Where Anxiety Was, There the Symptom Shall Be
George Mitropoulos
Freud writes that at the root of anxiety lies the emergence of a drive demand which is perceived as a drive danger and provokes a response of anxiety.[1] He adds that “the drive demand is something real” and that “real dangers and drive demands converge.” Faced with danger the subject admits his helplessness. The “indefiniteness and lack of object” confer onto the situation the dimension of trauma. In Seminar XI, however, Lacan connects the notion of the drive with that of the object, identifying the drive demand with the presence of object a. But the latter is in a place where it should not normally be and its presence, “introduces in itself a defect of detection which is a factor of anguish.”[2] This object is part of our body, but it can be replaced by an object of culture.[3] Our world is indeed an im-monde/filthy world[4] of substitutable artificial objects where individuals feel helplessness perceived as anxiety.
Jacques-Alain Miller says that at the heart of civilization lies a perpetual movement of recycling of waste, a veritable “circuit of the superego,”[5] once limited by the master’s discourse but reestablished by the emergence of capitalism.[6] As a result, “surplus jouissance” tends to become today “what supports reality as such”; this is “a reality that has become fantasy.”[7] According to Dominique Laurent, as our world “increasingly economizes meaning in order to account for a human subjectivity that pushes to enjoy, the relation of man to his anxiety grows. Parallelly, his relation to the symptom as a trace of repression declines”; and as the world “pushes for jouissance,” it happens that “the relationship of man to his anxiety grows.”[8]
Psychoanalysis was meant by Freud precisely to “loosen the hold of the superego.”[9] The desire of the analyst is an obstacle to the establishment of this circuit; as the discourse of the analyst poses a barrier between S1 and S2, it “implies the finitude of the analytic process.”[10] D. Laurent explains that psychoanalysis introduces the analysand “to the symptomatization of his anxiety so as to lead to the maximum symptomatic consistence.” Following Lacan, she writes that Little Hans’s phobia “is presented as a symptomatization of anxiety, to the extent that it accomplishes a signifying restructuring, by isolating a signifier that delivers [délivre] an object, which is in itself a signal of the fear to come from which the subject can protect itself.”[11] The analytic cure is thus seen as a “directed phobia.”[12] What can “dry up the ferocious greed of the superego” is, therefore, the finite procedure of psychoanalysis, a signifying restructuring which aims at a symptomatic consistency and introduces desire as a means to “dispel the drives.”[13]
“Where the id was, there the ego shall be,” Freud wrote and he added: “It is the work of culture – not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.”[14] Lake Zuider Zee was dried up during Freud’s time and turned into dry land where a residential area was built, an example of the work of culture. This image may offer an illustration of the psychoanalytic drying up of anxiety. Man’s increasing immersion in the im-monde/filthy world confronts him with a drive demand that generates more and more anxiety, comparable to an undrained Zuider Zee. Therefore, we could perhaps paraphrase Freud, saying that, where anxiety was, there the symptom shall be.
References
[1] Freud S., (1926) “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XX, Hogarth Press, London, 1959, pp. 166-8.
[2] Miller J.-A., “Introduction to the Reading of Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety,” tr. B. P. Faulks, Lacanian Ink, No. 27, Spring, 2006, p. 50.
[3] Ibid., p. 101.
[4] Lacan J., “The Third”, tr. P. Dravers, The Lacanian Review, No. 7, 2009, p. 104.
[5] Miller J.-A., “Jouer la partie,” La Cause du Désir, No. 105, 2020, p. 24.
[6] Ibid., p. 27.
[7] Ibid., p. 28.
[8] Laurent D., “Inhibition, symptôme et angoisse, aujourd’hui,” La Cause Freudienne, No. 58, 2004, p. 58.
[9] Miller J.-A., “Jouer la partie,” La Cause du Désir, op. cit., p. 24.
[10] Ibid., p.28.
[11] Laurent D., “Inhibition, symptôme et angoisse, aujourd’hui,” La Cause Freudienne, op. cit., p. 57.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Roy D., Discontent and Anxiety in the Clinic and in Civilization. An Introduction to the NLS Congress 2023, available online.
[14] Freud S. (1933), “New Introductory Lectures,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXII, Hogarth Press, London, 1960, p. 80.