John-Paul Zaccarini

Circoanalysis: Circus, Therapy and Psychoanalysis

ISSN 1652-3776 2013:2

John-Paul Zaccarini

Circoanalysis: Circus, Therapy and Psychoanalysis

ISSN 1652-3776 2013:2

ISSN 1652-3776 2013:2

DANS FORSKNING OCH UTVECKLING/DANCE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT is a serial publication on Dance published by the Board for Artistic Development, Research and Education at the University of Dance and Circus. The aim is to propagate the work currently being done in research and artistic development within the field of dance. The series of reports was initiated by Professor Erna Grnlund at the University College of Dance and Barbro Renck, Associate Professor at Karlstad University. Editor: Anna Karin Sthle

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Grnlund, Erna & Renck, Barbro: Dansterapi en mlinriktad behandling som std och hjlp fr pojkar med diagnosen ADHD/DAMP. Grnlund, Erna & Renck, Barbro: Dansterapi fr pojkar med ADHD. Grupp och individuell behandling. Sthle, Anna Karin: Dansnotation ett kommunikationsmedel. Grnlund, Erna & Renck, Barbro: Dansterapi fr deprimerade tonrsflickor samt utvrdering av det samlade dansterapiprojektet. Lilja, Efva: Movement as the Memory of the Body. Graff, Jens: Dansarens yrkesidentitet. Documentation of the artistic gathering Close Encounters Artists on Artistic research. Roman, Gun: Dans modern mstarlra Lion, Katarina: Det ena genom det andra. En forskningsrapport kring dans, analys och historieskrivning med utgngspunkt i Vietnam Romn, Gun m. fl.: Danspedagogik! Ursprung, uttryck och unika minnen Andreas Sknber och Camilla Damkjr: Documentation of CARD: Circus Artistic Research Development Roos, Cecilia, Elam, Katarina och Foultier Anna Petronella: Ord och tankar i rrelse. Dansaren och den skapande processen: konstnrlig och humanistisk forskning i samverkan. En delrapport CLOSE ENCOUNTERS Contemporary Dance Didactics: Exploration in Theory and Practice

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The books can be ordered from Dans och Cirkushgskolan, www.doch.se or tel 08-562 274 31.

Copyright: John-Paul Zaccarini Formgivning och mallar: Baringo reklam och kommunikation Tryck: Katarina Tryck AB Dans forskning utveckling ISSN 1652-3776 2013:2

Foreword
After being a circus artist for eighteen years I wondered what my next step should be. After all, what could be as seemingly impossible and masochistic as circus? It would have to be something that required arduous, painful work for a few infrequent yet intense moments of delirious pleasure. A PhD clearly. Psychoanalysis has a lot in common with circus sex, death and the fact that it requires the presence of an other. They both create a relationship rife with fantasy, desire and projection. What would happen if these two things met each other and tried to have a dialogue? This thesis describes the relationship that formed from that meeting as it emerged chronologically. As they tried to negotiate with each other, employing education as a mediator, the circus artist gave way to the researcher, the listener and the facilitator. I would like to thank Victoria Roberts, Matilda Leyser, Dr. Ana SanchezColberg, Ivar Heckscher and Auletta Zaccarini, whose nickname for me as a child was the Dotty Professor, for inspiring this shift in me. I would also like to thank Paus Elias Larrson who at the end of our first session coined the phrase circus therapy. I guess he's my Anna O. Youll find out who she is in chapter one. John-Paul Zaccarini, March 2013

Contents
Foreword .................................................................................................................. 5 Introduction: Circus and Psycho-analysis A background to the research .... 11 Chapter One: Circoanalysis .................................................................................. 15 1.1 The Subject of Circus ......................................................................................... 15 1.2. Which Subject? A Review of Traditional, New and Contemporary Circus .......... 17 1.2.1 Traditional Circus ............................................................................................ 17 1.2.2 New Circus .................................................................................................... 19 1.2.3. The Emergence of Contemporary Circus ....................................................... 20 1.3. The Object of Circus ......................................................................................... 22 2.1 Literature Review ............................................................................................... 25 2.2. Psychoanalytic Literature .................................................................................. 26 3. Key terms adopted and how they may be adapted for circus................................ 27 3.1. Satisfaction ....................................................................................................... 27 3.2. Repression........................................................................................................ 29 3.3. Symptom........................................................................................................... 30 4. Circoanalysis ....................................................................................................... 31 4.1 Rationale for a methodology bringing circus into a discourse with psychoanalysis ........................................................................................................ 31 4.2. The Practices .................................................................................................... 36 4.2.1. Phase One: Testing and Laying the Ground for the Methodology ................... 36 4.2.2. Phase Two: Circotherapy The Methodology in Practice............................... 39 Chapter Two: Towards the Methodology of Circotherapy .................................. 40 1. Introduction The Questionnaire and the methodologies emerging from it .......... 40 2.1. The First Question: What brought you to Circus? Negotiating between the Trick and the Word............................................................................................ 46 2.2. The Second Question: Who, from your past, would you like to perform your circus to and why? - Transference, Transmission, Transformation .......................... 56 3.1. The Surgery ...................................................................................................... 62 3.2. The Act interpreted as a dream in the Surgery .................................................. 65 3.3. Discovering Repression and Censorship in the Surgery .................................... 71

