Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, Lucie Cantin, Robert Hughes, Kareen Ror Malone After Lacan Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious Suny Series in Psychoanalysis and

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AFTER LACAN



SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and CultureHenry Sussman, series editor



AFTER LACAN

Clinical Practice andthe Subject of the Unconscious

WILLY APOLLON, DANIELLE BERGERONAND LUCIE CANTIN

Edited and Introduced byRobert Hughes and Kareen Ror Malone

STATE UN IVER S ITY O F NEW YO RK PRESS



Published byState University of New York

2002 State University of New York

All rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any mannerwhatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may

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photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permissionin writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press,

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Marketing by Anne M. Valentine

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Apollon,Willy.After Lacan : clinical practice and the subject of the unconscious / by

Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin ; edited andintroduced by Robert Hughes and Kareen Ror Malone.

p. cm.(SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture)Includes index.ISBN 0-7914-5479-7 (alk. paper)ISBN 0-7914-5480-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. PsychoanalysisPractice. 2. Subconsciousness. 3. Lacan, Jacques,

1901 I. Bergeron, Danielle. II. Cantin, Lucie. III. Hughes, Robert.IV. Malone, Kareen Ror, 1955 V. Title.VI. Series.

RC506 .A65 2002616.89'17dc21 2002017613

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1



Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction The Dialectic of Theory and Clinic 1Robert Hughes and Kareen Ror Malone

Chapter 1 The Trauma of Language 35Lucie Cantin

Chapter 2 The Jouissance of the Other and the SexualDivision in Psychoanalysis 49Willy Apollon

Chapter 3 The Signifier 59Danielle Bergeron

Chapter 4 The Work of the Dream and Jouissancein the Treatment of the Psychotic 71Danielle Bergeron

Chapter 5 From Delusion to Dream 87Lucie Cantin

Chapter 6 The Letter of the Body 103

Willy ApollonChapter 7 The Symptom 117

Willy Apollon

Chapter 8 From Symptom to Fantasy 127Willy Apollon

Chapter 9 Perverse Features and the Future of the Drivein Obsessional Neurosis 141Danielle Bergeron



Chapter 10 Perversion and Hysteria 155Lucie Cantin

Chapter 11 The Fate of Jouissancein the Pervert-Hysteric Couple 167Lucie Cantin

Chapter 12 Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima,from the Pen to the Sword 181Danielle Bergeron

List of Contributors 193

Index 195

vi Contents


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List of Figures

5.1 Schema I 90

5.2 Schema II 92

5.3 Schema III 94

Lacans Graphs of Desire

9.1 Graph I 143

9.2 Graph II 144

9.3 Graph III 146

vii


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ix

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the sources of the following material:Lacan, Jacques. crits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan.

Schemas reprinted from pp. 303, 306, and 313.W. W. Norton and Com-pany, 1966 by ditions du Seuil. English translation by Tavistock Publi-cations, 1977. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton and Company,Inc., and Taylor and Francis Books, Ltd.We appreciate copyright per-mission from Zone Books for Deleuze, Gilles.Masochism: Coldness andCruelty. Translated by Jean McNeil, 27879. New York: Zone Books,1989.

The editors acknowledge with gratitude the encouragement of JamesPeltz at State University of New York Press. Also, Robert Hughes wouldlike to give a word of deep appreciation to Henry Sussman for his early

enthusiasm toward the project, to the Graduate School and the Programin Comparative Literature at Emory University for their many generosi-ties, to Jennifer Ballengee for her timely and innumerable assistances,and to Morgen LeFaye, who was always more helpful than she couldever believe. Kareen Malone would like to thank her graduate assistant,Clayton Bohnet, and her patient family. Finally, the editors happily ex-press their gratitude to Willy, Danielle, and Lucie, for the opportunity towork with them and for the grace and intelligence that has always dis-tinguished their relationship with us.



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1

Introduction

The Dialectic of Theory and Clinic

ROBERT HUGHES AND KAREEN ROR MALONE

The Parisian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (19011981) is widely consid-ered to have been the most important and provocative thinker in psycho-analysis since Sigmund Freud. Philosophers, critics, and intellectualsacross the humanities have been energized by Lacans formulations onhuman subjectivityits development, its structure, its interaction in theworld. His theories have inspired many dozens of books and hundreds of

scholarly articles in English alone. In the main, these writings addressthemselves to Lacans conceptual edifice and to what his conceptualiza-tions have to offer to an understanding of culture, art, and philosophy.Thus, in North America, the impression among clinicians is that Lacan isall theory.Yet Lacan himself insisted that the greatest importance of hiswork lay in its contribution to the psychoanalytic clinicwhich was, hesaid, the origin and the aim of all his teaching. Lacans self-assessment isconfirmed by the openness to Lacanian thought within clinical circles ofother nations, belying the notion that Lacan is only accessible as an acad-emic exercise (see Hill 1997). In fact arguably, the academic appropriationof Lacan can function as an obstacle to understanding key Lacanian con-cepts.The editors propose that it is a pernicious misconception that Lacanis exclusively for literary critics and cultural theoriststhat Lacan, in otherwords, is about theory. Here is a recent example of this bias, one di-rected to the treatment of psychotics.

In spite of these criticisms of Lacans notion of psychosis, his theo-retical construction has something to offer as a way of conceptualiz-ing intrapsychic and interpersonal phenomena. It is perhaps all we



can ask of a theoretician that he prod our thinking in new directions.(Martel 1990, 251, emphasis added)

Such a statement, appearing in theAmerican Journal of Psychoanalysis,represents a highly misleading view of Lacan and his importance. Infact, Lacans work was always addressed to some degree to clinical phe-nomena and to the development of clinical practice. It is a corollary mis-conception that Lacanian work could only be successful with highlyfunctioning, intellectual analysands.The work done with psychotics bythe authors of the present collection as well as the general range of theirpatients are clear indications of the falsity of this reigning North Ameri-can perception. Certainly differences in the theoretical understanding ofclinical work in Lacanian circles as well as the differences in technique(variable sessions being iconic in this regard) have made some NorthAmerican practitioners wary. The warm reception by academics rein-forces other suspicions.The present collection, then, aims to develop, forclinicians and for interested readers in the humanities, a sense for theclinical context where Lacans formulations find their greatest force andtheir ultimate justification. Indeed this book forcefully conveys that anignorance of Lacanian clinical innovations is maintained at considerablecost to clinical advances and to the expansion of the scope and theory ofpsychoanalysis.1

The authors of the essays collected here, Willy Apollon, DanielleBergeron, and Lucie Cantin, together lead the cole freudienne duQubec and the GIFRIC group (Groupe interdisciplinaire freudien derecherches et dinterventions cliniques et culturelles; hereinafter cited asGifric). Gifric was founded in 1977 as a nonprofit organization with amission aiming at clinical and sociocultural research and interventions.In pursuit of this mission, Gifric has, like numerous other associationsand individuals, coordinated the training of North American analysts inLacanian approaches.2 On the Lacanian scene in North America, Apol-lon, Bergeron, and Cantin have distinguished themselves as among the

most clinically informed of theoreticians and the most theoretically as-tute and ambitious of clinicians. But their truly unique place derivesfrom the groundbreaking work at the 388, a clinic they run in Qubecfor the psychoanalytic treatment of young psychotic adults (schizophre-nia and manic-depressive psychosis).The highly successful clinical prac-tice of Gifric at the 388 has been inseparable from the Lacanianintellectual orientation and research represented in this collection.Whatever the theoretical divergences among the many analysts influ-enced by Lacans work, the present collection can be said to stand to-gether with a larger publishing effort underway, by the State University

2 After Lacan



of New York Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture, by the Other Pressunder Judith Feher Gurewich, and reflected in recent books by BruceFink and Dany Nobus. All these address the misperception of Lacan as

an ivory-towered theoretician.The title of the collection,After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject

of the Unconscious, suggests something more of the special contributionof these essays.With the publication of Bruce Finks excellent books, TheLacanian SubjectandA Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis,the English-speaking reader already has access to general, introductoryelaborations of Lacanian theory that are written with clarity and rigor aswell as from a clinical viewpoint. Finks admirable efforts have been sup-plemented by authors from the United Kingdom, such as Dany Nobusand Philip Hill, who are similarly focused on the clinical side of Lacan.Unlike the celebrated books of Slavoj Z

+

iz+

ek, Joan Copjec, Juliet Mac-Cannell, Ellie Ragland, Charles Shepherdson, and other philosophersand literary critics among the New Lacanians, Fink and Nobus addresstheir books not to the philosophical stakes and cultural manifestations ofLacanian theoretical structures, but rather to the specifically clinicalori-gin and theorization of Lacans theory as it evolved through the 1950s,1960s, and 1970s. But the books of all these writers, including those ofFink and Nobus, have nevertheless called for, explicitly or implicitly, aneven more concrete sense of the Lacanian clinic, particularly how vari-

ous Lacanian conceptshowever clearly or subtly explicatedbearupon contemporary clinical practice and upon the suffering addressedby psychoanalytic practice.

