Anxiety and Object a
Danuta Heinrich
In the argument, D. Roy states that the “object at the heart of the discontent and the place of the cause of anguish will [therefore] be the object of all our attention.”[1]
“The object a is taking centre stage in our topic (...) anxiety is the sole subjective translation of this object,”[2] which “only functions in correlation with anxiety”[3] and “it is not without an object.”[4]
The object a is what is lost upon entering the Symbolic order, “something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as a symbol of the lack, (...) of the phallus, not as such, but insofar as it is lacking.”[5]
For Lacan, symbolic castration or alienation involves the traumatic loss of preoedipal jouissance. The signifier of the Name-of-the-Father cuts the child from the presence of its own jouissance and intervenes on the mother’s desire - the imaginary phallus, entailing the inscription of the subject of the unconscious. “Effectively, everything turns around the subject’s relation to a.”[6]
As subjects, we desire what is missing, yet when we achieve our goals, we always want something more. Object a is a gap or any object temporarily substituted in our symbolic reality, the object that ensures the function of repression. The lost object of which we never had, founds the fundamental fantasy within the subject of the unconscious ($<>a), which will go on to shape all of the ego’s conscious pursuits, and functions as stopper to the Real.
In the seminar on Anxiety, Lacan speaks of 3 aspects of the relation object a to anxiety:
1. Anxiety is about the lack of a lack, the presence of something that was or is supposed to be absent, that threatens to consume the subject. “...it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety but its imminence? What provokes anxiety (...) that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back up onto the lap.”[7] It’s the presence of object a, here breast-as-an-object-a, that causes anxiety, the presence of the desiring subject’s potential satisfaction, which, in turn, is the annihilation of the subject qua lack of being.
2. Anxiety as a signal from the Real - alerts us to the proximity of the lack of a lack that can shatter our identities.
3. Anxiety is about not knowing what the Other wants from you. “The nightmare’s anxiety is felt (...) as that of the Other’s jouissance.”[8]
Anxiety is the affect, a signal of the Real, that alerts us to the lack of a lack, the presence of the proximity of the object a on the stage of fantasy, which is always a stage on which the Other’s desire is positioned as a threat to the subject’s desire.
References
[1] Roy. D., “Discontent and Anxiety in the Clinic and in Civilisation”, Argument of the NLS Congress 2023,
https://www.amp-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Argument.
[2] Lacan. J., “Anxiety,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X (1962-1963). Ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price, Cambridge/Malden, Polity Press, 2014, p. 100.
[3] Ibid., p. 86.
[4] Ibid., p. 89.
[5] Lacan. J., “The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, Ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, London, The Hogarth Press, 2004, p. 103.
[6] Op. cit., Lacan. J., “Anxiety,” p. 112.
[7] Ibid., p. 53-54.
[8] Ibid., p. 61.