3.4. Conclusions about the Surgery - The Infantile Wish hiding in the Act ................ 76 4. Conclusion: The Act qua the Dream as Holding Environment .............................. 81 Chapter 3: Anxiety ................................................................................................. 83 1. Introduction: Circoanalytic Interviews ................................................................... 83 2.1 Leyser and Weaver - Repeating/Remembering .................................................. 85 2.2. Leyser and Weaver with Costain - Anxiety ........................................................ 91 2.3. Costain and The Imaginary. .............................................................................. 98 2.4. Holmes - Seduction ......................................................................................... 104 3. Conclusion: The Desire of the Artist ................................................................... 106 Chapter 4: Circotherapy ...................................................................................... 110 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 110 1. 1. A Lacanian Immersion ................................................................................... 110 1.2. The offer ......................................................................................................... 112 1.3. Circotherapy as opposed to Circotherapy ..................................................... 114 2. The Case Studies .............................................................................................. 116 2.1.1. The Demand Leroy, Marc .......................................................................... 116 2.1.2 Conclusion. ................................................................................................... 123 2.2 Neurosis: Hysteria and Obsession Rosie, Emma, Christina .......................... 124 2.2.1. Rosie: Hysteria and the Law......................................................................... 126 2.2.2. Emma: The Hysterical Symptom .................................................................. 131 2.2.3. Rosie: Castration ......................................................................................... 139 2.2.4. Christina and the Law: Obsession ................................................................ 144 2.3.1. Jack Perversion......................................................................................... 148 2.3.2. Conclusion ................................................................................................... 160 2.4. Elena and Liz Melancholia and Psychosis .................................................... 162 2.4.1. Elena and the Symbolic Other ...................................................................... 162 2.4.2. Liz: The Imaginary Other .............................................................................. 168 2.4.3. Elena: Being okay with not being okay ......................................................... 174 2.4.4. Liz: The Real ................................................................................................ 180 2.4.5. Conclusion: Tragedy and the Sublime .......................................................... 185

Chapter 5: Conclusion ......................................................................................... 189 1. Psychoanalysis as Catalyst ................................................................................ 189 2. Melancholia/Mania ............................................................................................. 191 3. The New Subject of Circus ................................................................................. 194 4. The Ethics of Circus ........................................................................................... 198 Bibliography......................................................................................................... 200 Appendices are on the accompanying Cd

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Introduction: Circus and Psychoanalysis A background to the research

A nine-month ethnographic immersion in the life world of circus students at Danshgskolan in Stockholm as Visiting Professor in Autumn 2007/Spring 2008 highlighted for me the need for a methodology in circus training/production that gave space to the voice of the subject that choses circus. In the first three months I lived among them, ate, trained and held workshops with them, saw circus shows with them, attended parties with them and witnessed the rigourous rote training typical of circus education. During this period I made an offer to the students to talk about their experience of circus with me. Four students came forward, Elias, Jens, Par and Francesca. I then went on to write a graduation performance with them, entitled 3rd Time Lucky, which was constructed as a way for them to articulate their experience in the school. It was clear to me that as a group, the third year students felt that they had not been listened to and harboured a great deal of resentment towards the school. Whether this neglect was actual or not was irrelevant. They felt neglected, or that a certain aspect of their lives was not being attended to. In the factual, scientific mode of training repetition of an experiment to achieve the same result each time it felt as if some part of their subjectivity was considered irrelevant. Previous to this, in the Summer of 2007, I conducted an artistic research project with aerialist and writer Matilda Leyser. The task of the research was to try and think circus through another genre. Leyser choose a literary autobiography of her life as a circus artist and I attempted a piece of theoretical writing inspired by Lacan, Kristeva, Marx and Deleuze and Guattari. It was here that I

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stumbled upon the uncanny resemblances of the circus act and the psychoanalytic version of the symptom. Of all the methodologies I could have chosen, the one that, for me, most suited the bringing forth of the voice, of what could be spoken about experience was psychoanalysis. When reading Freud, iek, Lacan or Kristeva as a professional circus artist and director I could see my own experience described there, in the symptom, the death drive, jouissance, narcissistic omnipotence, obsessive neurosis, hysteria and masochism, not to mention objet a, the fetish object, repetition compulsion and mania. In the students I worked with as Visiting Professor I saw a circus body, an object/artefact that struggled to make visible, audible or viable the subject that created it. The first agenda then was to listen. On entering the room Par, Elias and Jens instinctively lay on one of the couches facing me and began to speak. Elias, afterwards, thanked me, describing it to be like a circus therapy. It was a difficult thing, just to listen. To let someone speak and not interject, interrupt, interpret or to bring my personality, taste or views into the equation. It seemed equally difficult to just talk, to not be interjected, interrupted, interpreted. We often ask for confirmation when we speak; Am I saying the right thing? Do you understand me? Am I giving you what you want? We need confirmation of our comprehensibility, our legibility when we speak. Without this constant affirmation we can doubt whether or not we are giving the other what he/she wants. This is what happens in everyday conversation. Here I wanted them to listen to themselves, for them to address an internal other, or an other situated somewhere in the field of circus. Each time there was a silence with these first three participants, I saw a recognition develop. As pauses became progressively longer, so too did the understanding that they were not really talking about what they did from a personal point of view, but from the point of view somewhere outside of themselves. This would be the point of view that disregarded their subjective position of enunciation. It was as if they were reciting what could be seen from