After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious aims to-wards addressing this need. The present book is not intended as a sys-tematic exposition of Lacanian theory. It is, however, a remarkablyunified and carefully planned collection of essays that succeeds in pow-erfully communicating some of the real discoveries of Lacans clinicalteaching. Certainly, too, the reader is likely to leave enriched from thecollections presentation of various theoretical concepts. For instance,

the writers present a concept like jouissance or the signifier or the symp-tom, now in relation to the Other, now in relation to dream, and nowagain in relation to fantasy. Each theoretical glimpse emerges from theexperience of the clinic and presents new and provocative vistas on con-cepts that have grown familiar in an unnatural theoretical isolation.Without doubt, the really special contribution of these essays lies in theremarkable way the authors pair a sophisticated theoretical expositionwith a concrete sense of the Lacanian clinic.

Certainly its true that the relation of clinic and theory is always, tosome degree, an uneasy one.The most basic difficulty in theorizing from

Introduction 3



the clinic lies in the fundamental insufficiency of anygeneralizable theoryto the experience of the clinic and its irreducibly singularsavoir.That is,theory and clinic aim at two very different varieties of knowledge, a dif-

ference that Lacan explicitly speaks to in his formalization of the differ-ence between university and analytic discourses.Theory aims at rationalclarity, at a fixed and systematic elaboration with recognizable explana-tory and predictive power, as well as some degree of general applicabil-ity (however strictly or loosely defined). Any given theory will surely fallshort in one or all of these aspirations, but these are surely the ambitionsof any theory worth the namethe qualities by which theory comes torecognize itself as theory.Through theory, we hope to understandsome-thing, in the ordinary sense, that we didnt understand before. As count-less commentators have come to appreciate, Freud and Lacan were eachsuperb theoreticians in this sense, and Western culture is much thericher for their efforts and their genius, as it is for the contributions ofCopernicus, Mendel, Darwin, and others.

However, as is implicit in the essays of the present collection, Freudand Lacan also aimed at some other variety of knowledge, both in theirclinical practice and in their pedagogy.This other variety of knowledgeconstitutes a savoir utterly particular to the subject and irreducible tothe level of information. Lacan made it quite clear that interpretation isnever quite a matter of understanding and that what interpretation aims

to open or stagea possible hit on the realbears more on the sub-jects relationship to what one cannotknow.Thus, interpretation resem-bles little the goal of understanding as making sense through the stringingtogether of signifiers.Whereas understandingis a reality we can master andbelieve in, saviorsupplies an access to subjective responsibility in the faceof the Others castration. Chapter 8, in which Willy Apollon writes ofMarguerite, a woman who arrives in analysis with a complaint of frigid-ity, is especially suggestive of what is at stake in this savoir of the clinic.

The Lacanian clinic favors an ethics where savoir is substituted for

the quest for a jouissance that the treatment experience reveals aslapsed and thus impossible.The knowledge at stake at the end of theprocess concerns the cause of the lapsing.The savoir that concludesthe experience is unlike the knowledge that the analysand in trans-ference supposed the analyst knew at the outset of the experience.The analyst refers the analysand to an ethics where desire feeds onthe failing of jouissance, and where the analysand takes that causeand the risks of desire as the only determinative realities for onesstory, and as a source from which the analysand will draw principlesof action, as the necessary support to assume ones sex and onesrelation to jouissance.

4 After Lacan



Significantly here, it is the treatment experience that communicates thesavoir of the clinic, not the semantic content of any word that the analystcould offer or that the analysand could report. It was indeed the special

quality of Lacans pedagogy to communicate to the auditors of his semi-nars something of this savoir of the clinic. Many of the eccentricities visi-ble in his published seminarstheir departure from the systematictheoreticalstructure that Kant and (in a still more totalizing way) Hegelaimed atrecord Lacans efforts to maneuver his auditors into some anal-ogously productive savoirin relation to the particularities of the auditorssubjective relation to jouissance, a savoir necessary to assuming the risksof ones desire and therefore at the heart of a Lacanian ethics.Hence,whatsome have called the poetic quality of Lacans own discourse, a qualitythat suggests to the reader some meaning being staged elsewhereon another scene one might say, and a quality of expression that has engenderedmuch fascination among intellectuals in the humanities.

And yet, in working from a savoir particular to Marguerites experi-ence, what is the theoretically minded clinician to do? Not write? Nottheorize? Not exactly. One would be ill-advised, as do some NorthAmerican psychodynamic therapists, to take the concrete exchanges ofthe clinic as able to provide the frame of the analysis. Rather the taskseems to entail an articulation and formalization of that peculiar exper-iment that one calls psychoanalysis, an experiment aimed at provok-

ing those signifiers, symptoms, transference, and fantasies that allow ananalyst the leverage to serve the production of a knowledge that opensthe path of desire.

In response to these demands, the authors strive in the essays here tocommunicate some of the power of the Freudian discovery by staging atwofold event in their writings. On the one hand, they must aim for arigor and a clarity that respects the theoretical stakes of the clinic andrenders these stakes understandable for the reader who has investedtime and effort in the present book under the supposition and expecta-tion that there is something to be learned here, something practical,

something on the level of information. The reader will not be disap-pointed in this regard.The present collection, working as it does from analmost unique clinical concreteness, abounds with illuminating insightsinto basic psychoanalytic structures such as perversion, hysteria, andpsychosis. Consequently, even the more advanced reader of Lacan islikely to arrive at new understandings of the relations of jouissance, theletter of the body, symptom, fantasy, and other concepts. At the sametime, however, the present collection also strives to convey something ofthe analytic experience, with powerful and fascinating movements ofseduction, enigma, and insight.

Introduction 5



A second, related difficulty in theorizing the Lacanian clinic re-mains ultimately intractable, and must be a necessary limitation of anywriting on the clinic. Namely, if one thinks of the clinical experience as

the confrontation of subjective experience by the real, one must alsorecognize that the real is irreducible and impossible; it is an impasse inthe structure of subjectivity such that even formalizations can not inthemselves reduce it.The real, which lies at the heart of the clinical en-counter, cannot therefore, be rationalized, as a text of theory demands,and fixed, as a published text necessarily produces. This is one reasonwhy the clinic can never stage the application of Lacanian texts persenot those texts by Gifric, and not those by Lacan himself. This isnot to confine the importance of Freud to early twentieth-century Vi-enna, of Lacan to mid-twentieth-century Paris, or, for that matter, ofGifric to early-twenty-first-century North America. But it is to recog-nize that any theory of the clinic cannot exhaust what it aims to expli-cate. Theory, though it may be constrained to fix itself in writing, canonly ever be a theory-in-progress. This was certainly true for Freudand Lacan, whose writings through the decades witness many sub-stantive changes; it is also true of the texts here by Gifric, which mostlydate from the early 1990s. So whileAfter Lacan: Clinical Practice andthe Subject of the Unconscious is, without doubt, about a clinical efficacyfrom a praxis initiated by Lacan, issuing from the field opened by

Lacan in his return to Freudand is afterLacan in the sense of deriv-ing from his teaching, it is also marked by the fact of coming preciselyafterLacan in a temporal or historical sense as well. Under the convic-tion that the savoir of the clinic remains the core event of Lacans re-turn to Freud, and recognizing both that clinical practice must bedictated by the terms brought by patients and that shifts in patient cul-ture demand corresponding shifts in theoretical emphases, Gifric, de-spite their deep debt to Lacan, diverge from Lacan and certain othercontemporary readings of Lacans work.

