Constructions, or the Moment When It Stops Not Being Written
Markus Zöchmeister
In Civilisation and Its Discontents,[1] Freud describes the emergence of the superego in two times. In the first stage, before the superego is established, the fear of losing the love of the authority leads to the renunciation of drive desires. The authority is external and the renunciation has to ensure the love of the Other. In this first stage, the Other still seems too real. In a second stage in the form of the superego, the authority has become internalised and renunciation no longer has a fully liberating effect. Aggressiveness is introjected and turns against the ego in the form of the superego. These two phases correspond to the succession of a logical time before and after the superego is established.
Lacan speaks of three logical times in his seminar on Anxiety:[2] the time of jouissance, the time of anxiety and the time of desire. In Chapter XIII, he says that the time of anxiety passes unnoticed in the gap between jouissance and desire. It is a time that can only be reconstructed in analysis. Here he refers to Freud's analysis of the phantasmatic representation of “a child is being beaten,” where the second time, as elided, can only be apprehended in analysis by constructing it.
With Seminar X, we can now say that between the two logical times that Freud formulates in Civilisation…, there must also be a gap that escapes us.
In the seventh chapter of Civilisation […], Freud wonders about the origin of the feeling of guilt. He inquires as to the object of guilt that afflicts the subject, and thereby distinguishes the psychologists’ answer from the analysts’. Whereas the psychologist locates the object in a real act of the subject, for the analyst, the object is a pleasure that is abandoned out of love for the Other, about which the subject no longer knows anything.
This object is a lost object and the topological locus of this loss is, in my opinion, situated in this gap that opens up between the two times. Lacan opens this gap for us and at first he places the Freudian “Thing” there. A little later, the logical elaboration of this “Thing” gives rise to Lacan's objet petit (a). In Seminar X, with the algorithm of the division of the subject, Lacan gives this object a logical time, the time of anxiety, and therefore a topological place.
It is in this gap that the objet petit (a) of all our attention is located, as Daniel Roy emphasises by drawing our attention to it in his argument.[3] By doing so, he also puts us in tune with the time of anxiety, which is the impossible meeting point where the subject comes up against the Other, in both Freudian and Lacanian analysis. Today, the object is no longer that of lack, as indicated by Freud and elaborated by Lacan, but it is the object of a plus-de-jouir of the One-all-alone that is at the centre of our malaise. We are thus called upon to rewrite the clinic of anxiety with the clinical data that we collect, each day when this gap opens and closes in our consulting rooms. The unconscious palpitates in this abyss, as Lacan introduces it in the second chapter of Seminar XI, an unconscious that stops not being written and that emerges in each truly analytical encounter.
Translation: Caroline Heanue
References
[1] Freud, S., Civilisation and Its Discontents, (1930 [1929]), S.E. XXI, London, Hogarth Press, 2001, pp. 123-33.
[2] Lacan, J., Anxiety, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X (1962-1963), ed. J.-A. Miller. tr.. A. R. Price, Cambridge/Malden, Polity Press, 2014, pp. 170-81.
[3] 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-FINAL-VERSION-DISCONTENT-AND-ANXIETY-IN-THE-CLINIC-AND-IN-CIVILISATION.pdf