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a small C.C.T.V. camera in a training space. What, in other words, external viewers could describe. A C.C.T.V. judges, it looks for where you go wrong, break the rules. The same could be said of the teacher, director, spectator of the Circus Act. The artist tries to do the right thing for a spectator of this sort because this spectator can confirm or deny his/her acceptability to varying degrees dependant on the mutually accepted rules that condition the specific context. All those contexts place demands on the subject to perform to expectation. The students lay on the couch staring at the ceiling giving me names, dates, places. They told short stories about breaking an ankle, listening to music, where they trained and with whom. These were surely facts, things that one could read on a curriculum vitae but they did not suggest to me who that person was that came to circus, they merely described a what. However at a certain point my listening silence made them pause. They were realising perhaps that they were more than just data. Suddenly the facts about themselves proved defunct, even banal. They were describing a what not a who. In Relating Narratives, Storytelling and selfhood (2000) Cavarrero makes the point that when Oedipus replies to the Sphinx's riddle with the answer Man, it is clear that he knows what he is. The dramatic irony of Oedipus Rex lies in the fact that he does not know who he is. To know who he is he needs to know his origins of which he is ignorant. Something seemed to shift. A slide sideways or maybe downwards from the literal to the figurative, from the factual to the metaphoric. Their attempt at representing their experience in objective language had become inadequate, had, at a certain point, failed. This was the language they were used to in relations with trainers it seemed. Objective language had exhausted itself in the task of giving an account of themselves and so another voice seemed to come into play. Below I give three examples of this moment of metaphoric description.

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What I work with is the word struggle to be centred [pause] its a struggle, such as what am I struggling for, for whom, where am I struggling? It always comes back to the struggle of becoming centred, landing, letting everything go let go of the struggle, just breathe the air and see how green the trees are; easy, true, see the world through the eyes of truth [pause] and [pause] I can feel that the handstand is a beautiful metaphor of the struggle for the centre, fight of the mind and body, for whom, why, where, what? is this the right way to struggle, will I know when I get there and what is there? Im here, now, so what is now? Now is just now, will always be now, will always be another now [pause] hmmm [long pause] (Jens 42-49) the freedom is that it cuts out the world a meditation, release from the other senses feel whole or alone/cut-out. Free by myself in a tube of air. In a training space alone I can be lost for 4hours, sucked up by juggling you feel cleansed of juggling not when youre juggling fragments a void or juggling was taken from you so that you can get on with doing other stuff, life. (Elias 52-59) I have it always in the back of my mind when Im learning, because as I learn a skill, it is because I want to give so what I kept of religion is the wish to give, be as good as I can to give it to another. A way of respecting myself and the other technique is a way of respecting what we do and the other to whom we give it. (Francesca 19-21)

I came to the conclusion that a research into circus that would produce new knowledge should focus on the subject of circus and not the object, or artefact that the artist makes and that psychoanalysis as a mode of investigation and as a discourse on subjectivity should be a key aspect of the methodology of that research.

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Chapter One: Circoanalysis

1.1 The Subject of Circus
Subject here denotes both the thematic of circus and the person who is the focus of the activity of circus. It also has the connotations of being subjected to something. The first way to bring forth this subject that often remains silent in the face of the demands of the school or the market is to give it a voice. This subject is regarded in this research as a process that produces circus objects, meaning that the circus subject is not in itself an object/product to be bartered for and is first and foremost an evolving idea not a fixed concept. So, I posit firmly the subject with its own desires and demands at the centre of this research; to remind myself who I am writing about when I use the word circus, not what; who it is that manifests circus and why. (Arendt, 1998, p.179) This refocusing of the debate to the who of circus comes at a time when the inclusion into the syllabus of the circus degree courses in Stockholm and London of talking about personal process in tandem with the training or creative process is beginning to show significant results in the production of authentic, self reflexive circus acts. This talking circus concerns language, the words we use to approximately describe our experience, words as signs pointing the way to deep motivations and desires and the physical signs that we use/choose to express those desires. A rope artist does not need to become a sailor in a storm to justify his climbing, his twining with the rope, nor at the end of his three years in school does he need to apply a metaphor to his routine to give him a reason for being there, in the air. The rope already is a metaphor. This thesis is the study of how and why those metaphors and signs came to be voiced or performed by an array of circus subjects at different stages in their professional lives and asks if they obfuscate deeper or more universal human issues. It is an attempt to understand how circus subjects construct their world, what materials they bring to it, what is at hand for them to use and what choices are presented to them. To do this I