Some Questions in the Lacanian Field and the Work of Gifric

Lacans return to Freud is a tribute to his recognition that Freudsfounding of psychoanalysis reflects the articulation of a specific field ofeffects. This specific field might be called the subject of the uncon-scious and Lacan remained devoted to a theoretical exposition of thissubject and to the development of a clinical praxis addressed to it.Whether contextualized in terms of a tension between the imaginaryand symbolic axes of intersubjectivity (as in early Lacan), or else asstructured by language, the discourse of the Other, or a response of the

6 After Lacan



real, Lacan attempts to further what he sees as Freuds discovery of thispeculiar phenomenon called the unconscious.

Hence, those with a Lacanian orientation often use ideas from both

Freud and Lacan.Yet it must be said that the Lacanian sense of Freud isoften much different than the one developed through the North Ameri-can psychoanalytic context. This difference has been noted by JudithGurewich (Clinical Series 1997) and is quickly evident in any reading ofcontemporary Lacanian work. From diagnosis to the metapsychologicalpapers, Lacanians seek out Freuds logic as a distinct logic of the uncon-scious irreducible to biology, to any phenomenology, to any reality or nar-rative, or to environmental effects. Thus, many Lacanians see manycontemporary psychoanalytic movements ostensibly beyond Freud ashaving underestimated an essential articulation within Freud and thusaimed toward a different psychological domain. Lacan stressed thisthroughout his writings.This is not to say that Lacanians do not move be-yond Freud, but rather that there is always a dual reference in Lacanianwork: to Lacan, it is true, but always also to Freud.The present volume isno exception.This dual reading sometimes generates a certain tension asto how much one stays grounded in Freuds particular articulation, howone reads through it, and where one moves in other directions. One cansee this in Lacans own work. For example, in Seminar XVII, Lacanworks the issue of castration in terms of the structure of discourse and re-

examines the ways in which Freud understands the Oedipal complex.Similar tensions are visible throughout the Lacanian field.For example, Paul Verhaeghe draws a distinction between Freuds un-

derstanding of the father and the Lacanian view of the paternal metaphorin terms of how each conception will play out in contemporary culture.Even though it is clear that Lacan takes Freuds ideas and transformsthem into structures, it remains an open question as to the degree towhich the logic of those structures transform their original Freudian pointof reference.Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantins papers in this collection areless likely to emphasize the distinction between the Freudian configura-

tion of the Oedipal and the Lacanian one, even as they clearly embrace astructural and linguistic understanding of its effects in relation to castra-tion, authority, and prohibition. But there are, of course, numerous waysto think through the Oedipal. Lacan often spoke of the importance ofunderstanding Oedipus at Colonus, the relationship of Oedipus to the (rid-dle of the) Sphinx, his function in the paternal lineage, as well as his statusas a sort of remainder/object (see Laurent 1996; Zupanc+ ic+ 2000; andLacans Seminar XVII1991). Broadening the usual North American read-ing of the Oedipus (wherein the father interrupts the mother-childdyad), suggests a number of ways to reconfigure the relationship between

Introduction 7



jouissance, the signifier, and the object. For example, considering theOedipal in terms of the vagabond wanderings of Oedipus at Colonus,shifts the focus from transgression to Oedipus himself. Lacanians might

call this the remainder, the object that falls out of the Other.In the structural reading of the Oedipal complex, one relates the

Freudian terms to the relation of the subject to the law of language, his orher place within the symbolic, and its limits on the jouissance of the(m)Other.The absence of a signifier (which would be instated by the pa-ternal metaphor) preconditions a failure in the phallic signifier that servesto establish sexual identity, orient desire to another, and, in the uncon-scious, mark the effects of loss and the jouissance thereby determining thesubject.The phallus, as signifier, ties this desire to the signifying chain, of-fering a conjunction between the effects of jouissance and the possibilitiesof desire. In On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psy-chosis, Lacan closely ties the imaginary phallus to the symbolic phallus.In Seminar XX, Lacan refers to the phallus as a contingency, even as itserves as a ballast against the intrusion of the Others jouissance and is es-sential to the formulas of sexuation. Although some, such as Tim Dean,have been led to question the significance of the phallus conceptually andturn more to the object a, there is still a critical phallic function in termsof the question of sexuation, identity, and its effects in founding desire (itsoperation as a conjunction marking loss).One wonders whether a position

that articulates only the object a is likely to default to a phallic positionwherein the function of woman as Other returns in another form or iseven more radically eclipsed. Clearly, these issues are relevant to the treat-ment of psychosis and neurosis, and such issues, perhaps less figural inthese particular chapters by Gifric, are under serious consideration byApollon, Bergeron, and Cantin in their clinical praxis and in relationshipto evolving social structures. Still, for these authors, the most intensive en-gagement with Lacanian and Freudian ideas emerges from their workwith psychotics.

Some argue, as has Jacques-Alain Miller (Paradigms 2000), that

Lacans ideas on the function of the signifier shift with implications forthe relationship between neurosis and psychosis, and the status of thename of the father (see also Grigg 1999). Gifric, as well, has revisitedsubjective structures and their treatment from the perspective of psy-chosis. Remarkably, within the clinic of the psychotic, the authors haveattempted to elicit both a signifier and transference.Thus, they nowconceptualize aspects of their work with psychosis outside of the frameof strategies originally developed in relation to the name of the father.However, it is also true that such contemporary readings remain underconstruction.

8 After Lacan



A recent text by Dany Nobus discusses the Lacanian effort to clarifyhow one treats psychosis. Nobus suggests that the path is not fullymarked by Lacan. Lacans most fully elaborated ideas on psychosis ap-

pear early (notably in Seminar III), and these initial formulations sug-gest a stabilization through working along the imaginary axis, using it tosupplement the symbolic failure (see Fink 1997, who notes this descrip-tion is a simplification). As this strategy risks invoking destructive imag-inary rivalries and erotic preoccupations, one also establishes keysignifiers that may function to stave off the jouissance of the Other. Herewe have a sort of faux symbolic, maintained by the desire of the ana-lyst and his or her ethical adherence to the rule of the symbolic in amanner even more strict than in the case of neurosis.

In contemporary Lacanian thinking, clinicians have continued to ex-plore the leverage of the signifierthe basis of the talking cureintransforming the suffering of the psychotic. It is suggested by RolandBroca that one might use the triggering of the psychosis and the devel-opment of the delusion within the transference to allow the psychoticpatient a different relationship to the jouissance of the Other. Here againthe analyst must hold fast to his desire (1991, 53) to create a differentrelationship to the invasive signifiers of the Other. Understanding trans-ference as based in the signifier and predicated within a knowledge,Gifric both uses and challenges the parameters of Lacanian ideas of

transference (which is a matter of the analysts position) in order to moreradically engage the subjective structure of the psychotic. Does the psy-choanalytic use of dreams allow the analyst an opportunity to introducea new subjective position that depends on the function of the signifier?The authors here pose this very interesting, pressing question.

Lacans theory of psychoanalysis, most especially as a clinicallygrounded exposition, is a precise tool for understanding the process ofpsychoanalysis and its object of research. But such an understandingdoes not come easily; it is still a work in progress. For many NorthAmericans, this continuous interrogation within Lacanian thought adds

to a confusion already fueled by differences in vocabulary and approach.It is easy to treat a theory that is foreign as both opaque and monolithic,but although Lacanian thought is difficult and is different, it is neitheropaque nor monolithic, and it is far from being a settled, finished dis-course ready for full appropriation. Rather Lacanian thought introducesa discipline, a certain set of inquiries, a way of understanding the stakesof the psychoanalytic process that are unique and viable for theory and,as these chapters indicate, for the clinic. Those who are aligned withLacan bring a certain set of presuppositions to their work and these pre-suppositions run through many strains of Lacanian thinking.

Introduction 9



The body is conceptualized uniquely in Lacanian thought, where it ismost certainly socially constructed (see Colette Soler 1995).There is in-deed a bio-logic of the body, but there is also another logic, introduced

by the signifier, that installs a radical break between the biological bodyand theparle-tre, thus rendering the subject as a lack in beingand atone level split, unknown to him or herself. Psychoanalysis must concep-tualize this subject through the relationship between jouissance and theOther as the locus of the signifier.

Jouissance even as it is translated as enjoyment, entails an under-standing of what Lacan called the death drive. It is surely fair to saythat Lacanians are more preoccupied with this aspect of psychic struc-ture than are many other schools in the United States, which would in-stead have repetition appear primarily as a pathological effect. Thestructure of jouissanceits effects through fantasy, symptom, transfer-ence, and the signifierframe the economic question in psychoanaly-sis, the positioning through which the body is given over to being. ForLacanians, the formulations of jouissance are considered a bit more pre-cise than the vocabulary of affect, which is seen as too unreliable, toophenomenologically based, to serve as an orientation for the position ofthe analyst.

