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A Child Is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissism and the Death Drive
The powerful thesis of this book is that in order to achieve full selfhood we must all repeatedly and endlessly kill the phantasmatic image of ourselves instilled in us by our parents. We must all combat what the author calls “primary narcissism,” a projection of the child our parents wanted. This idea—that each of us carries as a burden an unconscious secret of our parents, a hidden desire that we are made to live out but that we must kill in order to “be born”—touches on some of the fundamental issues of psychoanalytic theory. Around it, the author builds an intricate analysis of the relation between primary narcissism and the death drive. Each of the book’s five chapters begins with one or more case studies drawn from the author’s clinical experience as a psychoanalyst. In these studies he links his central concern—the image of the child created by the unconscious desire of the parents—to other issues, such as the question of love, the concept of the subject, and the death drive. In the penultimate chapter, on transference, the author challenges the commonplace understanding of the analyst’s impassivity. What does such impassivity imply, especially in the context of a “transferential love” between a female patient and a male analyst? In replying to this question, the author forcefully reassesses the relation of psychoanalysis to femininity, to the question “What does a woman want?” Serge Leclaire’s overarching thesis leads to a provocative rereading of the Oedipal configuration. Leclaire suggests that he is inhabited, pursued, haunted, and debilitated by the child who should have died in order that Oedipus might have been born into life.
102 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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225 people want to read
About the author
Serge Leclaire
32 books8 followersSerge Leclaire was a practicing psychoanalyst in Paris and one of the first to join Lacan's school.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 21, 2019
Πολύ καλό!! Διεισδυτικό και ειλικρινές!! Όχι εύκολο ανάγνωσμα για κάποιον που δεν έχει εξοικείωση με ψυχαναλυτικους όρους και πρακτικές και ειδικότερα με τη Λακανικη σχολή στην οποία ανοίκει και ο συγγραφέας.
May 25, 2019
An interesting text that I think starts to become meta at some point in the book. It starts off about killing the phantasy of the child we hold onto as adults, a result of an unconscious projection of the desire of the mother, and it ends with Leclaire's views on transference: namely, since it is unavoidable there is hardly any reason in denying the inherently sexed aspect of the analyst-analysand relationship (this does not mean giving in to countertransference, but some of the stuff Leclaire said seemed like it was going in that way). This child we must kill ends up taking detours through love and (as mentioned) transference love, being constituted as a subject, and the death drive. This seems to me primarily an exploration of the feminine, since the ultimate question (that remains unanswered or unanswerable) is "What does a woman want?" Leclaire offers some tentative guesses, but I think he comes down on the side that ultimately we (or more specifically male analysts) cannot know. All male analysts can do is proffer an impotence that will never satisfy their "jouissance in suffering", which, he argues, is the source of speech (for women? for humans? I'm not sure.)
Pretty new to psychoanalysis and theory, so this is likely all wrong. Very interesting and cool book though, beautiful writing and very cool phrases peppered throughout, and Nata Minor's post-script is very good as well, ending the book with evocative imagery and beauty:
"At the very moment where eyes are torn out, where wolves and masks suddenly fly off, the real appears in its extreme concision, more surprising and uncanny than fiction, with its procession of sounds, words, and images like closed lips barred by an index finger."
Pretty new to psychoanalysis and theory, so this is likely all wrong. Very interesting and cool book though, beautiful writing and very cool phrases peppered throughout, and Nata Minor's post-script is very good as well, ending the book with evocative imagery and beauty:
"At the very moment where eyes are torn out, where wolves and masks suddenly fly off, the real appears in its extreme concision, more surprising and uncanny than fiction, with its procession of sounds, words, and images like closed lips barred by an index finger."
December 27, 2020
This masterfully poetic work of psychoanalysis bears import for any seeking to understand the complications of the work of analysis, which bears the mark, latent yet openly, of the between and its silence. To trace the gap in speech and the subject, evincing less an answer and an origin, and rather a continual response, a listening, and a questioning quest.
The infans stands as the fundamental figure, the remainder, of import for this work. The unspeaking child, always already killed, allowing for and yet haunting life which cannot let it go, demanding the interminable perpetuation of responding to this death which, paradoxically, renders its response possible only through killing it once more (in a mimesis of this originary loss, tracing the life of the subject in the image without image, the figure without figure, of this haunting death, impossible yet necessary).
Leclaire seems ever on the cusp, at the brink of the abyss of the absence of origin, but never fails to turn away from it. Take for example his discussion of the phallus and castration in the second section of this work. He notes that the phallus operates as a figural representative of a mimetically abyssal unconscious absence. And yet, in figuring castration between the genders and their discursive genrefication, he grounds sexual difference once more in an originary split, all the while failing to asequately take account of the gap or écart marking the division between the two - the always already neutered and neutral (in sexual and discursive terms) personne which evinces a radical absence of origin. The truth of the phallus is an originary loss or castration, cut off from what never was phallic; the phallus figures, as secondary repression, a radical impotence which exposes one not to the generative sēmion of life, but rather to the ineluctable exposure of death in its absolute effacement, and the impotence or powerlessness, the impuissance, which engenders it.