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will look at how the practices or aesthetics of circus impact or meld with the psychic and physical materials the subjects bring to it. I describe how some teaching or training practices impose a prescriptive knowledge that pre-exists the subject. The practice element of this research is to develop a practice of reflexive enquiry that celebrates the newness that the circus candidate brings to the establishment and how this newness impacts or melds with pre-existing traditions. In as much as the author is a critical observer of circus practices and also a subject immersed in circus and sometimes subject to circus there will be two voices weaving through the text to come. The primary one that seeks to adapt and adopt elements of Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytical theory in order to develop a methodology of bringing the subject of circus to the fore. This adoption of key concepts occurs in the practices of focus groups, interviews, tutorials, surveys and the final methodology of circotherapy. This study therefore takes psychoanalysis as its starting point to ask; from what contents, past objects, traumas or repressions does the subject (knowingly or not) construct their world and what external forces impinge satisfaction or deliver it? From the knowledge accumulated through these practices a therapeutic process will emerge that will facilitate the individual subject's production of new, or previously unconscious knowledge.
the activity of doing qualitative research (identifying and clarifying meaning; learning how the meaning of aspects of the social world is constructed) is highly concordant with the activity of doing therapy (making new meaning, gaining insight and understanding, learning how personal meanings have been constructed.) (McLeod, 2007, p.16)

The secondary voice arises from my material engagement in the empathetic listening with a student/professional artist, a materiality that is suffused with both circus and psychoanalytic understanding. Here psychoanalysis shares some key aspects of ethnographic practice in so far as being a participant in a culture that implies an immersion of the researcher's self into the everyday rhythms and routines of the community is a means of developing inter-

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subjective understandings between researcher and researched. (Crang and Cook, 2007, p.37). This is to acknowledge that there is no object of study without a subject doing the studying and to continue my emphasis on the subject of study would therefore imply the above inter-subjective understandings. This dialogic aspect of immersion finds support in Freire's Education for Critical Consciousness (2010) where the educator becomes educatee, capable of dialogue, freed from the straight jacket of the one supposed to know (Ibid., Goulet, Introduction p.ix). Here the I use my own experience within the culture of circus to look more deeply at the subject/object relationship that occurs between spectator and artist, student and trainer, performer and director/choreographer with the intention of articulating a new possibility, that of the circoanalyst/circoanalysand. As such this voice attempts to embody a fleshed out sense of lived experience and will include dramatic recall, unusual phrasing, and strong metaphors to invite the reader to relive events with the author. (Holt, 2003, p.12)

1.2. Which Subject? A Review of Traditional, New and Contemporary Circus 1.2.1 Traditional Circus
The traditional circus is generally acknowledged to have its origin in experiments with trick horse-riding performed in a circular arena by Philip Astley in 1768. The equestrian display was later filled out with other skilful performances that had been popular in British fairs since the beginning of the seventeenth century; tumbling, rope-dancing, juggling, animal tricks. (Stoddart, 2000, p.13) It was this collection of disparate but spectacular acts under the same roof that came to be known as the circus.

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By the 1890s the Ringling Brothers were the predominant American circus and it was here that the three-ring circus was invented to permit circuses to accommodate larger audiences. (Sugarman, 2002, p.438). The emphasis was on spectacle and although individual spectators could only see well one of the three to five simultaneous performing acts, the entire audience could enjoy the massive spectacles that filled the space and engaged the entire company (Ibid., p.438). These performances were typified by a formula of exoticism, gorgeousness, skill, novelty, magnificence, danger, display, beauty, action, spectacle and the affective responses of the audience were sensation, delight, wonder, humour, suspense, astonishment. (Stoddart, 2000, p.85) Stoddart remarks that the circus was an important part of nineteenth century modern industrial society in that it provided a life-affirming transcendence in the face of a dangerous, exciting, frenetic, shocking and ever-changing modernity. It distracted the audience from their problems rather than, as in the sensation novel of the same period, describing them in harrowing and explicit detail. The sensation novel described female figures wracked by nervousness, hysteria and moral ambiguity that all too clearly held a mirror up to the moral repercussions of a rapidly expanding and destabilising modernity. In this way she presents the circus and the sensation novel as two sides of the same coin, two modes of vicariously dangerous enjoyment in the nineteenth century; one exhilarating, affirming the individuals mastery over nature and the other providing a morbid, intellectual fascination with the moral failure of the individual. (Ibid., p.95-97)
The fact that the circus was the first American show to be electrically illuminated is testimony not only to its popularity and cultural significance at the time but its association with electrical lighting underlines its connection to the emerging technologies of vision and spectacle which would, in a little over a decade, produce the cinema. (Ibid., p.35)

Here it can be seen that the large circuses of the nineteenth century were as excitingly new and as wonder provoking as the invention of electrical light and their social relevance could be said to have turned on the fact that they reflected

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the speed, danger and virtuosity of an emerging modernity. Modern circus in the twentieth century retained those principles of the spectacle and the mastery of the human form over gravity or animals yet it struggled to compete with those now rapidly emergent technologies of vision and spectacle of television and cinema and consequently was no longer parallel to these developments. It was no longer new it had become traditional.