As well as re-defining the economic side of psychoanalysis, a Lacan-ian approach re-formulates the narrative side of psychoanalysis. Here,

interpretation neither refers to an object, the unconscious, nor does itplay off reality. Rather, the unconscious and interpretation functionalong the same plane; they are, so to speak, co-constituted within the an-alytic process. One can see this dimension of the analytic process insofaras the analysis focuses on the symbolic register.

In the view of many Lacanians, other current schools of psychoanaly-sis are taken in by the imaginary axis of functioning.This axis, whichmay be conceived as the axis of identification, the analyst as self-object,or even as the terms of intersubjectivity, is certainly one part of the ana-lytic (or any other) relationship. Its overemphasis, however, brokers the

possibility of veering the analytic process toward normalization or mightotherwise stall the psychoanalytic process. Thus, Lacanian informedwork reconceives the meaning of analytic neutrality, not as a matter ofanalyst observer but as strategies for moving away from little other dy-namics towards an encounter with the subject of the unconscious.Thisaspect of Lacanian practice could find as its precedent Freuds Recom-mendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis.

Such differences from the more usual North American practices withinpsychoanalysis account for the specialized lexicon that marks all Lacan-ian accounts. Surely there is important work to be done in taking up the

10 After Lacan



points of engagement where Lacanian approaches address the same clini-cal difficulties as are pinpointed by other schools, and thus more carefullyaddressing Lacanian differences in initial assumptions at points where di-

alogue is most possible and productive.However, it is not the task of thesechapters to look to those points of convergence and divergence in relationto contemporary North American psychoanalysis or even within the La-canian tradition. Rather, their interest is to bring the reader into the psy-choanalytic clinical praxis and the questions that it evokes.

In The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,Lacan calls for a critical fidelity to an authentic praxis. Many ofLacans notorious theoretical swerves refer to clinical issues that requirea better conceptualization of the symptom, a more attuned response tothe stakes of the transference; they utilize diagnosis in the most mean-ingful way, and articulate the place of fantasy, repetition, and the limitsof interpretation. Gifric has taken its Lacanian roots and planted themin the soil of an ongoing practice with psychotics. It is from this site thatone sees Gifrics theoretical formulations take their shape.

Academic Interest in the Lacanian Clinic

Scholars in the humanities have, of course, found in Lacans writingsan incredibly fertile source of inspiration as they work with problems in

art and literature, ethics and philosophy, epistemology and cognition.However, it has become clear, in the decades since Lacanian theory firstentered academic discourse, that a widespread misapprehension of theclinical aspects of Lacans theoretical elaborations has led to a certainlack of grounding in increasingly abstract theoretical debates. One finds,for example, that certain debates over the phallus disappear when thephallus is situated, not as an abstraction amid debates in literary or po-litical theory, but rather as a concrete function in the clinic.

Indeed any number of debates still swirl around the phallus and thequestion of authority that it implicitly or explicitly poses.The present

volume certainly will not quell such debates and could not possibly set-tle all of the issues that arise in relation to the phallus and the place ofthe Oedipal. Such questions must be seen as part of a clinical and theo-retical perspective that is continually in development, both inside theLacanian field and among others in psychoanalysis. However, the clini-cal narratives of this text (and the function of the phallus in the concretelives and structures of desire therein) argue forcefully against any posi-tion that might too facilely dismiss or deny the function of the phallus inthe lives of men and women, as if it were purely a political function orbased only in competitive masculine narcissism.

Introduction 11



If we culturallyand by implication theoreticallyretain sexual dif-ference through a relation to the Other sex, we must understand itsstructural intermixing with the locus of the Other and with the genesis

of desire in the Other. Insofar as that genesis in its particularity is writ-ten in the unconscious, we are well advised not to be satisfied withacademic discourse alone, but to turn as well to the clinical practicesthat are founded on the unconscious. Perhaps only clinical practice canadequately dramatize the starkly different logic that governs the uncon-scious, where the signifier is marked by its lack of sense and is ratherheld by its reference to jouissance. Here, the appearance of the uncon-scious in free association and its deduction from fantasy do not followthe same logic as any standards of intelligibility. As well, clinical practicesituates this drama amid a very different structure of address, since theanalysand is not speaking about himself or herself but about an Other.

Political promise has likewise troubled the relationship between La-canian psychoanalysis and certain strains of feminism. At least sinceFoucaults reconsideration of subjectivity and subjection, feminists haverecognized the necessity of articulating a relation between subjectivityand the political, but too often they have been hampered by a lack ofclinical insight and as a consequence have succumbed to the political ex-pedience that would collapse fundamental elements of subjectivity intoego idealswhere, for example, the mother becomes all good things.

Clinical experience, as this collection shows, would suggest that the fem-inist ideological move away from Freuds perceived phallocentrismneeds to be executed with greater precision and with greater respect forsomething crucial in the relation between the paternal function and theformation of the subject.

Especially germane to the interest of the present collection in the psy-choanalytic treatment of psychosis, one finds that certain readers in thewake of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari have suggested that there is asort of liberatory potential represented by the psychotic, whom the La-canian clinic shows to be outside of paternal law. Deleuze and Guattari,

of course, wish to counter normative psychotherapy and to rethink therelation between subjectivity and the political. However, emancipatoryclaims for schizoanalysis must appear romantic when one sees the an-guish that characterizes the psychotics in the present collection. It ap-pears much more the case that in the absence of Oedipal triangulationunder the father, the uninhibited flow of the Others jouissance enslavesthe psychotic and (at the very least) threatens to do the same to the per-vert. This is not to say that the neurotic isnt equally enslaved. In factGifric, like many anti-psychiatrists, would recognize in the psychotic aparticular savoirone that is as true as it is unbearable to acknowledge.

12 After Lacan



The issue is freeing the psychotic to face that savoir of the absent Other,rather than to occlude it with the mission (as Gifric calls it) whichaims at a flawless universe.

WhileAfter Lacan encourages the reader to carefully evaluate the sig-nificance of the paternal, it also speaks specifically to how the signifier or-ganizes the logic of the body and of the images that organize corporeality.Through concrete symptoms, fantasies, and dreams, the authors showhow the signifier operates in these seemingly nonsymbolic domains. Onecan see how this addresses certain problems in current discourses ofmedia analysis and trauma-theory.To focus on the imaginary body to theexclusion of the symbolic, threatens to overlook precisely what is most in-teresting about trauma-theory and about our relation to the screenimagenamely, that trauma above all stages a crisis in the symbolic andthat the screen image speaks to us in very specific ways that are governedby the signifier and the symbolic. By grounding consideration of the bodyin the analytic clinic and in the very thorough discussion of the bodilysymptom in this collection, the specifics of the way the body is overwrit-ten by the signifier and the importance of the signifier as the means of theanalytic process are restored to their proper importance.

Finally, although the work of Slavoj Z+

iz+ek, and others have introducedthe notion of the real into cultural studies, no amount of categorical de-scription or illustration can fully convey the laborious work with signi-

fiers, the timing of the symptom, or the construction of the fantasy thatframes the encounter with the real within the clinic. Its momentary frag-mentary appearance, etched in anguish, insists within the temporality ofthe subject and resists any purely philosophical depiction. Thus, in away, clinical praxis itself forces certain forms of theorizationa dialecticthat we see evident in the work of Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin.

Clinical Interest in Lacanian Theory

The ideal of any school of psychoanalysis, at least, has been to interar-

ticulate ones clinical choices with a certain theoretical integrity (see alsoLondon Part I 1988, 59).This ideal is characteristic of Lacanian work aswell. So, although it is oriented to psychoanalytic praxis, this collection ofpapers from Gifric is not simply a clinical demonstration of psychoana-lytic practice. Nor should the reader expect a clinical introduction toLacan (for those one may usefully consult Bruce Fink, Jol Dor, or DanyNobus), a guide to the evolution of Lacans thought (see Miller Intro-duction 1996; and Julien 1994), or a comparison of concepts and tech-niques in Lacanian versus other psychoanalytic approaches (seeGurewich 1998; Muller 1996). Rather, both the theoretical and clinical

Introduction 13



bounties of the collection are best understood as a rigorous applicationand development of Freuds and Lacans work in a strict dialogue withclinical practice.The fact that many of the chapters originated in presen-

tations to general audiences, gives us hope that non-Lacanian clinicianswill more readily understand how these concepts function within an an-alytic context.