Irremediable castration, or the castration of origin, then. The longing for a loss which bears no object - the loss of something which is nothing, which is multiplied exponentially into a loss of loss itself, able to bring loss to term or consummation. We are committed to forgetting, and the remembrance which analysis seeks to trace out is not a remembrance of things past, but an opening onto what was never past - its anterior existence standing outside (ek-sisting) beyond the beginning, outside the reaches of memory. Analysis, in this sense, in unweaving the web and allowing the infans to speak otherwise than through the torments of speech, might allow us to return to what memory cannot remember, any more than it can forget - a radical forgetting, forgotten, opening the fissure of the subject to glimpse its abyssal heart in the absence of an object marking the evasion of a death which continually disturbs every subject.
And thus Leclaire's insistence on translation and transference, Übertragung, as less of a reciprocal relation between subjects, and rather his emphasis on the holding open of the écart of the "I", the space between words or speeches, allowing the silence, the unspeaking infans, to resonate in its silent (re)mark. Analysis, for Leclaire, is essentially relational - but more so for the distance, the between, that it holds open in the I - the fracture of the I (that the I is or would stand for, that it marks). Between the two who speak, who respond and listen, each to the other and so, by detour, to "themselves," there silently resounds the word of a third - the infans, given language and given over to language, and so returned to what it gives and yet has ever been denied it. The resonances with Blanchot - and beyond his "(A Primal Scene?)" - abound...
The adjoined essay by Nata Minor is far and away the weakest aspect of the book. Partly because of its plodding suggestions which never really get to any substantive revelation (she takes double the pages of any of Leclaire's chapters in order to say far, far less), partly because I believe the claim that the question "What do women want?" is neither the central question of Leclaire's work nor that of psychoanalysis more generally. A minor birth, certainly, if not a stillbirth, mort-né, in terms of a response to what precedes it - for it misses not only on the life of the thought and questioning of Leclaire's writing, but also on that very death, ever fugitive and elusive, which he seeks to give word to, to translate - the infans which bears the absence of the phallus in its perpetual effacement, demanding of us a response which remains impossible, which troubles us, shakes and disturbs us to the heartless heart of our uncanny existence. The mourning never ceases, especially not with death, be it "ours" or that of the other.
The infans stands as the fundamental figure, the remainder, of import for this work. The unspeaking child, always already killed, allowing for and yet haunting life which cannot let it go, demanding the interminable perpetuation of responding to this death which, paradoxically, renders its response possible only through killing it once more (in a mimesis of this originary loss, tracing the life of the subject in the image without image, the figure without figure, of this haunting death, impossible yet necessary).
Leclaire seems ever on the cusp, at the brink of the abyss of the absence of origin, but never fails to turn away from it. Take for example his discussion of the phallus and castration in the second section of this work. He notes that the phallus operates as a figural representative of a mimetically abyssal unconscious absence. And yet, in figuring castration between the genders and their discursive genrefication, he grounds sexual difference once more in an originary split, all the while failing to asequately take account of the gap or écart marking the division between the two - the always already neutered and neutral (in sexual and discursive terms) personne which evinces a radical absence of origin. The truth of the phallus is an originary loss or castration, cut off from what never was phallic; the phallus figures, as secondary repression, a radical impotence which exposes one not to the generative sēmion of life, but rather to the ineluctable exposure of death in its absolute effacement, and the impotence or powerlessness, the impuissance, which engenders it.
Irremediable castration, or the castration of origin, then. The longing for a loss which bears no object - the loss of something which is nothing, which is multiplied exponentially into a loss of loss itself, able to bring loss to term or consummation. We are committed to forgetting, and the remembrance which analysis seeks to trace out is not a remembrance of things past, but an opening onto what was never past - its anterior existence standing outside (ek-sisting) beyond the beginning, outside the reaches of memory. Analysis, in this sense, in unweaving the web and allowing the infans to speak otherwise than through the torments of speech, might allow us to return to what memory cannot remember, any more than it can forget - a radical forgetting, forgotten, opening the fissure of the subject to glimpse its abyssal heart in the absence of an object marking the evasion of a death which continually disturbs every subject.
And thus Leclaire's insistence on translation and transference, Übertragung, as less of a reciprocal relation between subjects, and rather his emphasis on the holding open of the écart of the "I", the space between words or speeches, allowing the silence, the unspeaking infans, to resonate in its silent (re)mark. Analysis, for Leclaire, is essentially relational - but more so for the distance, the between, that it holds open in the I - the fracture of the I (that the I is or would stand for, that it marks). Between the two who speak, who respond and listen, each to the other and so, by detour, to "themselves," there silently resounds the word of a third - the infans, given language and given over to language, and so returned to what it gives and yet has ever been denied it. The resonances with Blanchot - and beyond his "(A Primal Scene?)" - abound...
The adjoined essay by Nata Minor is far and away the weakest aspect of the book. Partly because of its plodding suggestions which never really get to any substantive revelation (she takes double the pages of any of Leclaire's chapters in order to say far, far less), partly because I believe the claim that the question "What do women want?" is neither the central question of Leclaire's work nor that of psychoanalysis more generally. A minor birth, certainly, if not a stillbirth, mort-né, in terms of a response to what precedes it - for it misses not only on the life of the thought and questioning of Leclaire's writing, but also on that very death, ever fugitive and elusive, which he seeks to give word to, to translate - the infans which bears the absence of the phallus in its perpetual effacement, demanding of us a response which remains impossible, which troubles us, shakes and disturbs us to the heartless heart of our uncanny existence. The mourning never ceases, especially not with death, be it "ours" or that of the other.
