Quicksand
Cristina Rose Laurita
Following Lacan and Miller, if the 21st century is marked by the decline of the phallic function, the fall of the Name-of-the Father, how does this manifest in contemporary forms of discontent and anguish in children? We see an influx of anxious children in our practices—not necessarily complaining of anxiety per se, because they are not always able to name it as such, but presenting with anxiety manifesting as: dysregulated bodies, agitation, sensory overload, “ADHD,” confused and chaotic behaviors, bodies that twitch and develop tics, bodies suffused with jouissance and suffering…
Imagine a child who has persistent nightmares and fears of sinking into quicksand. A real fear but also a perfect metaphor for a contemporary form of anxiety—a fantasy of a devouring Other but with no stick in the crocodile’s mouth. Lacan indicates that the stick is “the phallus” and that it “shelters you.” (1) Without the ballast of the Name-of-the-Father, the child may be at risk of being devoured, or of metaphorically sinking into quicksand. In one’s relation to language, that can look like a cascade of something not well-knotted, of something that slipped in the quilting point [point de capiton], or of being stuck in a holophrase. The relation to both language and the body is at stake.
In “Note on the Child,” Lacan states that a child can identify either with the object of the mother’s fantasy or with the symptom of the parental couple.(2) Today, more children may be identified with the object of the mother’s fantasy (e.g., the fantasy of being devoured), more cases of psychosis than neurosis. Are children today more at risk of identification with the object waste? Im-monde? If it is the child—the subject—that falls (or is at risk of being devoured), rather than the object a, there can be devastating effects.
Analytic interventions can create an extraction or localization of jouissance. This can allow jouissance to drain out of the body, resulting in a body no longer so saturated with suffering. Analysis can bring the possibility of arriving on more solid ground, of not losing one’s footing as in quicksand—sometimes by way of invention, but not without the desire of the analyst and transference, whereby a new Other might be constructed.
In some cases, analysis can create a shift for a child, from waste object to something more agalmatic. Sometimes analysis results in the formation of a symptom, which can form around a real kernel of jouissance, which, as Freud put beautifully, is “like the grain of sand around which an oyster forms its pearl.” (3) It can perhaps also allow for the possibility of making use of a residue of jouissance, a grain of sand, giving it a new place and function, and in the form of singularity. As we know, each pearl is completely singular and unique, unlike any other…
References
[1] Lacan. J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, (1969-70), ed. J.-A. Miller, tr. R. Grigg, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007, p. 112.
[2] Lacan. J., “Note on the Child,” (1969) in The Lacanian Review, Issue 4, Paris, NLS, 2018, pp. 13-14.
[3] Freud, S., “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905e), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II, London, Hogarth Press, 1964, p.83.