1.2.2 New Circus

New circus is characterised by the rejection of animal performances as well as having a common genesis in the alternative arts of the 1970s, particularly street theatre, mime and dance (Ibid., p.29) and as a return to circus via the avantgarde ideas on theatre which had percolated through western theatre and dance schools in the post -1968 period. (Ibid., p.93). Arguably then, the shift from traditional to new could well have been about a more fundamental change occurring on the very ground that circus as well as everything else stood. In other words, it had to change, something new had to emerge if it was to continue to have any cultural valence in a western society whose values and beliefs were changing so radically and rapidly.
The Romantic celebration of mans benevolent mastery over nature.no longer has any purchase over contemporary imaginations for whom the dominant public discourses in relation to nature centre on environmental protection (against the force of human exploitation) rather than domination. (Ibid., p.76)

New circus offers a more intimate experience than traditional circuses (Sugarman, 2002, p.438) by focusing on the individuals and their emotional journeys, prioritising performance over spectacle and presenting a more personal narrative to the audience. This came about through its interaction with other performance-based arts; the new circus is frequently more theatrical and nar-

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rative or theme-based than circuses have been since the nineteenth century. (Stoddart. 2000, p.29) With the advent of New Circus, we trace a clear distinction between a traditional circus that is for the most part purely formal and a new circus placing as much importance on the content as it does on the form. New Circus challenges the notion that circus is not about anything other than tricks so that There is now a common use of theatrical frames in order to take the presentation of skills beyond a display for its own sake (as in more traditional circus) (Sanchez-Colberg, 2007, p.53) This mutation of circus, already a multi-disciplinary medium, enabled it to impact on other forms of entertainment (cinema, ballet, opera, contemporary dance) into which it has, at times, been incorporated. (Stoddart, 2000, p.28). This splintering of circus into these other art forms, has permitted many more options to the young circus artist leaving school. Circus training has taken this into consideration providing dance and theatre classes as part of the curriculum allowing circus artists to make their living in a variety of mediums. So a distinction must be made at this point between circus and the circus. The current investigation focusses on the former and the individual who does it and their relationship to that entity that is the circus.

1.2.3. The Emergence of Contemporary Circus

If New Circus has been with us now for almost forty years can it still be described as new? In welcoming dance and theatre into its already multidisciplinary bricolage of techniques (circus artists are encouraged to excel in more than one circus form and to sometimes combine them to create new hybrids), New Circus effectively responded to a cultural climate where multidisciplinarity was becoming more and more common and was held to be a necessary step forward for all art forms to take if they wanted to retain their cultural valency. I propose that in doing so circus, younger than dance, younger than theatre responded perhaps too hastily to the exigencies of the period and by-

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passed one crucial step. In keeping up it left behind something of the very nature that drove it to be in the first place. Circus began to fly before it could walk. The character based act is symptomatic of the trend to superimpose a structure (dance or theatre) over the base form of circus before the student really knows what they are doing with the circus itself. I propose that the shift to interdisciplinarity may well have allowed circus to be critically discussed alongside and incorporated into dance, theatre, live and visual art but perhaps at the cost of loosing an identity it was only just discovering. My contention is not that new circus cannot have meaning and content, but that it should search for that content from within; a meaning that could arise from the base form if properly investigated, rather than a meaning being applied as an afterthought. This seems to be the direction being taken by the recently coined successor of new circus, contemporary circus. (Purovaara, et al., 2012) This then may be the rationale behind the neologism created by Danshgskolan for their Bachelor Degree in Neo Circus:
Neo circus is an artistic form that exists at the point of intersection between different circus techniques and artistic fields: its tool is the body. .In the program, great emphasis is therefore placed on reflection and encounters with those involved in other artistic fields.A fundamental aim is to provide the students with the scope and time for personal development; the time to mature as individuals and in their roles as neo circus performers. A great deal of emphasis is placed on the students own creative ability and on encouraging an independent and open approach to their own work. (Danshgskolan, 2007. Bachelor Programme in Neo Circus. Extract from the Programme Syllabus. Retrieved 30th November 2008 from www.danshogskolan.se.)

Eagleton, discussing idealist culture in The Ideology of the Aesthetic says that it speaks the body, but rarely speaks of it, unable as it is to round upon its own enabling conditions (1990, p.264). This is precisely the sort of procedure I suggest would thrust new circus or neo circus into real newness, that it speak of its own enabling conditions.

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Why a person chose to be a circus performer and not a chef or lawyer or Formula One racing driver is of the utmost importance here and is a question that will distinguish the circus performance artist for example from the corporate circus artiste. No matter how culturally disparate their productions they do have one thing in common the circus act which acts upon another. In what follows I will suggest that circus is often a way of organising an otherwise unmanageable excess that, prior to circus, threatened the organism it emerged from. The choice of circus then was one that could be a safe substitute for that excess but conditioned by certain formal/aesthetic laws or techniques that rendered it non-threatening. The excessive and deathly drives of anorexia, compulsively risky sexual encounters, heroin addiction and psychotic breakdown are all instances of such unmanageable, life-threatening excesses. I will propose that circus artists and students often disavow and repress what brings their circus act to actuality and that the result is that most circus production remains trapped in an infantile position. I propose a shift to its motivations, to what is latent to it, to what drives it and my contention is that there is a deeper demand within it than the need for applause. This is the aim this thesis is driving towards. To discover what it is that drives someone to choose as their aim in life, their way to make their living, an aim so physically dangerous to that life and to describe the ways in which that person denies and obfuscates it.