February 18, 2026
Conseguir ter um orgasmo é a única garantia de conseguir amar, por isso é que os meninos são malvados (só tem orgasmos que existem, não os que ex-istem)
1 parte discussão sobre repressão primária e secundária CRUCIAL PRA UNDERSTAND GENERO IN A NEW AND RIGHT WAY,2 sobre amor mulheres transference diferente funny,NO FINAL EXCERTO E CITAÇOES COM EXPLICAÇÂO CHAT ESSENCIAIS PRA PERCEbER NEUROSE VS PSICOSE QUE ATE AGORA NUNCA TINHA PERCEBIDO.LER AGAIN AND AGAIN URGENTE, UMA MANEIRA DIFERENTE E MAIS COITADINHA DE VER NEUROSE OBSSESIVA, AFINAL N É SÓ FALTA DE CORAGEM FACE AO OUTRO, PQ A LACK PODE COMER TE INTEIRO, excertos tirados nao so do livro como do ensaio sobre o Phillo,e sobre o sonho do unicornio, publicados separadamente e lidos por mim ao mesmo tempo. Pa sofreu um bocado com a tradução
🚨⬇️
So, the mother? Sooner or later, she will have to face the fact of lacking the penis. If we consider, as we must, the never-completed “loss” of the primary narcissistic representation as constitutive of castration proper, we can say that realizing the lack of a penis, which characterizes the girl’s gender, will be inscribed for her as confirmation of a necessary loss tied to taking her place in the conflictual space of the word where desire unfolds. It is a space determined by the irreducible opposition of the conscious system to the unconscious system. Furthermore, if we take into account the experiences that analysis has taught us to understand as the “loss” of the oral object at the time of weaning, and then of the anal object—experienced as letting go of a part of the body—we can see that the “phallic” phase of the girl is inscribed at the time of its decline in a homogeneous series of losses or separations or a lack, falling naturally into place as it were in the structure of the unconscious, a structure controlled by castration.
This arrangement of experience, conditioned by anatomical givens, leaves woman disposed to an unmediated relationship to the workings of castration. She therefore finds herself on the same level with the process of original repression and invests little in the process of secondary repression (repression proper). The consciously rejected representations constituting the repressed of the “secondary” unconscious count less for her than the representatives of the “primary” unconscious (that of original repression). More precisely, all her experience confirms her—if she does not inopportunely deny it—in an acknowledgement of the “loss,” that is to say of the determining primacy of the unconscious representation in the face of which the prestige of the conscious representation pales along with the conceptual apparatus it produces. For the woman, not only do words, above and beyond their signifying function, keep their value as unconscious representatives, as signifiers of jouissance, which will constitute her woman’s word. In the immediacy of her connection to castration, she also finds support for a process of properly sexual identification that first and unconsciously specifies her as woman before any secondary identification of a trait or figure as belonging to womanhood.
On the contrary, for the man the experience of the phallic phase and its decline provides a break in the homogeneity of the series of losses: it is easy for him, confident in his possession of the penis, to fool himself and be persuaded that the phallus is not lost to everyone and that he, like all men, possesses it. The effect of this inevitable confusion is simple: it will intensify and confirm the secondary repression through which the truth of castration, as attested by unconscious representatives, will be more firmly denied and will furthermore ward off the infantile fear of losing the penis. The man’s discourse, thus constituted as a discourse of secondary repression (in the common sense of the word) is clearly ordered then as the refusal of castration and misrecognition of the unconscious and therefore as a mode of exile from jouissance. Whatever the facts, confident in the tenacious illusion of not being castrated and of being in some way, since he has a penis, the possessor of the phallus, the man will insist on the primacy of conscious representations and the signifying values of words. He will elaborate conceptual systems with the ineradicable pretension of producing a universal discourse whose only function, in fact, is to occult the truth of unconscious discourse and the immovable radicalness of castration. Only repeated collisions against the “rock of castration” will force…
No discourse is asexual.
More simply, someone who wants a woman will wish to be the object of her dreams; if the two dreams only rarely coincide, they are no less necessary to the life of the desire. At a time when men were gallant, passionate courting was conceivable only where the lover was assured that the object of his flame was playing the role of a frightfully reticent woman. Do we imagine today gallantly courting a liberated woman?
This is the way we should understand the formula that the other is necessary to sustain desire. Philo, on the other hand, is captive of his unique passion and is fundamentally ignorant of the other as desiring. And yet, in order for his own desire to live, the other is necessary. In this impasse he will make use of anything at all to create a fancied other, the illusory support of a sterile desire. To give to the inanimate object the appearance of life, to make it live and die, to care for it, then to destroy it, such is the derisory game to which Philo is reduced. The obsessional’s object is invested with this essential function of otherness.
Without an industrious activity to sustain it, the dream may well evaporate, and Death then threatens to bear witness to the truth. In order to avoid this ruin, the obsessional ceaselessly takes up the exhausting work of reducing the living to nothing and of giving to others the impression of an ephemeral life.
This impossible quest for the other remains the most notable characteristic of the obsessional’s desire.
Thus the circle is closed: the desire that was prematurely satisfied is substituted for the demand; it remains isolated in a solitary daydream peopled with shadows, calling ceaselessly to the other, excluded yet necessary.
