other writings
In Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) Freud discovers that the human being’s fundamental relation is to an impossible object by which one aims at a satisfaction that is irrevocably lost. In articulating the mode by which the human approaches satisfaction via hallucination (wishful fantasy: remember he will talk about the infant’s hallucination of the breast in the context of dreams as wish fulfillments)—and insofar as the object of satisfaction for the human is always an object that merely aims more or less clumsily at satisfaction—Freud locates the human being as stranded between a failed biology and the inability of language to satisfy need.
“At first, the human organism is incapable of bringing about the specific action [to reduce tension]. It takes place by extraneous help, when the attention of an experienced person is drawn to the child’s state by discharge along the path of internal change [manifest by the child’s screaming]...The discharge acquires a secondary function of the highest importance, that of communication, and the initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives.”
Thus the infant, without speech, is nonetheless subjected to the social imperative to communicate its need for satisfaction to the Other. With need subjected to the desire of the Other—at this point senseless and without justification—the child will be forced to enter into the symbolic world of its caregivers. From this moment on, internal homeostatic instinct will be interrupted as the organism becomes stranded in a linguistic environment, where access to physiological satisfaction is necessarily mediated by representation. This rupture in the world of the human organism is what detaches instinct from its object, giving rise instead to the body of the drive. The distinction between instinct vs. drive, organism vs. body, is key here. We can say that for the human being, the cut of language detaches the body of the drive from the organism of instinct.
It is because of this detachment that we see Freud, in Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), say:
“the sexual drive and the sexual object are merely soldered together…[T]he sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attraction.”
Fantasy, then, is merely the attempt to offer an (always insufficient) object for the undead wandering of the drive (it is perhaps for this reason that the drive is truly a death drive—it is like a ghost who has lingered far past its proper allotment on earth, lost in a belated world defunct to the possibility of fulfillment).
Lacan in Seminar III, pp. 84-85
“All human apprehension of reality is subject to this primordial condition - the subject seeks the object of his desire, but nothing leads him to it. Reality, inasmuch as it is supported by desire, is initially hallucinated. The Freudian theory of the birth of the world of objects…implies that the subject remains suspended at the point of what makes his fundamental object the object of his essential satisfaction…[The reality principle means that the subject is impelled to] refind an object whose emergence is fundamentally hallucinated. Of course, he never does refind it…since by definition he must refind something which he has on loan.”
So the lost satisfaction is what leaves the subject with recourse only to fantasy and representation to support and mark its absence. These function to repress, to make bearable, the absence of the perception of satisfaction itself, forever lost to the speaking being by its imprisonment in language. The question is: why is this loss unbearable to the psychotic in particular? Simply put, it is only in neurosis that repression (Verdrängung) takes place, while psychosis is characterized by what is called “foreclosure” (Verwerfung).
For the neurotic the trauma of language is repressed by being inscribed in the Symbolic, and thus rendered meaningful. The primary loss in the encounter with the Other’s Demand (the social imperative for need to pass through mediation by representation and communication) is dramatized in the fantasy that structures the Oedipus complex where the lost satisfaction is cast as the object in the fantasy.
Apollon, After Lacan:
“The Oedipus complex operates as the mythical structure of that trauma which underlines the domination of the Law over the satisfaction of the drive. The Oedipus complex is the time when the actualization of the power of the symbolic order is at stake in the dramatization of the father's role as representing the author of the Law…[T]he father is the signifier of the loss which attends subjectivity and which establishes the child as a subject in language, and a subject of the Law.”
“The father is purely a signifier. He is a metaphor; for the child, he represents the signifier of cultural law, the signifier of the effects of language on human beings.”
When we talk about the paternal metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father, or the symbolic Father, as the representative of the Law of language, it is not a literal father that we speak of, it is not a man who impregnated the mother, it is to be understood as what functions to lend symbolic support for the primary loss of the subject. Even in the Oedipal framework where what is lost is cast in the form of a story of separation from the mother by means of a prohibition, an actual father need not be involved. The term Name-of-the-Father in French, nom-du-père, is homophonous with non-du-père (“no” of the father) and it can be conceived in terms of a father who, when challenged to give justification for his “no”, replies “because I said so”. It’s this minimal support for Law and loss. In psychosis, the Name-of-the-Father is rejected, or foreclosed.
So the symbolic Father is a fiction that enables the Symbolic Law to be installed in the psyche and thereby function as a barrier, a limit, to the primary violence introduced by the Other of Language and social demand. While for the neurotic this fiction is able to repress the emptiness of meaning in human existence, in contrast the subject of psychosis faces the void alone without any symbolic support, faces loss without representation to act as barrier or limit, without justification or exchange value in the economy of signifiers.