While it is not advisable for one to be simply theory-driven in onestherapeutic practice (an accusation often leveled not just at Lacanian psy-choanalysis, but also at psychoanalysis in general), one cannot merely col-lect techniques based on current or unarticulated ideas of human nature.Such a strategy is all too characteristic of contemporary psychotherapeu-tic and even some psychodynamic approaches.With theoretical apathy,therapeutic practice becomes vulnerable to a certain ideological overwrit-ing. One evokes notions of projection or of self-object, in a manner thatdepends on meanings of these terms that draw from consciousness asmuch as they draw from the encounter with subject of the unconscious.Failing to attend to the specificity of the subject as discovered by psy-choanalysis means that its notions become sustained by common senserather the rigor of its own practice.This ideological problematiccoveredover by technical preoccupationshaunts North American therapeuticpractices and has received increasing critical scrutiny from psychologists,historians, social theorists, and even therapists (see Cushman 1990; Hare-

Mustin 1997; Jacoby 1986). Concern with unintentional ideologicaleffectsnormative biashas always been critical to Lacanian thinkingand motivates Lacans repeated efforts to formalize the specificity of theunconscious in its relation to the Other. Lacanians know that they are notdealing with simply asocial properties possessed by a given individual con-sciousness (a view Lacan called psychologizing in his crits). Rather, is-sues that arise in clinical practice are better understood as reflective of thehuman stakes in the social link (chap. 1). At the same time, neither doesthe Lacanian sensitivity to the centrality of the social link as constitutive ofhuman subjectivity devolve into a politicization of psychoanalytic

processes, nor does it translate the clinical encounter with the unconsciousinto a (democratic) interpersonal event. The imposition of the inter-subjective and the social does not, for Lacanians, default to a modelwherein healthy parts of analysts and analysands communicate and con-struct coherent narratives. Referring to the Lacanian affiliation withFreuds so-called classical psychoanalysis, Jacques-Alain Miller writes,Nor is classical psychoanalysis the blend of ego psychology and object re-lations theory attempted by contemporary American psychoanalysts, thattakes into account the semantic relationship to others while retaining thestructural framework of ego psychology (1996, 307).

14 After Lacan



The process by which one becomes a human subject does not, in theLacanian view, reflect the maturation of adaptive capacities that ulti-mately refer to instinctual forces, conflictual or not. Rather, the subject

for Lacan and for Lacanians, is genuinely a subject of the unconscious.In part, this means that Lacan regards the unconscious as the effects ofthe spoken word on the subjecta dimension where the subject deter-mines himself or herself. Thus, it is necessary that the analyst trust[s]nothing but the experience of the subject, which is the sole matter ofpsychoanalytic work (Lacan cited in Nasio 1998, 133).The subject, wesee, is not just a fancy word for theperson; the terms are utterly distinct,and the ethics of the clinic require that the subject not be engaged as ifit were the person. This impersonal quality to the subject of theLacanian clinic is sometimes viewed as harsh by North American clin-icians. But, for Lacanians, theorizing psychoanalysis through the Imagi-nary (e.g. imprinted interpersonal relations and schemas) is notinconsequential for the ultimate transformative effects of psychoanalysiseither. As well, maintaining an ethics oriented to the subject of the un-conscious does not preclude work with more fragile individuals who inbeing respected as subjects are more likely to respond as such.The workat 388 is a tribute to this fact.

Hence, it is the subjectthat we must theorize, not the phenomenologyof symptoms (chap. 9), and it is precisely the subject of the unconscious

that we must work with clinically. From this perspective, the Lacaniansubject is perhaps even more completely deconstructed than the mul-tiple selves currently being conceived as part of narrative and postmod-ernist trends in relational psychoanalytic approaches.

The success of Gifric with psychotic young adults is exemplary ofhow a Lacanian orientation can frame ones practice within a clinicalsetting. Although the 388 is not an intensive inpatient facility such asNorth Americans might think of with respect to Chestnut Lodge, it is aresidential and nonresidential treatment center that is anchored in psy-choanalytic theory and individual psychoanalysis with psychotics.The

analysts of Gifric, much like the many therapists that followed Fromm-Reichman, Sullivan, Boyer, or Searles in the United States or Bion andKlein in Great Britain have creatively extended not only the horizons ofpsychoanalysis in their treatment of psychoses, but also what are nowcalled severely borderline states. Here there is no supposition that psy-chosis is a biological entity (chap. 12).

As noted by Otto F. Kernberg, the psychoanalytic treatment of psy-chotic conditions is currently enjoying something of a renaissance inNorth America. In part this reflects the dissemination of recent work bypsychoanalytic pioneers in the treatment of psychosis.These approaches,

Introduction 15



whether or not they see a continuum between neurotic and psychotic dif-ficulties (London Part I 1988,522), have dispelled the presumption thatpsychoanalysis is only effective in relationship to the transference neuro-

sis (Rosenfeld 1998). At the same time, the ameliorative limits of psy-chopharmacological approaches are becoming more apparent, and thelimited efficacy of simply supportive therapies is likewise becoming clear.Moreover, the increasing presence of what many call borderline pa-tients further signals the importance of continued psychoanalytic con-sideration of psychosis. Lacanians do not consider borderlines a distinctcategory (see Fink 1997) but many psychoanalysts in North America seesuch patients as constituting a separate diagnostic entity.This category ischaracterized by more primitive object relations and by presenting adifferent set of transferential challenges. Clearly, a better understudyingof innovative approaches to psychosis, such as described here inAfterLacan, ought to shed light on the enigmatic category of the borderline.

Irrespective of the type of analysand, the clinical papers of Apollon,Bergeron, and Cantin demonstrate the clear interrelation between theoverall understanding of subjective structures, the type of work under-taken in the clinic, and the way human suffering is alleviated and trans-formed. Even with psychotic patients, a Lacanian approach does notattempt to establish a therapeutic alliance.Thus, one would not invokethe ideal of a healthy person or real self. Nor would these authors divide

the analysand into psychotic and non-psychoticpersonalities. For Gifric,psychosis, like neurosis and perversion, defines a form of subjective struc-ture, an unconscious relationship to the structure of signification and thelogic of the signifier as forged in the concrete vicissitudes of our relationswith others (chaps. 1, and 3). Ideas such as healthy self may or maynot intersect with certain Lacanian notionsit may approximate, for ex-ample, a certain subjective position in relationship to the signifyingstructure. But the Lacanian perspective approaches the questions of psy-choanalysis from the place of a dividedsubject, not a subject that is frag-mented into different agencies, with its best agency modeled on a

notion of the self. In other words, the clinical process is conceived out-side of the terms supplied by the ego (chap. 7). It is conceived strictly inthe terms of the unconscious.

Given this shift, the role of the analyst is not oriented to providingemotional support based on a certain sort of maternal presence thatwould restore an analysand to a place wherein his or her ego can benefitfrom interpretation. Rather, issues that are defined by the concepts ofdemand, desire, the dream, and the signifier carve out a new clinical ter-rain. Although there is a de-emphasis on emotion, this is not a matter ofthe imputed classical view of an observing psychoanalyst qua scientist

16 After Lacan



who looks at the unconscious of another and then interprets it.Theauthors do not think the unconscious is inside somebody. Nor is theunconscious something that is examined by another as might follow

from the medical model. The unconscious is a clinical event: it re-quires the psychoanalytic dyad but is irreducible to it; it requires athirdthe locus of the Other. Put differently, the unconscious and in-terpretation are of the same fabric.