Sygne (analysand) keeps hunting for analysts representatives of unconscious desire, reading his looks, his silences, his previous books and family history etc, but not to appease her desire, as might be thought, but to find bodily consistency for the words haunting her (qua women being in closer relation to the experience of castration via lesser secondary repression): “Invited to speak her peace, sooner or later, a woman will inevitably express what speaking means for her, namely, that there is jouissance. As I stated in Chapter 2, ‘for the woman, not only do words, above and beyond their signifying functions, keep their value as unconscious representatives, as signifiers of jouissance, which will constitute her woman’s word. In the immediacy of her connection to castration, she also finds support for a process of properly sexual identification that first specifies her as woman before any secondary identification of a trait or figure as belonging to womanhood.’ What she expects from analysis is what a man of today, for whom identification with ideology’s representations takes the place of a sexual position, seems most often unable to give her by the mere homage of his power: the recognition of the essential truth of her words as a woman. What a woman wants is first of all a man’s recognition of her woman’s words, since its durability is not originally guaranteed by any repression. Essentially, her words retain their position of unconscious representative (signifier) and only incidentally enter the system of meanings. They are the stars and glorious bodies of the phallic system and can speak of nothing more than the shadowy place of any body’s objects. She expects man’s discourse to pin to a screen of repression the signifier of her glory in the flesh and have it be his hope of seeing a piece of the sky.” Just as she does with numbers in her work, Sygne in analysis uses words to speak of love. The breathless round of signifiers she sets in motion speaks of nothing but her pain, or rather, her jouissance in suffering (the primary model of hysterical dissatisfaction). She is not fooled by it. Her wish to rest her head in my hand and lean her body against mine is not—at least she says as much without further denial—to appease her desire; rather, it is to find bodily consistency and anchor for the words haunting her, a shaded, cool spot for the fires of truth consuming her. When catching hold of the signifiers she imagines (most often rightly) to be those of my desiring phantasies, she is not merely asking me not to disown them but also to be faithful to them.
It is as if the constellation of my unconscious representatives, set like jewels on the screen of all my repressions, could give her support by recognizing her as Sygne. I have no doubt that some doctors of psychoanalysis would tell me that I should have received her in a more bare office, that I should not have released my writings as I have done, and that paying closer attention to the analyst’s discretion would have spared Seghin her entanglement in a transferential rapport that will have a very hard time terminating. Besides loathing this term, I refuse to believe that an experience of truth can ever be erased. Transparency is such an experience, and so is transference love. It is not merely my supposed indulgence that allows Seghin to grasp the signifiers of my desire. My accepting her into analysis is an invitation to speak, and she goes without detour to the end of what she has to say: her jouissance in suffering. In so doing, she loves the person who invites her to speak and lets her speak. Everybody knows that the most definite symptom of love is the acuity that enables the lover to go to the heart of the loved one’s signifiers, however strong the resistance.
Now let us suppose that I were to indulge a reaction of withdrawal in the face of a woman’s love and labor to convince her of its illusory or pathological nature. My interventions, even if pertinent and sober, could only be taken for what they would in fact be: a blunt refusal, a way of telling her that even in analysis a woman’s words of jouissance have no place. Nothing seems more essential to me in analytic practice than refusing to take part in this sort of?). Now I would be in bad faith if I pretended that Cygne, to speak here only of her, leaves me cold. In this love story, my whole life resonates harmonically, not only my loves, women's words or silences inscribed in my body, children, but also my interests in analysis, my questioning the origin of speaking, my work on the discourse of oppression, my quest for half the sky. Does this mean that I love her? No, that is to say, not really, but it could have been outside analysis.
What is extraordinary about the analytical adventure is revealed in this meeting between the discoverer and his true object, love, which is to say, a woman's word, a strange and familiar woman's voice.
By the way, what is the sex of analysts? Do they have one? The question is worth submitting to the next council. Today, the prevailing opinion is that indeed they do, but that it doesn’t matter as long as they have ears.I can’t resign myself to this.To maintain that an analyst’s sex has no immediate bearing on his or her practice would be tantamount to turning the analytical function into a sort of priesthood, placing the analyst beyond the plurality of the spoken word, especially the duality of masculine and feminine voices. I know that the fantasy of a universal discourse is indestructible. This is because it upholds what is most derisory in men’s claims to virility. But I think I have shown sufficiently how the temptation of a universal discourse is part and parcel of the work of repression in that it is never anything but an attempt at subsuming all the modes of repression.Let us recall just how much this enterprise turns out to be masculine, since for lack of an immediate connection with castration, which for woman essentially determines her identification as sexual, a man will find sexual identification by breaking with the process of repression that he inevitably leans on for support.The superfluous and pitiful I am a man is always marked by some spectacular violence against the order to which he is a secret accomplice. Just as there is no metalanguage, there is no Esperanto of sex, in other words, no pseudo-analytic discourse capable of going beyond difference. Quite the contrary, what we call analytical discourse promotes another logic from the unconscious. It is fine by taking castration, connection to the phallus, into account, and castration is what determines sexual identity in speaking beings. Analytical discourse leaves to each and everyone, starting with analysts, the task of knowing from whence he speaks. To each figure its own traps,
but to each its own promise of truth:the hope for a voice to be born is always there.
ULTIMA PARTE ESSENCIAL!!!!!!!!!!