1.3. The Object of Circus

The circus number or act is the culmination of the training of a circus performer, a crystallisation of the desire to do circus. For example, at the end of three years in circus school a juggler must present an act as her thesis. She is the subject that has produced this circus object which, upon entering the market she must sell in order to make a living. However she must not think of herself as the object to be bought. However there are instances in which she can feel that

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her subjectivity or ownership of her product is denied and that, because of the markets' demands the only successful route is to allow herself to be treated as an object of exchange. It is the difference between becoming what she has to become in order to be bought, and becoming what she wants to become in order to make her life. In a discussion of Cirque Du Soleil, the most profitable, successful and widely recognised exponent of New Circus, Sugarman describes how performers can be replaced, like machine parts, during the long runs. (2002, p.438) and how Each productionlike an automobile modelreturns its investment through reproduction. (Ibid., p.439). In this example it is clear that an artist does not own the work and that they themselves are fungible, treated as instruments within the machinery of the Cirque. This would seem consistent with a description of a circus artist as an object of exchange, or, in other words a commodity. In the realms of the pop video, corporate entertainment and product placement the circus artist appears as a peripheral, aesthetic extension of a product extrinsic to themselves. The act, their act is no longer theirs because, qua commodity, their aesthetic qualities, desirability, skill have become merely reflections of the aesthetic qualities, desirability and skill of the product whose status they are meant to supplement; the car, the mobile phone, the millionaire whose birthday party they perform for. Analogously their presence in Cirque Du Soleil could be understood as that of the commodity whose purpose is to enhance the status and therefore profitability of the Cirque. Writing of Karl Marx Eagleton suggests that the commodity's value is eccentric to itself, its soul or essence displaced to another commodity whose essence is similarly elsewhere, in an endless deferral of identity. (1990, p.208) This is not to say that the artist does not profit from such an arrangement. It is well known that a days work in the corporate sector pays more (per hour) than working in a circus or a theatre. There can be no objection to a hard working artist being paid well for their labour. However if profit becomes the motive for the act then this merely affirms the dominance of the market on the life of an artist as object and as instrument of the other's desire, the other in this

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instance being the product he/she is paid to endorse and the aim of that desire being, presumably profit. The psychoanalytic structure that most conforms to this is the formula for perversion. My question here is: does profit as primary motive rob the subject of ownership over the act as material extension of subjectivity and in the process rob them of a part of their subjectivity? Freire sees this difference between subject and object in education also. Students as patient receivers, awaiting a donation of knowledge (2010, p.39) are students as objects who adapt or adjust to their context, rather than subjects integrating themselves into their context by both adapting and being able to transform their context via critical choices (Ibid., p.4). In this scenario the student demands the donation of circus knowledge in the form of a trick, shape, or sequence. Consequently the identity of the artist is endlessly deferred, for it has become a mere reflection of whatever commodity it happens to be endorsing at the time. This commodity, whether it be a car, soft drink or pop star borrows those qualities of exoticism, gorgeousness, skill, novelty, magnificence, danger, display, beauty, action, spectacle mentioned above for its own ends, reducing the artist to a means, an object to be manipulated to that means, not an end in themselves. They become just another commodity narcissistically reflecting another's value and therefore far from authentic, far from being for itself. Here we find the artist moved around the stage/screen/image rather like, what I have heard circus artists called in opera, warm props. In these instances the artist has become merely a material. One does not listen to a material, one manipulates it, bends it to ones will you dont have a chat with a lump of clay asking it whether it would rather be a pot or plate today, one simply urges it into the object or shape one has in mind. If you are planning to sell a lot of pots then that object-shape you have in mind must conform to the markets' demands. This is the sense in which I am using the word object. The rights of this material, in this instance the circus body and its spectacular skill, I propose, must always remain the property of the subject.

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2.1 Literature Review

One of the most current historical accounts of circus is Helen Stoddart's Rings of Desire: Circus history and representation (2000) which begins with a comprehensive history of circus and its social impact in order to demonstrate in the second half of the book the various ways it has been appropriated and represented in the mediums of fiction and film. In Circus Bodies (2005) Peta Tait's agenda is how gender stereotypes have either been reinforced or subverted by circus since the nineteenth century. She concludes with a phenomenological survey of its visceral impact on the audience and the possibility that it opens up instances of sensory exchange where words are not necessary. Her article Body Memory in Muscular Action on Trapeze (2004) continues this emphasis by exploring the internal phenomenology of the trapeze act via interviews with the circus artists themselves and in so doing brings the subject of circus back into the equation. Of the recent papers and articles written specifically about new circus Ana Sanchez-Colberg's Making The Invisible Visible: We: Implicated and Complicated is the only one to take the circus subject as its starting point. Significant is that the paper delineates the process by which circus students make the leap from performing to creative artists (Sanchez-Colberg, 2007) and lies at the interstice of academic study and artistic research. This is the only account I have found in the contemporary literature on new circus that places the subject at the heart of the discussion and this is due to it being based on a practice of using language to voice the physical materials being used, and of metaphorization. Papers such as Robert Sugarman's The New Circus (2002) and the recent Introduction to Contemporary Circus (Purovaara 2012) are socio-historical accounts which, from the point of view of a circus artist, again place circus at a distance as an object of study. From within the circus, La Fdration europenne des coles de cirque professionelles (FEDEC) publishes manuals on various circus disciplines, but the methodology is one of repetition and rote mimicry, they are a donation of knowledge and so again, differ from the approach in this study. Pierre Bouissac's Semiotics at The Circus (2010) shares

