Upon waking, associations: the role that Olesia's allusion to her uncle's offer of a dowry might have played. The ambivalent attitude this inspired in me, and my refusal, despite what I had previously considered the amount of money needed to allow myself to embark on such a project.
The dream meaning twisted into a desire to leave Olesia by using the dowry as an unacceptable imposition on Lacan's freedom, even if it would allow him to continue the relationship that only just before was full of passion.
The horror of marriage I felt toward her meant the horror of an obligation. I accept it more and more now. The fantasies that were unleashed for a moment, with all possible perversities, with her (the Hostel), a unique episode of a sacrilegious fantasy. In fact, it is an undeniable part of my physical horror because of her physical flaws. Why does the "higher" conflict affect me so deeply and risk making me neglect this instinctive, elemental motivation?
It is an extraordinary adventure to win the heart of a woman.
The adventure and the chase to "win the heart of a woman," was where the interesting tension, challenge, and passion was for Lacan. The hostel clues into something wild and instinctive that seems natural, but at the same time against the "higher" Christian morals. It may also refer to Olesia's androgyny, which was referred to as an example of reverse homosexuality, when her prior boyfriend Drieu de la Rochelle found her masculine side attractive, satisfying homosexual longings in him, and Lacan using the masculine signification ami, to turn her into a chum, but a chum with a vagina. While this may have been a passionate charge with Drieu that Olesia waited in vain to return to, Lacan may have found it too much like a male friend, or in conflict with what he was supposed to chase after. Either way, one is left with the enigma of desire.
The Ego and the Id - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Last night, a discussion with her [Malou] revealed the value of disruption theoretically vast disruptive power of analysis within the eternal affective regulations of humankind. Humanity can no longer accept as prejudices or dogmas what appear to be simple determinations of certain affective mechanisms. But, I pointed out to her, the debate cannot be situated at that level for us. It would cause us to lose our ability to progress at the level of the concrete things we actually encounter. Our very practical powerlessness protects us from the anxieties of excessive power, and if we were to reach that level, human resistance would certainly know how to defend itself.
Lacan realized that power corrupted and that unlimited desire was impractical in a world full of limits, but he learned that it was something out of one's hands much of the time. Desire elides the true experience of surprise that many would encounter, especially in romantic relationships.
The Pleasure Principle - Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html
Definition of eternal analysis (assuming the family complex is socially destroyed by social evolution). Revealing the extent of man's unconscious knowledge. Freud's precedence over Janet—all in this. Freud saw that the driving force was sexual (the entire dynamic rests on this). This leaves the structural question untouched. Evocation of the mystery: the absolute negative. The elusive instinct. The reverse side of reality. The death instinct. The mind as a death drive, according to Klages's thinking. But I would point out that analysts are currently working towards social normalization. I cite the example of Y. – suicidal thoughts after his brother's suicide. The mother's threatening role, which he sees as responsible for the first suicide. Constant denial of the love he experiences. And a constant affirmation of a marital affection that is nothing but hatred and disgust. A benevolent face to the vision of evil. Is instinct evil? Beyond good and evil. Love, the gift: "a total enigma" according to Odier's formula.
Lacan's notebook showed engagement with thinkers like Ludwig Klages and Charles Odier, who saw that the spirit and soul could be at loggerheads causing ambivalence and making desire less predictable in terms of its object and reasoning. Life-serving and death-serving tendencies can appear inside love or hate. Hate can be fueled by a desire for truth, and love can smother. There's an element of desire wanting what it wants and either defending values, or because of perceived unfairness in the past, seek entitlement, demand revenge out of resentment, and sabotage the life drive with an internal protest that it's not worth it or not the right object. Odier targeted sadomasochism as the connection with the death drive. It didn't just want to die, to relieve the pressure of survival, but there were distorted motivations. Sadism and Masochism chase different rewards that conflict with the conscious ego's life goals, much like described with later modalities, like Internal Family Systems (IFS). Odier wanted to separate the terms instinctual from instinct in definition, to focus on deep seated motivations as opposed to analyzing pure biological reflexes. Like music that plays in a loop in the mind, the drive follows suggestions, follows imitations, acts on conditioned repetitions, and therefore conditioned beliefs effortlessly open the doors to a persistent mental noise that disrupts planning and goals, which appears as self-sabotage. "The number one scourge is not adultery; it is sadism, and its inverted form, psychic masochism. It is sadism, or its awakening, that causes the most harm to the superego, and too often turns it against itself or overwhelms it. The Freudian superego implies, in four words: the latency of instinctual [deep seated motivational] drives; the preservation of their psychic reality thanks to their unconsciousness; the possibility of their awakening; and finally, the realization of their awakening to varying degrees of intensity and duration. Having established these points, any awakening of drives will therefore be assumed to have repercussions on the activity of the superego. And this is precisely what the analysis of moral facts, or lived experiences, demonstrates...This superego activity is [singled out]. The choice of the area of moral conscience that will be influenced or disturbed by the superego is conditioned by the nature and particular aim of the awakened drive; and secondarily, by its greater or lesser propensity to infiltrate this or that forbidden zone, to invade this or that domain of the world of values; to attack this value rather than that one; and finally, by the very nature and level of elevation of the value that is subjected to this influence or violation...The superego is hardly impartial; sometimes it protects values, sometimes it stabs them in the back."