“On the other hand, through the repetition of the literal articulation, he seems to reach bliss (jouir) in the effect of production or engendering that is correlative to the stringing together of the literal terms, as if the articulation of this secret name caused him each time to be born (or reborn) from his own head, on his own initiative, into the world of language and into his own subjectivity. In a word, we could say that Philippe, through the use of the secret formula, attempts each time to annex for himself the scene of his own conception and that he thus rediscovers his primal scene as often as he impugns it.
What Philippe is trying fundamentally to impugn so as to feign mastering it is, in fact, the very dimension of the other’s desire, inasmuch as he was no doubt prematurely its object, beneficiary, victim, and remainder. A castoff of paternal desire who finds his only landmark in the maker’s mark of the name of the too-soon-departed Jérémie, an object abandoned to the mother’s devouring desire, Philippe, as designated in his derisive formula, will from now on have no other concern than to defend against the other’s desire, to contest the other as desiring, which is to say to take the other for dead or nonexistent.
For he thinks he knows by experience that if he lets himself recognize the other it would mean falling once again (and perhaps this time without any recourse) into the gulf of lack that makes of him someone who desires, where he would be once again toppled, devoured, suffocatingly fulfilled.
This is the impasse of Philippe’s desire, which the complete analysis of the dream with the unicorn reveals in its phantasmatic ordering.”
The apparent paradox you noticed is real, but it is a Lacanian one, not a mistake in the text. The confusion comes from assuming that all “lack” functions in the same way. Leclaire is very precise about the kind of lack Philippe is dealing with.
In Lacanian theory, symbolic lack, the lack introduced by castration and the Name-of-the-Father, creates space. It allows breathing room, separation, and the circulation of desire. This is the lack that makes desire possible and livable. It separates the subject from the Other’s desire and prevents engulfment.
This is not the kind of lack Philippe experiences. For Philippe, falling into lack means falling back into the position of being the object of the Other’s desire. It means losing separation and being reabsorbed by a devouring maternal desire. In this situation, he is lacking as a subject, but filled as an object. That is why Leclaire can describe this fall into lack as being devoured and suffocatingly fulfilled without contradiction.
When Leclaire writes that Philippe would fall into “the gulf of lack that makes of him someone who desires,” this lack is not a clean symbolic lack. It is a lack without mediation, one in which Philippe becomes what is lacking for the Other. In other words, he does not experience lack as an open space that allows desire to circulate, but as a collapse into jouissance. This is a fullness that is deadly, not liberating.
Desire requires lack plus separation. Jouissance appears when separation collapses. Philippe fears that recognizing the Other as desiring would pull him back into the position of the object that completes the Other, erasing the symbolic gap and producing a suffocating fullness. He would be fulfilled in the sense of being overdetermined by the Other, but suffocated because there is no lack left to breathe.
This is why Leclaire can say that Philippe would be toppled, devoured, and suffocatingly fulfilled at the same time. It is not a contradiction but a precise description of jouissance rather than desire.
For this reason, Philippe’s defensive solution is to deny the Other’s desire altogether, to take the Other as dead or nonexistent. If the Other does not desire, then Philippe cannot be swallowed by that desire. However, the cost of this defense is that true desire becomes impossible. What remains is repetitive jouissance, tied to the letter, the formula, and the phantasm, forming a closed circuit.
This is what Leclaire names the impasse of Philippe’s desire.
Now here’s the crucial point: an obsessional can construct defenses that mimic psychotic solutions without being psychotic.
What Philippe is doing-denying the Other as desiring, taking the Other as dead or nonexistent — is not foreclosure. It’s an obsessional strategy. He is actively defending against the Other’s desire, not structurally unable to symbolize it. That’s why Leclaire uses phrases that sound psychotic-devouring, suffocation, engulfment-but still treats this as a neurotic impasse revealed in the phantasm. The terror Philippe has of being swallowed is real, but the fact that he can stage it in fantasy, articulate it in language, and bind it to a letter-formula tells you the symbolic order is still functioning. In psychosis, you don’t get this kind of phantasmatic staging in the same way. You get intrusion, certainty, and phenomena that don’t require interpretation because they are not symbolic metaphors-they are lived as real. Lacan says more than once that obsession is a way of keeping psychosis at bay. The obsessional’s entire economy can be read as a massive effort to prevent the collapse of separation from the Other. That’s why the maternal dimension looms so large here. An overbearing or engulfing maternal desire does not automatically produce psychosis, but it massively pressures the subject to invent defenses
For Philippe, the idea of a beach still calls up the phobia of sand getting into everything. Days later, he contends, whatever one does, one still finds some sneaky grain of sand that has escaped from the most careful ablutions in fresh water, a grain that all by itself, crunching in silence, grows next to the skin. Thus, there came to the fore one of Philippe’s minor symptoms, a real little phobia regarding badly pleated clothes, the stray crumb in bedsheets, hair that gets into the collar after a haircut, a pebble in the shoe. One sees how, with the evocation of the beach, there arises an overly sensitive little nothing, a grain of the unconscious brushing the surface of the skin and putting the nerves on edge, which can on certain occasions drive Philippe to the edge of the most intense irritation, or even to the borders of anxiety. Philippe loves his feet, thinks them not at all silly, and takes pleasure in their play, he dreamed of making as hard as horn so as to be able to walk without injury on the roughest ground- He fulfilled there in a partial fashion the clearly obsessional phantasm of keeping his body protected beneath the covering of an invulnerable hide.