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with Making The Invisible Visible and Body Memory in Muscular Action on Trapeze a closer link to the artists themselves, by examining their modes of practice, presentation and locomotion as part of their way of life, so explores how they impact on social space and comment upon it. The contribution this thesis thus makes to the knowledge about circus is that it comes purely from the perspective of the artist and takes into account the psychoanalytic proposition that, above all, it is the body that thinks, enjoys and desires.

2.2. Psychoanalytic Literature

This investigation into the circus subject began with Freud and then found certain important revisions of his concepts in Klein, Winnicot and the British object relations school that could be used to construct a methodology appropriate to the thematic and context of circus and the body that would speak about it. However, since circoanalysis had two practices a circoanalysis, the uncovering and critical production of knowledge across a wide base of subjects and the development of a treatment, circotherapy, for some of those subjects, designed to provide symptom relief and greater access to unconscious creative forces foreclosed or repressed by the demands of the circus it was necessary to research both psychoanalysis as written by analysts and the critical discourse that it has provoked with philosophers and cultural theorists. The main analysts employed are Freud, Klein, Winnicot, Laplanche, Bollas and Lacan. The main theorist employed is iek, with support from Arendt, Butler and Cavarerro. The engagement with iek opened up the Lacanian corpus in a way that privileged Lacan as the theorist of choice for the practice of circotherapy. Lacan appropriates Hegel, Heidegger, Kant and Saussurian theories of language as system for his own project of delivering, in his seminars, a theory that follows the very process of the unconscious itself and in doing so leaves pedagogic clarity at the door. I had thought that Lacan was therefore not going to be helpful in my attempt to bring non-academic circus artists and teachers to an

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understanding of their primary motivations and the secondary considerations of the market that I believed rob their actions and productions of their revelatory potential. However I had a gut instinct that it was Lacan who should guide me in the last part of my research. Therefore I decided to become an analysand in a Lacanian analysis for the last two years of the research and it was here that I began to understand the importance of the seminars for the methodology.

3. Key terms adopted and how they may be adapted for circus 3.1. Satisfaction
Our ability to inhabit social reality can be disturbed by the gravitational pull of wishful forces. What Freud is trying to explain are pathological perturbations in how these people are living. That is, he sees people who are failing to flourish, and he sets out to give a psychological account of why that is. On his account, neurotics fail to live well because they themselves turn away from reality. (Lear, 2005, p.151-153)

Something is preventing the neurotic on Freuds couch from flourishing, from being satisfied. Is something preventing the circus arts from flourishing? Is it neurotic? Dissatisfied? By studying neurotics Freud sought to have a clearer understanding of the normal. He understood that we all passed through neurotic moments without actually being stuck in a neurotic structure and that by studying extreme cases of the illness he could understand how and why we may or may not be living fulfilled lives. In this way the particularities of a given pathology, once confirmed to have similarities across a broad range of subjects could give an insight into the universal condition of being human. Although not classed as a neurosis, his discussion of our everyday nonpathological perversion explains this clearly:

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No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim; and the universality of this finding is in itself enough to show how inappropriate it is to use the word perversion as a term of reproach. (Freud, 2001b, p.304)

In the present study I ask whether the extreme choice of a circus artist illuminates something about our own choice in making a living, making a life. By extreme, I mean a life choice that either directly confronts the possibility of organic death, in the case of the high flying aerialist, or the more symbolic death of failure, in the case of the juggler who, if he drops a ball, confirms, for all to see that he has failed. By allowing the subject to speak, free associate and recount/explore their dreams Freud sought to uncover the desires/wishes that were being prevented satisfaction and in consequence cure the ailments, in the form of symptoms that had occurred due to the build-up of tension generated by those unfulfilled wishes. These unfulfilled wishes found their partial, distorted expression in dreams as well as in symptoms, jokes and slips of the tongue. In a similar fashion, by giving the circus artist a voice, I hoped to discover what was preventing a full emergence of what, I intuited, circus was really about. This subject matter of circus that I was supposing existed was the matter I believed was being withheld, or worse still foreclosed. It was analogous to the unfulfilled wish of the neurotic. Anna O, a patient of Dr. Josef Breuer with whom Freud wrote Studies on Hysteria coined this technique the talking cure (Ibid., p.13). Breuer discovered that not only did talking about her fantasies momentarily relieve her of her mental confusion but
It was actually possible to bring about the disappearance of the painful symptoms of her illness, if she could be brought to remember under hypnosis, with an accompanying expression of affect, on what occasion and in what connection the symptom had first appeared. (Freud, Ibid., p.13)