"The word is the murder of the thing" Lacan often repeats, referring to the replacement via representation of the thing with the word. But it goes further, as Miller points out: "there is no biunivocal correlation of the word and the thing: the word does not represent the thing, the word articulates itself to the word." This is a reference to the theory of structural linguistics, in which signifiers do not simply point directly to their referent, but only gain their meaning by their differential relation to other signifiers, just as when you look up a word in a dictionary the only thing provided to orient you are other words. The thrust of this fact is that the “Thing” is truly lost, since now it does not even have a place in the structure of signification at all. Like Freud spoke of with regard to the object of the drive, the word and thing are only libidinally “soldered” together. We could say that this fact is precisely what is repressed in the neurotic, while the psychotic is stranded in the yawning gap between word and thing.
This is also what differentiates human language from animal communication. It is true, animals also communicate, based on rudimentary signs. But these signs are univocal, they point to the thing directly, without metaphor or metonymy, without giving rise to a structure of signification based on the opposition of signifiers in relation to one another. The alarm call of the monkey points directly to the predator, the dance of the bee points to the nectar, but the signifier can only relate to another signifier.
In psychosis we see that the word has not adequately murdered the thing and so the real breaks in, not as the other side of representation, but as an unbearable irruption. Not any word, but specifically the Word as the primary signifier of the “paternal” metaphor, and the “maternal” Thing as in the access to complete satisfaction or jouissance.
This is what characterizes foreclosure as opposed to repression. Lacan: "what has been rejected from the symbolic reappears in the real" (i.e., the invasion of the lost jouissance from outside, or in the body, rather than its repression into the network of signification)
Freud in “Repression”:
“We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the drive being denied access into the conscious. With this a fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and drive remains attached to it…The second stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it. On account of this association, these ideas experience the same fate as what was primally repressed.”
This initial, primary repression is what founds the neurotic unconscious in the first place and constitutes the first element of the underground chain to which subsequent repressions will attach.
Lacan S.III:
“Verdrängung, repression…is what happens when things don't hang together at the level of a symbolic chain…[I]t sometimes happens that…the position we are in comprises a sacrifice that proves to be impossible at the level of meaning. So we repress…But the chain nevertheless continues to run on beneath the surface, express its demands, and assert its claims - and this it does through the intermediary of the neurotic symptom. This is where repression is at the base of neurosis.”
Thus without this primal repression taking place, the psychotic will only have recourse to Verwerfung, meaning that instead of the return of the repressed insisting in the form of signifiers, one is flooded by the Real's traumatic return. As Freud points out in Notes on a Case of Paranoia (1911), this is different from projection:
“It is incorrect to say that the perception which was suppressed internally is projected outwards; the truth is rather, as we now see, that what was abolished internally returns from without.”
These primary forms of negation are fundamental, and determinative of psychic structure, not at the same level as ego defenses like projection, intellectualization, reaction formation, etc.
with the phagocytosis of the human organism by language, any animal adaptation to the environment is cancelled, our habitat now is the structure of language itself. instinct gets hijacked and forced to follow the logic of the signifier, detaching the body from the organism. this body must be constructed out of letters, the detritus of signifying effects. with it, we inherit the constitutive gap in the signifying structure, the cut over which signifiers run, making jouissance gather around the cuts and rims of erogenous zones. dragged along on the signifier's metonymic flight as it chases its impossible completion, we are cast out beyond into another dimension of experience, the beyond-language that language itself institutes. this is what we call death drive.
the effraction of the audible: lalangue, the real body of language, operating as an apparatus of jouissance rather than a means of communication, of which language is merely the superstructure, a secondary elaboration of the babbling and echolalia that founds it. the jouissance of the phoneme is what is at the bedrock of our speech even as we think we are speaking purely for purposes of conveying meaning. Lacan refers to it as our mother tongue, since before understanding what the mother's speech means we experience it in the womb as inscrutable jouissance-laden sound masses that reverberate through our world of flesh. this mother tongue insists throughout our lives, its letters inscribed in us to manifest in repetition and equivocations. if the unconscious is structured like a language, it is because the unconscious is precisely that which language tries and fails to know about itself. it tries by interpreting, via the letter and the associations it gathers through the ravinement of the signifier. it fails in the symptom, which is already an interpretation, an answer to question of jouissance.
the unconscious as lalangue is the proliferation of the formal laws that linguistics discovers, which language coopts into a system of communication and meaning.