1 parte discussão sobre repressão primária e secundária CRUCIAL PRA UNDERSTAND GENERO IN A NEW AND RIGHT WAY,2 sobre amor mulheres transference diferente funny,NO FINAL EXCERTO E CITAÇOES COM EXPLICAÇÂO CHAT ESSENCIAIS PRA PERCEbER NEUROSE VS PSICOSE QUE ATE AGORA NUNCA TINHA PERCEBIDO.LER AGAIN AND AGAIN URGENTE, UMA MANEIRA DIFERENTE E MAIS COITADINHA DE VER NEUROSE OBSSESIVA, AFINAL N É SÓ FALTA DE CORAGEM FACE AO OUTRO, PQ A LACK PODE COMER TE INTEIRO, excertos tirados nao so do livro como do ensaio sobre o Phillo,e sobre o sonho do unicornio, publicados separadamente e lidos por mim ao mesmo tempo. Pa sofreu um bocado com a tradução
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So, the mother? Sooner or later, she will have to face the fact of lacking the penis. If we consider, as we must, the never-completed “loss” of the primary narcissistic representation as constitutive of castration proper, we can say that realizing the lack of a penis, which characterizes the girl’s gender, will be inscribed for her as confirmation of a necessary loss tied to taking her place in the conflictual space of the word where desire unfolds. It is a space determined by the irreducible opposition of the conscious system to the unconscious system. Furthermore, if we take into account the experiences that analysis has taught us to understand as the “loss” of the oral object at the time of weaning, and then of the anal object—experienced as letting go of a part of the body—we can see that the “phallic” phase of the girl is inscribed at the time of its decline in a homogeneous series of losses or separations or a lack, falling naturally into place as it were in the structure of the unconscious, a structure controlled by castration.
This arrangement of experience, conditioned by anatomical givens, leaves woman disposed to an unmediated relationship to the workings of castration. She therefore finds herself on the same level with the process of original repression and invests little in the process of secondary repression (repression proper). The consciously rejected representations constituting the repressed of the “secondary” unconscious count less for her than the representatives of the “primary” unconscious (that of original repression). More precisely, all her experience confirms her—if she does not inopportunely deny it—in an acknowledgement of the “loss,” that is to say of the determining primacy of the unconscious representation in the face of which the prestige of the conscious representation pales along with the conceptual apparatus it produces. For the woman, not only do words, above and beyond their signifying function, keep their value as unconscious representatives, as signifiers of jouissance, which will constitute her woman’s word. In the immediacy of her connection to castration, she also finds support for a process of properly sexual identification that first and unconsciously specifies her as woman before any secondary identification of a trait or figure as belonging to womanhood.
On the contrary, for the man the experience of the phallic phase and its decline provides a break in the homogeneity of the series of losses: it is easy for him, confident in his possession of the penis, to fool himself and be persuaded that the phallus is not lost to everyone and that he, like all men, possesses it. The effect of this inevitable confusion is simple: it will intensify and confirm the secondary repression through which the truth of castration, as attested by unconscious representatives, will be more firmly denied and will furthermore ward off the infantile fear of losing the penis. The man’s discourse, thus constituted as a discourse of secondary repression (in the common sense of the word) is clearly ordered then as the refusal of castration and misrecognition of the unconscious and therefore as a mode of exile from jouissance. Whatever the facts, confident in the tenacious illusion of not being castrated and of being in some way, since he has a penis, the possessor of the phallus, the man will insist on the primacy of conscious representations and the signifying values of words. He will elaborate conceptual systems with the ineradicable pretension of producing a universal discourse whose only function, in fact, is to occult the truth of unconscious discourse and the immovable radicalness of castration. Only repeated collisions against the “rock of castration” will force…
No discourse is asexual.
More simply, someone who wants a woman will wish to be the object of her dreams; if the two dreams only rarely coincide, they are no less necessary to the life of the desire. At a time when men were gallant, passionate courting was conceivable only where the lover was assured that the object of his flame was playing the role of a frightfully reticent woman. Do we imagine today gallantly courting a liberated woman?
This is the way we should understand the formula that the other is necessary to sustain desire. Philo, on the other hand, is captive of his unique passion and is fundamentally ignorant of the other as desiring. And yet, in order for his own desire to live, the other is necessary. In this impasse he will make use of anything at all to create a fancied other, the illusory support of a sterile desire. To give to the inanimate object the appearance of life, to make it live and die, to care for it, then to destroy it, such is the derisory game to which Philo is reduced. The obsessional’s object is invested with this essential function of otherness.
Without an industrious activity to sustain it, the dream may well evaporate, and Death then threatens to bear witness to the truth. In order to avoid this ruin, the obsessional ceaselessly takes up the exhausting work of reducing the living to nothing and of giving to others the impression of an ephemeral life.
This impossible quest for the other remains the most notable characteristic of the obsessional’s desire.
Thus the circle is closed: the desire that was prematurely satisfied is substituted for the demand; it remains isolated in a solitary daydream peopled with shadows, calling ceaselessly to the other, excluded yet necessary.