The Lacanian approach seen in the work of Apollon, Bergeron, andCantin is a carefully conceived mode of therapeutic functioning that isfounded in the position of the speaking subject. Psychoanalysis operatesin relation to the conditions that structure the coming into being of thesubject and trace the impasses that are marked in a particular subjectsrepetitions and symptoms. Clearly, Lacanian clinicians are aware thatthey are the vehicles through which interpretation is effected.They mustserve to structure the transference and the patients encounter with thesavoir of the unconscious (chap. 6). However, Gifric conceives of theseclinical activities and of the patients progress outside ideas of counter-transference, emotional support, or the analysts self-disclosure (seeMcWilliams 1994; Searles 1988; Boyer 1989). Countertransference, likeintersubjectivity assumes two monads interacting even as such views at-tempt to dialecticize such a relation. The early Lacan entertained thisidea of intersubjectivity, but later determined that this model could not

calibrate the presence of the Other. This is especially important giventhat, in North America, such relational concerns are commonly con-sidered the pivot of success with more disturbed patients. Certainly, thedifference in praxis here and the theory that sustains it deserves thesame significant dialogues that are accorded the differences betweenmore typically British object-relations perspectives and more process-relational North American stances (see Williams 1998).

The essays in this collection show how treatment at the 388 aims torestore a sphere of subjective psychic activities to patients that will en-able them to reintegrate into social life and recapture sufficient control

of their personal and social lives that they can take a certain satisfactionfrom coexistence.The treatment aims to stabilize the delusion and tocontrol the disorganizing effects of the psychosis. It does so in part bybringing the psychotic to take responsibility for the comprehension ofthat which causes his or her activities.The patient, then, is not regardedas an object of care, but rather treated as a subject of speech.The ana-lytic listening to the experiences of the psychotic in relation to the imag-inary Other and the social and symbolic Other creates a space for theexpression of the truth of that psychotic, a truth other than that of thedelusion and its voices, a truth that aims to reappropriate the life and

Introduction 17



history of the young psychotic. Partly in response to psychiatric ad-vances in the treatment of psychosis, American psychoanalysts are ingreat alarm as biomedical approaches and short-term, insurance-driven

therapies increasingly encroach upon analytic modes of treatment.Thisbattle about human nature requires more than professional maneuver-ing. It needs all of the clinical knowledge it can garner and a serious the-orization of the ethical and theoretical stakes of psychoanalysis.

Broader Debates

It is surely an inappropriate clich that North American psychother-apy is only ego-centered. Nevertheless, some of the ideas presented heremay be surprising or radical to North American sensibilities. Hence, theimportance of the clinical material in which this book abounds. Suchmaterial, rather than the almost impossible task of theoretical transla-tion, allows North American clinicians to gain an appreciation of theseinnovative Lacanian concepts. As well, gaining a sense of the Lacaniancontribution may significantly further contemporary understandings ofongoing psychoanalytic debates and treatment approaches for certainpopulations.

For many psychoanalysts, especially in North America, psychoanalyticperspectives ultimately divide over the place of environmental object-

relations approaches versus more classically oriented positions.The latterconceive of the psychoanalytic process in terms of endogenous drives andresultant intrapsychic conflicts, whereas the former turns the psychoana-lytic process toward issues of relationship. Within the psychoanalyticcommunity, there are certainly many blends of these two perspectives,combining what one calls drive/structure with object-relations and re-lational modalities (see Greenberg and Mitchell 1983).As one reads thefollowing chapters, it becomes clear that Lacanian approaches offer athird alternative that re-conceptualizes the drive, the Oedipal and the pre-Oedipal, and thus moves both technique and theory beyond current the-

oretical integrations or exclusive alternatives. For if the Other is theabsolute pivot in psychoanalysis and one must privilege the signifier andthe object (petit objet a), it does not follow that psychoanalysis automat-ically moves to the dimension of the interpersonal.The drive and the un-conscious indicate that the subject is produced on another scene (chaps.2 and 3). The particularity of the discipline of psychoanalysis also an-swers to this other scene which is most certainly neither the realm of neu-rology or biology, nor is it located within the phenomenology of theemotions or in corrective emotional experiences (re)-lived in the rela-tional present. Psychoanalysis does constitute a social bond, but there is

18 After Lacan



an asymmetry between the Other and the subject that is not captured bythe notion of intersubjectivity.

More specifically, the intricate Lacanian understanding of the func-

tion of the Other in relation to the advent of the object and of the humanbondage to the signifier address in a very precise way the relationship be-tween representation and what are called primitive object relations.Such relations are really played out in terms of signifiers that emerge asindices of the logic of the subject. Although a number of approaches topsychosis directly theorize the representational confusions of psychoticindividuals, the deficiencies in cognition are referred to super-ordi-nate cognitive processes related to adaptation (London Part II 1988).These process are either genetically compromised or severely disruptedby early trauma experiences, giving the patient a psychotic personalitythat must vie with a more normal one (Williams 1998).The second per-sonality is the vehicle for identification with the analyst and is the lever-age that allows for psychoanalytic progress through interpretation. Incontrast, more relational practices accept the significance of a psychotictransference and work within that process. In this case, the emphasis isto treat the psychotic transference as defined mostly by chaotic affectiveresponses and scarred object relations that are tolerated and repaired bya certain analytic presence. Although analytic observations on transfer-ence in psychosis indicate that they are dealing with a type of relation-

ship with the Other in which the Other is both impervious and absolute,in North America, this relationship may be seen less as a structure andmore as played out in terms of affects, persons, and perhaps styles ofrepresentation.Thus, the therapeutic presence is defined as much by itsemotional tonality as it is by interpretation. In very recent developmentsin this relational view, one interprets up (McWilliams 1994) and issupportive of the healthy self (Black 1998). This reading of a psycho-analysis of psychosis would seem to suggest affinities to ego psychologyeven if it uses the word self instead. Such approaches remain quite dif-ferent from a Lacanian approach or even from Searles exchanges within

psychotic transference.The orientation ofAfter Lacan, then, should be read as marking a cer-tain departure from prevailing North American tendencies. From psy-chosis to neurotic disorders, we are dealing with issues of a subject thatis defined by its inception into a community that speaks (chap. 1).Theeffects of the signifier ground all subjective being in relationship tospeaking and its logicone does not need a super-ordinate adaptivefunction for language. But, as well, this condition of coming to significa-tion is always complicated by its registration in the terms of the bodyand the impossibility of our fully knowing the Other (chap. 2).Thus, in

Introduction 19



a sense, the issues raised by this collection are indeed not only matters ofobject relationships, but also relations to the object that function muchmore as a matter of an effect of a structure and a location in fantasy.The

object is more precisely understood as a place within a logic that createsa corporeal consistency.Thus, analytic concepts such as projective iden-tification, which are so important to work with psychotics, do not neatlycoincide with the Lacanian frame of the logic of the signifier. Ratherthan compiling a list of defensive postures and mechanisms, such de-fenses are coherently related to the genesis of human desire within thestructures and registers (the real, symbolic, and imaginary) that foundhuman coexistence.This allows one to clinically encounter the humansubject rather than a normative subject that is crippled by a certain setof defenses. This encounter, if it is theorized and carefully addressed,fully exploits the possibilities of understanding offered by psychoanaly-sis. As such it offers a more coherent picture of the stakes of clinicalpractice, new clinical approaches, and an ethical position from whichpsychoanalysis can maintain and expand its way of seeing the humansubject in an era where considerations of subjectivity are all too rare.

It will be evident from preceding sections of this introduction thatthere is a diversity of opinion among Lacanians on many topics; there isno supposition here that all Lacanians would agree on the parametersthat define the diagnostic categories as they are presented in this text.

Such differences in the Lacanian field do not devolve into eclectic lais-sez-faire pragmatics but constitute the tension that define Lacans richtheory and the demands of clinical work.The essays of Apollon, Berg-eron, and Cantin clearly represent how this tension informs clinicalwork and indicate the ways that a Lacanian orientation allows one to re-conceive transference, castration, the symptom, the object, interpreta-tion, and psychopathology itself. Perhaps, this clinical edge willintroduce some modesty into academic debates about Lacanian psycho-analysis and encourage the long overdue recognition of the claims of theLacanian clinic.

General Summary of Chapters inAfter Lacan

The twelve chapters of the present collection give a highly integratedpresentation of Lacanian ideas in relation to clinical practice. Probably aword or two might be said about their disparate origins, however. Nearlyall of the chapters included here were originally occasioned by conferencepresentations of one kind or anothersometimes a general conferenceon psychoanalysis, sometimes a conference more narrowly Lacanian infocus. Somewhat to the editors surprise, the disparate originating con-

20 After Lacan



texts seemed to give to the assembled whole not a scattered feeling, but,to the contrary, a sort of rhythmic movement of deepening intensities bal-anced by the relief of more leisurely, more concrete pieces.The texts were

originally written in French, the native language of the authors, generallyin the early- and mid-1990s, and then given rough translation into En-glish to be read at the conference. The editors of the present volumeworked in close consultation with the authors to give the language a morecongenial gloss, occasionally retranslating passages altogether, and, ofcourse, editing and ordering the texts according to the necessities of pub-lished, rather than oral presentation. In the editing process, every effortwas made to preserve the intended meaning of the original French texts,despite the fact that the authors thinking has continued to evolvethrough the intervening years since the essays were written.