Beyond the Pleasure Principle - Freud & Beyond - War Pt. (2/3): https://rumble.com/v1gv855-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-freud-and-beyond-war-pt.-23.html
Sexuality Pt 4: Masochism - Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtrq1-sexuality-pt-4-masochism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Sexuality Pt 5: Sadism - Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtssd-sexuality-pt-5-sadism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
Bas Rutten Street Defense - The Best Version: https://youtu.be/mosX7L25HV8?si=ivnyj8_rE4hBDMr7
Parenting may reward and punish the wrong things, leading to the structural question Lacan was asking. Dynamic explanations alone do not explain psychic architecture. Why is enjoyment available only through that route for this subject? Structure asks what family position the subject was in, what symbols and language organized identity, and what logic repeats in the form of beliefs about how the world works? This leads to distorted revenge, that may punish more than what a victim went through. Self-sabotage attacks good rewards because of beliefs that they are not worth it. People take on relationships with glaring red flags because they are recognizable, comfortable, and one may have anti-skills that habitually work well for these toxic environments. Some evil may have the cloak of goodness, fairness, and justice if the structure is distorted by familial habits for punishment, and perverse incentives that reinforce these attitudinally. The strange behavior of the super-ego was partially explained by Odier, but Lacan saw that structure could be introduced to clarify even further. Desire may not have been "beyond good and evil," but instead evil as good -> distorted. Many destructive acts are forms of enjoyment organized destructively, because the unconscious language has not taken in the consequences for those desires based on the time dimension. Reflecting on time allows the anticipation of pain to enter into the activity of weighing and measuring.
Odier illuminated destructive motivation; Lacan asked why some people are structured so that destruction feels like the only available road to satisfaction. This is why there's relapse into addictions, and why some are attracted to the same kind of toxic relationships. It's a comfortable structure that people are used to. There is a therapeutic opportunity here, to look directly at structure. Healing is not just the reducing of bad impulses—it can be about building new routes to enjoyment that do not require punishment, chaos, or revenge.
The role of morality in facilitating mental peace was a lesson that some people got from Lacan, but others who were more radical wanted to be shameless. Fantasies are usually alluring because they want to break free of all constraints, but life is full of constraints, added maintenance, and turbulence. It's easier to let go of pathological fantasy when reality is let back in. Some constraints are false and excessive shame should be fought against, but others have to be accepted, in which shame is actually helpful sometimes. Lacan navigated this imperfectly, but like so many psychologists, they had to make messes of their lives to generate material that helps others. By making the unconscious conscious, new goals can be created to line them up. By catching negative feelings as they arise, one can challenge beliefs as to their validity to see if a depression is underrating the situation, or a mania is overrating another. Reality testing needs to happen before the emotional response can be seen to be justified.
Poison Your Fantasies - Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/audio/evening/2018/180108-poison-your-fantasies.html
This afternoon, my desire for an obscene painting, the awakening of erotic forces. The horror of the "holy nags." The obsequious painting (Saint Jerome by Georges de La Tour) has greatly...my current liberation, my artificial pains, self-pity this morning, going to look for crayfish instead of the lobster [thermidor?] I crave.
Here the lesser-than of crayfish compared to lobster was symbolized by a desire for satisficing over maximizing, but with an underlying pressure to trade up later if the opportunity revealed itself. Also hidden behind all of this desire to trade up was the symbolic license of money to open doors for fantasies to expand, and to even realize them, if only partially, so as to keep relationships alive with ever more rewards.