Sygne (analysand) keeps hunting for analysts representatives of unconscious desire, reading his looks, his silences, his previous books and family history etc, but not to appease her desire, as might be thought, but to find bodily consistency for the words haunting her (qua women being in closer relation to the experience of castration via lesser secondary repression): “Invited to speak her peace, sooner or later, a woman will inevitably express what speaking means for her, namely, that there is jouissance. As I stated in Chapter 2, ‘for the woman, not only do words, above and beyond their signifying functions, keep their value as unconscious representatives, as signifiers of jouissance, which will constitute her woman’s word. In the immediacy of her connection to castration, she also finds support for a process of properly sexual identification that first specifies her as woman before any secondary identification of a trait or figure as belonging to womanhood.’ What she expects from analysis is what a man of today, for whom identification with ideology’s representations takes the place of a sexual position, seems most often unable to give her by the mere homage of his power: the recognition of the essential truth of her words as a woman. What a woman wants is first of all a man’s recognition of her woman’s words, since its durability is not originally guaranteed by any repression. Essentially, her words retain their position of unconscious representative (signifier) and only incidentally enter the system of meanings. They are the stars and glorious bodies of the phallic system and can speak of nothing more than the shadowy place of any body’s objects. She expects man’s discourse to pin to a screen of repression the signifier of her glory in the flesh and have it be his hope of seeing a piece of the sky.” Just as she does with numbers in her work, Sygne in analysis uses words to speak of love. The breathless round of signifiers she sets in motion speaks of nothing but her pain, or rather, her jouissance in suffering (the primary model of hysterical dissatisfaction). She is not fooled by it. Her wish to rest her head in my hand and lean her body against mine is not—at least she says as much without further denial—to appease her desire; rather, it is to find bodily consistency and anchor for the words haunting her, a shaded, cool spot for the fires of truth consuming her. When catching hold of the signifiers she imagines (most often rightly) to be those of my desiring phantasies, she is not merely asking me not to disown them but also to be faithful to them.
It is as if the constellation of my unconscious representatives, set like jewels on the screen of all my repressions, could give her support by recognizing her as Sygne. I have no doubt that some doctors of psychoanalysis would tell me that I should have received her in a more bare office, that I should not have released my writings as I have done, and that paying closer attention to the analyst’s discretion would have spared Seghin her entanglement in a transferential rapport that will have a very hard time terminating. Besides loathing this term, I refuse to believe that an experience of truth can ever be erased. Transparency is such an experience, and so is transference love. It is not merely my supposed indulgence that allows Seghin to grasp the signifiers of my desire. My accepting her into analysis is an invitation to speak, and she goes without detour to the end of what she has to say: her jouissance in suffering. In so doing, she loves the person who invites her to speak and lets her speak. Everybody knows that the most definite symptom of love is the acuity that enables the lover to go to the heart of the loved one’s signifiers, however strong the resistance.
Now let us suppose that I were to indulge a reaction of withdrawal in the face of a woman’s love and labor to convince her of its illusory or pathological nature. My interventions, even if pertinent and sober, could only be taken for what they would in fact be: a blunt refusal, a way of telling her that even in analysis a woman’s words of jouissance have no place. Nothing seems more essential to me in analytic practice than refusing to take part in this sort of?). Now I would be in bad faith if I pretended that Cygne, to speak here only of her, leaves me cold. In this love story, my whole life resonates harmonically, not only my loves, women's words or silences inscribed in my body, children, but also my interests in analysis, my questioning the origin of speaking, my work on the discourse of oppression, my quest for half the sky. Does this mean that I love her? No, that is to say, not really, but it could have been outside analysis.
What is extraordinary about the analytical adventure is revealed in this meeting between the discoverer and his true object, love, which is to say, a woman's word, a strange and familiar woman's voice.
By the way, what is the sex of analysts? Do they have one? The question is worth submitting to the next council. Today, the prevailing opinion is that indeed they do, but that it doesn’t matter as long as they have ears.I can’t resign myself to this.To maintain that an analyst’s sex has no immediate bearing on his or her practice would be tantamount to turning the analytical function into a sort of priesthood, placing the analyst beyond the plurality of the spoken word, especially the duality of masculine and feminine voices. I know that the fantasy of a universal discourse is indestructible. This is because it upholds what is most derisory in men’s claims to virility. But I think I have shown sufficiently how the temptation of a universal discourse is part and parcel of the work of repression in that it is never anything but an attempt at subsuming all the modes of repression.Let us recall just how much this enterprise turns out to be masculine, since for lack of an immediate connection with castration, which for woman essentially determines her identification as sexual, a man will find sexual identification by breaking with the process of repression that he inevitably leans on for support.The superfluous and pitiful I am a man is always marked by some spectacular violence against the order to which he is a secret accomplice. Just as there is no metalanguage, there is no Esperanto of sex, in other words, no pseudo-analytic discourse capable of going beyond difference. Quite the contrary, what we call analytical discourse promotes another logic from the unconscious. It is fine by taking castration, connection to the phallus, into account, and castration is what determines sexual identity in speaking beings. Analytical discourse leaves to each and everyone, starting with analysts, the task of knowing from whence he speaks. To each figure its own traps,
but to each its own promise of truth:the hope for a voice to be born is always there.
ULTIMA PARTE ESSENCIAL!!!!!!!!!!