The early chapters (chaps. 1, 2, and 3) are devoted to the general con-cepts (for example, the jouissance of the Other, the sexual division, andthe paternal function) and key terms (dream, signifier, and interpreta-tion) that constitute the touchstones of the early phase of analytic treat-ment, elaborating their interrelations and their clinical relevance.Thenext chapters (chaps. 4, and 5) focus on the groundbreaking clinic ofpsychosis that Gifric has pioneered in Qubechow Lacanians theorizepsychosis and how Gifric has come to treat it analytically. The nextchapters (chaps. 6, 7, and 8) turn toward the second phase of analytic

treatment, introducing a new set of termsthe letter of the body, thesymptom, the fantasyto understand the genesis within the transfer-ence and the ethical act of analysis in the subjects assumption of theOthers lack.The concluding chapters (chaps. 9, 10, 11, and 12) are es-pecially rich in clinical material, and broaden the understanding of theanalytic clinic by discussing the key psychic structures that describe theorganization of subjectivity and thereby dictate the terms of analysis: ob-sessional and hysterical neurosis, perversion, and (again) psychosis.

Language, writes Lucie Cantin in chapter 1, has transformed usinto beings subject to a logic that is other than biological or natural

logic. The early chapters of the collection probe the clinical implica-tions of this human fact. One discovers that at stake in this subjectionto language is more than the way we are captured by desires, fantasies,and expectations in the discourse of others about usthough indeedone sees this dimension very concretely in Cantins presentation of thecase of Myriam, a young dancer who lives so painfully under the fantasyof a mother whose devaluation of the father and whose own refusal ofloss interferes with Myriams access to desire. As Cantin argues further,the very organization of our very bodies, our erotics, our symptoms, evenour life and our deathall this has come under the law of the signifier,

Introduction 21



with the exile of our bodies from a natural logic. This exile has at thesame time necessitated an essential loss in human existence; in language,human life recognizes an impossibility of a natural jouissance or a total

satisfaction. As language and the laws of culture mediate our appetitesand our pleasures, human desire has shown itself to be irreducible, thatis, without any specific object to offer perfect and complete satisfactionof its own. And if, in our subjection to language, father becomes thename of this necessity of loss under the law of the signifier and the lawof culture, fatherthe paternal functionalso acts to limit the jouis-sance demanded by the Other in the imaginary of the child. Loss andlack are the law for child, but they are the law also for the Other, whoseclaims on the life of the subject are thereby limited.

Willy Apollons canny and passionate chapter on jouissance (chap. 2)deepens the consideration of the irrevocable loss of natural satisfactionand the consequent impossibility of any total jouissance.When satisfac-tion must be routed through language and culture,when satisfaction sub-mits itself as a demand to the Other, it becomes vulnerable to the whimof the Other, dependent upon the Other, who may or may not respond asthe subject demands (by providing or withholding a desired object, say).Satisfaction comes to depend, therefore, upon the Other even more thanupon the adequacy of the object itself. Moreover, a jouissance is imputedto the Other in this power of refusalthe Other may be thought to derive

a certain pleasure from this power over the subjects demand.Thus, jouis-sance always implies the relation to the Other. An obsessional neurotic,for example, may hypothesize a lost, mythical moment in which he or shewas perfectly satisfied by the Others jouissance, but in actuality, jouis-sance will always prove an obstacle to satisfaction. It is the signifier thatplaces the subject in an elsewhere outside of consciousness and in excessof need, an elsewhere regulated by jouissance and radically unknown tothe subject. How the subject will relate to the Other and to jouissance interms of the procreation of the speaking human being describes theasymmetrical terms of the sexual division, which Apollon explores in the

balance of the chapter.Danielle Bergerons chapter on the signifier (chap. 3) scales us backfrom the theoretical intensity of the preceding chapter and begins in amore leisurely fashion to describe the nature of the signifier in psycho-analysis. Lacanian borrowings from linguistics are, of course, familiarterritory by now, but Bergeron illustrates how the signifier in psychoan-alytic discourse also represents a break from the semiotic signifier inso-far as the psychoanalytic signifier is what, above all, ruptures meaning,to suggest the workings of some other scene hidden from view. More-over, with her clinical example from the dream and subsequent associa-

22 After Lacan



tions of a young medical intern, Bergeron shows vividly how the psy-choanalytic signifier, selected from the navel of the patients dream, givesvoice to the unconscious and allows for the talking cure to do its work.

Hence, Bergerons description of the signifier as both the metaphor ofthe subject and as the metonymy of desire.

The next two chapters by Bergeron and Cantin (chaps. 4, and 5) buildupon the earlier chapters elaborations of the signifier, the paternal func-tion, and the jouissance of the Other, to illustrate the theory and clinic ofpsychosis. In the cases of John, Mr. Owens, and Mr.T., the reader gets apowerful sense of the pathos and the anguished drama of the psychotic inhis vulnerability to the abuse of the Other.This exposure to being used asthe object of the Other, we learn, results from a failure of the paternalfunction to establish the law of the signifier, the law of universal lack thatwould place a limit on the jouissance of the Other.

Through a graceful marriage of theory and case material, Bergeronand Cantin trace the precise positioning of the analytic acts that effectthe movement from the subjects relationship to the signifier within psy-chotic delusional systems, to the logic of the signifier found in thedreama movement allowing the psychotic a different relationship to hisor her suffering.The delusion attempts to treat the real by subordinatingscattered, aggressing signifiers with the imaginary as it elaborates a flaw-less knowledge that both accounts for the victim position of the psy-

chotic subject as the object of the jouissance of the Other and signals thestatus of the psychotic as a privileged, elected one.The dream, by con-trast, processes the real by subjugating the imaginary to the symbolic,where desire must obey the laws of language and meaning. It is by in-ducing the psychotic to produce a dream for the analyst, these chaptersargue, that psychoanalysis can treat psychosis. Because the dream intro-duces the curious logic of the signifier and the signifying chain (andhence also a certain flaw or lack in savoir), when a psychotic is broughtto dream, the certainty of the psychotic delusion begins to come underdoubt.The consistency of the persecuting jouissance of the Other grad-

ually diminishes as the analyst takes the specific signifiers of the psy-chotics dream narrative and encourages metonymic association with thepatients past to construct a narrative of the psychotics life that is out-side of the delusion and alternate to it.

Apollons chapter on transference and the letter of the body (chap. 6),initiates an important shift to the concerns of the second phase of ana-lytic treatment, a phase dealing with the real of jouissance throughsymptom and fantasy. In this and the following two chapters, Apollondevelops further the presentation of the parceled body dealt with in psy-choanalysis to demonstrate how the logic of the signifier moves clinical

Introduction 23



practice beyond what the signifier can reveal in itself. Since the symptomindicates the failure of the law of the signifier to limit the Others jouis-sance, the analysts maneuver in the transference aims to instigate lack as

a barrier to that deadly jouissance that repeats itself in the life of the pa-tient. In general terms, then, the analysts desire under the transferenceelicits various materialsthe signifier in the dream, the letter in thesymptom, the object in the fantasyto convert forbidden drive jouis-sance into desire. Apollon writes of the matter as an ethical choice, albeitnot a choice on the ordinary level of conscious intention. More precisely,the choice of the subjectand the maneuver of the analystmay be saidto involve an ethical assumption by the subject of the Others lack asfoundational to desire. As Apollon will suggest in chapter 8, the choicerevolves around the question of the relationship to jouissance sustainedby the subject: either to persist in the prohibited, fatal (impossible,lapsed, etc.) jouissance that returns in the repetition of the symptom, orelse to assume subjectively the constitutive failing of jouissance, to an-swer the lack in the Other, a lack necessitated by the law of the signifier,and lying at the heart of desire.