So much of Lacan's views related to how distance, obstacles, prohibition, the promise of wholeness, the thrill of the chase, challenge, and friction, added intensity to any desire. Language, structure, and cultural meaning tell us what is good or bad, even if real world consequences reveal that many of these symbols are abstract nonsense. This is why it's frustrating for people who want to be perfect. Unless you had perfect parenting and live in a perfect culture, everyone has their own work cut out for them. It's the work of an adult life to dispel cultural illusions.
This is often why it's better to police oneself rather than blame society, which makes one fall into projection, then as each person learns how to work on their own projections, you have a sustainable revolution. All hierarchies and governments use rewards, the withdrawal of rewards, and punishments to enact their policies. All these methods are repressive and lead to a desire for change. For revolutions to be successful, they have to be authentic, meaning that people are able to assess reality and make personal decisions with the right kind of tradeoffs that's right for that individual. This definition of desire, on how it is manipulated by culture, explained the constant shifting to replacement objects, its insatiability, its lack of practicality, the role of novelty, and boredom, as well as the fear of missing out on some object promising to be better or superior in some fashion that culture pointed to. Revolutions that fail to teach people real wisdom on how to live end up unraveling or being even worse than the systems they overthrew. You can see how culture wars play out through desire and how sub-cultures are created to change the policing systems if they are considered too repressive, or not repressive enough. Culture wars usually are not violent at first, but play out most of the time in the manipulation of language, newspapers, media structures, emphasis, and deemphasis, and political activism.
The sense of lack pointed to an impractical wholeness, that appeared frozen as if in permanent self-contentedness, alien to an adult life that realistically had to contend with the time dimension, and desire's repeated question of "what's next?" Desire looks for anything in the environment, including substitutes, and fantasy imagines big, but the question always remains that "if I got what I think I want, what problem would still remain?" There's insecurity to protect what you have, still more comparison with others who have more, boredom and emptiness when a reward repeats, and the pressure to maintain what you have. An inverse question in the situation of loss would then be "Now that this is gone, what pressure, illusion, or obligation is gone with it—and what does that make possible?"
Reality appears in the knowledge gap between the fantasy and the actual procedures required for success. Fantasies always skip steps, including many unavoidable ones, and this is where self-sabotage enters in, because reality wasn't able to penetrate the fantasy deep enough to induce sobriety. For Odier, when fantasies rub up against reality, a sadistic or masochistic approach can be adopted as a way to control and cope with unpleasant reality. When those approaches stay unconscious, then the waking ego keeps being surprised by unconscious attempts to control or fawning behavior to manipulate.
In his next paper on Family Complexes, Lacan was to examine desire and the weaning process that left a feeling that something was lost, missing, or incomplete. This led to different desire profiles showing up in adults, repeating different kinds of internal conflicts between unconscious and conscious modes. Édouard Pichon called this Schizonoïa, "a tendency towards discordance between the attitude a subject consciously seeks to adopt in life and their unconscious psychic activity, which imposes a different orientation."
Blur - Barbaric: https://youtu.be/Ek9eLru_YHE?si=qybE0caD0kwJt7Fi
Later on in Jacques Lacan's life, he managed to catch up with Olesia to see if anything remained of the old desire. "They met forty-three years later over dinner for two at the restaurant La Petite Cour...But much as they might have liked to recapture time past, they had nothing to say to one another...'She's moved on from men.' She was living with a woman at the time."
Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought - Elisabeth Roudinesco: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780745623146/
Lacan Redivivus - Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller, Christiane Alberti: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9782916124735/
2 Dreams - Jacques Lacan: https://freud2lacan.b-cdn.net/DREAMNOTEBOOK-FINAL1.pdf
Loewenstein, R. (2007). Remarks on tact in psychoanalytic technique. Figures of Psychoanalysis, 15(1), 181-189. Jacques Sédat French Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1930-1931, reprinted in The Clinical Work, edited by Jacques Sédat, Paris, Bibliothèque des Introuvables, 2005
Les deux sources consciente et inconsciente de la vie morale - Dr Charles Odier: https://classiques.uqam.ca/classiques/Odier_Charles/Odier_charles.html
Psychologies - Schizonoïa: https://www.psychologies.com/Dico-Psycho/Schizonoia
Life with Lacan - Catherine Millot: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781509525027/
Psychology: http://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/