“On the other hand, through the repetition of the literal articulation, he seems to reach bliss (jouir) in the effect of production or engendering that is correlative to the stringing together of the literal terms, as if the articulation of this secret name caused him each time to be born (or reborn) from his own head, on his own initiative, into the world of language and into his own subjectivity. In a word, we could say that Philippe, through the use of the secret formula, attempts each time to annex for himself the scene of his own conception and that he thus rediscovers his primal scene as often as he impugns it.
What Philippe is trying fundamentally to impugn so as to feign mastering it is, in fact, the very dimension of the other’s desire, inasmuch as he was no doubt prematurely its object, beneficiary, victim, and remainder. A castoff of paternal desire who finds his only landmark in the maker’s mark of the name of the too-soon-departed Jérémie, an object abandoned to the mother’s devouring desire, Philippe, as designated in his derisive formula, will from now on have no other concern than to defend against the other’s desire, to contest the other as desiring, which is to say to take the other for dead or nonexistent.
For he thinks he knows by experience that if he lets himself recognize the other it would mean falling once again (and perhaps this time without any recourse) into the gulf of lack that makes of him someone who desires, where he would be once again toppled, devoured, suffocatingly fulfilled.
This is the impasse of Philippe’s desire, which the complete analysis of the dream with the unicorn reveals in its phantasmatic ordering.”
The apparent paradox you noticed is real, but it is a Lacanian one, not a mistake in the text. The confusion comes from assuming that all “lack” functions in the same way. Leclaire is very precise about the kind of lack Philippe is dealing with.
In Lacanian theory, symbolic lack, the lack introduced by castration and the Name-of-the-Father, creates space. It allows breathing room, separation, and the circulation of desire. This is the lack that makes desire possible and livable. It separates the subject from the Other’s desire and prevents engulfment.
This is not the kind of lack Philippe experiences. For Philippe, falling into lack means falling back into the position of being the object of the Other’s desire. It means losing separation and being reabsorbed by a devouring maternal desire. In this situation, he is lacking as a subject, but filled as an object. That is why Leclaire can describe this fall into lack as being devoured and suffocatingly fulfilled without contradiction.
When Leclaire writes that Philippe would fall into “the gulf of lack that makes of him someone who desires,” this lack is not a clean symbolic lack. It is a lack without mediation, one in which Philippe becomes what is lacking for the Other. In other words, he does not experience lack as an open space that allows desire to circulate, but as a collapse into jouissance. This is a fullness that is deadly, not liberating.
Desire requires lack plus separation. Jouissance appears when separation collapses. Philippe fears that recognizing the Other as desiring would pull him back into the position of the object that completes the Other, erasing the symbolic gap and producing a suffocating fullness. He would be fulfilled in the sense of being overdetermined by the Other, but suffocated because there is no lack left to breathe.
This is why Leclaire can say that Philippe would be toppled, devoured, and suffocatingly fulfilled at the same time. It is not a contradiction but a precise description of jouissance rather than desire.
For this reason, Philippe’s defensive solution is to deny the Other’s desire altogether, to take the Other as dead or nonexistent. If the Other does not desire, then Philippe cannot be swallowed by that desire. However, the cost of this defense is that true desire becomes impossible. What remains is repetitive jouissance, tied to the letter, the formula, and the phantasm, forming a closed circuit.
This is what Leclaire names the impasse of Philippe’s desire.
Now here’s the crucial point: an obsessional can construct defenses that mimic psychotic solutions without being psychotic.
What Philippe is doing-denying the Other as desiring, taking the Other as dead or nonexistent — is not foreclosure. It’s an obsessional strategy. He is actively defending against the Other’s desire, not structurally unable to symbolize it. That’s why Leclaire uses phrases that sound psychotic-devouring, suffocation, engulfment-but still treats this as a neurotic impasse revealed in the phantasm. The terror Philippe has of being swallowed is real, but the fact that he can stage it in fantasy, articulate it in language, and bind it to a letter-formula tells you the symbolic order is still functioning. In psychosis, you don’t get this kind of phantasmatic staging in the same way. You get intrusion, certainty, and phenomena that don’t require interpretation because they are not symbolic metaphors-they are lived as real. Lacan says more than once that obsession is a way of keeping psychosis at bay. The obsessional’s entire economy can be read as a massive effort to prevent the collapse of separation from the Other. That’s why the maternal dimension looms so large here. An overbearing or engulfing maternal desire does not automatically produce psychosis, but it massively pressures the subject to invent defenses
For Philippe, the idea of a beach still calls up the phobia of sand getting into everything. Days later, he contends, whatever one does, one still finds some sneaky grain of sand that has escaped from the most careful ablutions in fresh water, a grain that all by itself, crunching in silence, grows next to the skin. Thus, there came to the fore one of Philippe’s minor symptoms, a real little phobia regarding badly pleated clothes, the stray crumb in bedsheets, hair that gets into the collar after a haircut, a pebble in the shoe. One sees how, with the evocation of the beach, there arises an overly sensitive little nothing, a grain of the unconscious brushing the surface of the skin and putting the nerves on edge, which can on certain occasions drive Philippe to the edge of the most intense irritation, or even to the borders of anxiety. Philippe loves his feet, thinks them not at all silly, and takes pleasure in their play, he dreamed of making as hard as horn so as to be able to walk without injury on the roughest ground- He fulfilled there in a partial fashion the clearly obsessional phantasm of keeping his body protected beneath the covering of an invulnerable hide.
February 17, 2023
I don’t want to think about this book anymore than I already have
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