The next chapters on symptom and fantasy (chaps. 7, and 8) furtherintegrate these theoretical elaborations with clinical case material. Inchapter 7, drawing from the earlier argument concerning the routing ofsatisfaction through the vicissitudes of the Others response (in chap. 2),

and following the case of a young anorexic, Apollon propose two di-mensions of the symptom in relation to jouissance.There is, as he de-scribes it, a certain jouissance that inscribes the symptom itself inrelation to the signifier and the failure of the Other; and there is anotherjouissance that fails to be inscribed in the symptom and in consequencereturns to seek inscription in the repetition of the symptom.This latterjouissance is the one that concerns the second phase of analysis, as treat-ment begins to orient itself in relation to the symptom and the traversalof the fantasy. Analysis attempts to treat the symptom through the tra-versal of fantasy, where fantasy is understood as formulating the sub-

jects relation to the lost object that gives rise to desire. The analystsmaneuver aims, as Apollon puts it, to disengage the fantasy, to grasp theremainder of jouissance that both repeats and resists inscription in thesymptom.

The next chapter on the fantasy (chap. 8) continues Apollons theo-retical work with case material to follow the clinical process through tothe traversal of fantasy that marks the end of analysis.The chapter fol-lows the case of Marguerite, a young woman whose frigidity derives, shesays, from her fear of fainting during sexual intercourse. Her analysisturns upon two dreams. While the dream attempts to accommodate

24 After Lacan



insistent jouissance by way of the signifier, the jouissance that the dreamfails to reduce shows itself in the symptom. Her analysis shows that Mar-guerites relation to jouissance has been organized according to a fantasy

in which Marguerite supposes that the prohibition of her own jouissancederives not from the universal law of the paternal phallus, but ratherfrom the reservation of a special jouissance for the mother.Through theanalysis, her symptom gives way as Marguerite moves to make the ethi-cal choice to confront the truth that was previously hidden by the fatal,prohibited jouissance at work to efface the subject

The final chapters focus on the fundamental structures of subjectiv-ity, as defined by the Lacanian clinic: obsessional and hysterical neuro-sis, perversion, and psychosis. Bergerons chapter describing obsessionalneurosis (chap. 9) introduces the important Lacanian distinction be-tween subjective structure and phenomenological features. She followsthe case of Mr. Beauregard, a man whose sexual behavior and fantasiesmight be considered perverse by some classical and object-relations per-spectives, but whose structure is clearly obsessional. Bergeron describesthe anguish of the obsessional (and the obsessionals special difficulty inanalysis) as that of a forbidden hope unabandoned. Mr. Beauregardsanalysis illustrates the obsessionals paradigmatic seduction fantasy:events in his childhood have suggested the illusory hope that the mothermay be available to him (despite the paternal prohibition he recognizes),

and he feels himself therefore forbidden to desire any others, as well asguilty, fearful, and self-punishing for his forbidden fantasy.When we seethis in the life of Mr. Beauregard as he symptomatically sabotages his sexlife with his new partner, we understand the neurotic symptom as thejouissance of the drive seeking satisfaction in the body, when desire can-not supersede the demand of the Otherthe demand Mr. Beauregardfeels in response to what he imagines his mother would love (her son asa priest).

Cantins chapters on perversion and hysteria (chaps. 10, and 11), elu-cidate the two structures by considering them in relation to each other,

as well as by considering examples, one from the clinic, another from lit-erature. Perversion, we learn, is characterized by a twofold movement:an initial postulation of the Father and of the signifier, coupled with alogically subsequent denial that stages the uselessness of the Father-sig-nifier-symbolic.The pervert attempts to obscure the logic of the drivesfunctioning by imposing instead a logic of pure mechanism.A conflationof the natural/organismic penis and the symbolic phallus, for example,denies the phallus and symbolic castration to eliminate desire: no longermust the pervert hazard the question of a partners desire.The perversecontract formalizes the matter by regulating exchange and eliminating

Introduction 25



the gap, as if to say: Its not a question of what you or I might desire; itsa matter of arranging our bodies and organs as pre-arranged, asscripted. Its like a reversion to some sort of animal code: the signifier

compels, but only with the evacuation of the otheras Cantin shows inthe example of the Sacher-Masoch contract (chap. 11). Nevertheless, incontrast with psychosis, the phallus does exist in perversion, and the per-verts collusion in the denial of the lawand his or her status as the cap-tive object of the mothers desireis determined by some sort ofunconscious choice and assent.

Hysteria, we find, also features an unsatisfied mother, but where per-version accents the failure of the paternal most generally, hysteria accentsthe voracity of the mother, her unsatisfied demand. Because the maternalcomplaint concerns the insufficiency of the paternal phallus to put anend to the jouissance at work in the mother, the hysteric seeks to satisfythe mother by bolstering the inadequate father. Castration is repressedunder the supposition that it is only the hysterics particular father wholacks, rather than fathers (and humans) universally. Consequently, thehysteric is on a quest for the phallic ideal, the Master, who might satisfythe mother and repair the inadequacy of the fathera role the pervertmay feel privileged to play. Also, for the hysteric, the insufficiency of thesignifier of the Fathers desire for the mother means that the subject hasbeen unable to sufficiently trust the signifier.Thus, the ability to occupy

the position of a possible object of desire has been compromised. Such isthe tragedy of the hysteric, endlessly addressing the Other, seeking refer-ence points that would allow the subject to construct the ego as an ob-ject of desire. In the pervert, the hysteric may find not only the Masterwho embodies the accountable other, but also the one who gives the hys-teric the dedicated status as object.The hysteric, however, cannot be theobject-cause of the perverts desire, but only ever an object of jouissance.The seduction fantasy, in which the hysterics desire is forsaken in be-coming the object of the desire of the Other, as well as the quest for thecredible word of love that would quiet the jouissance of the Other, con-

stitute the pathos of this subjective structure.The final chapter (chap. 12), in which Bergeron introduces a fasci-nating clinical analysis of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, usefullygeneralizes discussion of the psychotic from earlier chapters to examinethe life of a highly functioning, very articulate psychotic, and to proposesome conclusions about the treatment of the excluded jouissance that isunrepresentable by the signifier and that constitutes the real defect oflanguage. Bergeron finds in Mishima an exemplary psychotic who expe-rienced his body as powerless against the jouissance of an Other. Raisedby a grandmother who, it seemed, cared only for his physical preserva-

26 After Lacan



tion and refused the boy entry into the world of social interaction andmasculine identification, Mishima lived a childhood organized by keyimageshypermasculine images of fairy tale violence and tragic sacri-

fice in the cause of God (Saint Sebastian) and country (knightly Joan ofArc). The psychotics fantasy, as we see here (and as we might recallfrom earlier discussions), involves the subject being brutally captured bythe jouissance of the Other, and abandoned to this jouissance. Fore-closed from masculine identification under the symbolic phallus,Mishima was nevertheless able to attenuate the violence of the jouis-sance of the Other, through his art and through his body building. Hisdistance from perversion is suggested by Mishimas concern for mascu-line ethics, for a sacrifice on behalf of the paternal emperorconcernsthat would have been anathema to a pervert. Mishima shows us, too, thepeculiar relationship to language that the psychotic suffers: words havepower over his flesh, but though supremely articulate, Mishima cannotmake words represent reality. More and more he comes to forge a flaw-less language of the flesh in body building, an effort that also gives himaccess to a powerful masculine identification, and gives meaning to hislife and death.

Limited Glossary of Terms

There are several fine Lacanian and psychoanalytic dictionaries cur-rently available in English and the interested reader may usefully consultthose of Dylan Evans, Elizabeth Wright, and Laplanche and Pontalis.The definitions given below are not considered general, either in termsof the full scope of Gifrics thinking, Lacanian thought, or psychoanaly-sis, overall. Rather this brief list of terms is provided as a point of entryfor some of the terms used in the present collection.

Castration

Castration suggests the subjects entry into the world of irreduciblelack and loss, the impossibility of total satisfaction that necessarily ac-companies the entry into the symbolic order of language and social law(chap. 6). Castration is therefore the result of the effects of the signifier,and constitutes the universal law for both women and men, though themasculine and the feminine positions have a different relationship to it(chap. 2), as will different subjective structures (chap. 10). Ones relationto the Other is a Lacanian formalization of the castration complex aspostulated within Oedipal dynamics in the Freudian paradigm as a markin which a biological difference becomes a psychological inscription.

Introduction 27



E

Documents

Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, Lucie Cantin, Robert Hughes, Kareen Ror Malone After Lacan Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious Suny Series in Psychoanalysis and