Freud soon left suggestion behind and focused instead on developing a quality of listening that inspired a cathartic quality of speech from the analysand. The

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cathartic procedure which, in Breuer's technique was so bound up with the hypnotic state, was to become an independent process in Freud's. (Ibid, p.22) This brings me to quotation from Lear above. The reality he is writing about is the reality of an external world that may not conform to our wishful fantasies, a reality that can be deeply at odds with our own internal ideas of what we want. Indeed Lear speaks of the gravitational pull of wishful forces. The idea, or fantasy needs release or realising somehow; its pressure is insistent and if it cannot find an outlet, an object to latch onto in the real world then it will seek an internal one as a compromise. Conversely there may well be an internal obstacle or conflict preventing the subject's satisfaction, because the idea or fantasy proves incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality. (Ibid., p.24) It is my contention that ideas of reality and fantasy are contiguous in the circus act. There is without doubt something fantastic about circus, but also it cannot get any more real. When the flying trapeze artist lets go of the trapeze, flies for a moment and is then caught safely by another body, not only does this embody a fantasy of flight (both for the artist and the audience) it is also a material and indisputable reality.

3.2. Repression
This conflict between reality and fantasy, or the real world and desire, experienced as discomfort, finds its temporary solution in repression, the essence of which is to put something unpleasurable out of one's conscious mind. The repressed idea continues however to exert its pressure from the unconscious, forever on the look-out for an opportunity of being activated (Freud, 2001b, p.27) and it takes energy to keep it at bay. It is thus a defensive procedure to keep unpleasurable contents/conflicts out of sight and (conscious) mind. However in the hysterical emergence of the symptom repression can be said to have partially failed. The symptom emerges then as a disguised and unrecognisable substitute for what had been repressed. (Ibid., p.27)

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3.3. Symptom
In this way the symptom can be seen as a compromise formation in which the libido finally succeeds in forcing its way through to real satisfaction though one which is extremely restricted and scarcely recognisable as such. (Freud, 1975, p.540-541). Later on in the same essay, Freud declares that The kind of satisfaction which the symptom brings has much that is strange about it. (Ibid., p.546) meaning that pleasure can be found in the most apparently unpleasurable things. The symptom it seems, operates then as a metaphor which from the Greek metapheiren means the carrying over of meaning, and the talking cure could then be said to be a technique that seeks to find and interpret the metaphors in speech that indirectly carry over the meanings of the symptom. The purpose of therapy then, from the Greek to attend to, would be to attend to the meanings carried over by that metaphor. In this way Freud could trace in it the remains of some kind of indirect resemblance to the idea that was originally repressed. (Freud, 2001b, p.27) This was the repressed idea I was aiming for in this research. Circus artists may not have circus as their symptom, nor as a dream/fantasy/unfulfilled wish, they may not be compelled or obsessed or neurotic but they may well have found a way of so limpidly describing, enacting or elucidating their symptoms, in the symptom's own language of metaphor, not to have to suffer from them or be subject to them. The circus act, in my view, is a description of the symptom. Taken to its limit I would then propose that the circus act is a description of certain psychoanalytic concepts in material space, given that the symptom occurs on the threshold of the somatic and psychic and is presented to an other. So, not only may psychoanalysis have something to give to circus, by way of clarification or unconcealing but circus itself may have something to give to psychoanalysis by way of exposition, materialisation.

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4. Circoanalysis 4.1 Rationale for a methodology bringing circus into a discourse with psychoanalysis
Pleasure, play, dream, myth, scene, symbol, fantasy, representation: these are no longer to be conceived of as supplementary matters, aesthetic adornments to the proper business of life, but as lying at the very root of human existence.Human life is aesthetic for Freud in so far as it is all about intense bodily sensations and baroque imaginings, inherently significatory and symbolic, inseparable from figure and fantasy. (Eagleton, 1990, p.262)

The discipline of circus and the practise of psychoanalysis are brought together in the role of circotherapist to create a methodology specific to this research. Circoanalysis is the term I give to the entire project and denotes the theoretical aspect while also subsuming circotherapy as the practice. In a direct transposition of the psychoanalytic encounter between analyst and analysand, the circus artist/student is given the opportunity with the circotherapist to explore the personal connections with their craft that may have been foreclosed by the demands of both training and the market. That psychoanalysis is a theory of what drives us and is an analysis of the psychosomatic manifestations of that which prevents us fulfilling our desires is an important issue for this research. It implies that it is, like circus, a materialist discipline rather than an abstract or conceptual one. Given that the artist/student of circus is rarely also an academic who is versed in abstract conceptualising I propose that they might respond better to a psychoanalytic than a semiotic, philosophical or cultural analysis. This would then be to work with them on their own terms, using their own language and narratives. Terms such as symptom, repression, fantasy and pleasure are used in circoanalysis both as lenses through which to view the circus subject and as tools employed to aid that subject to flourish and succeed on its own terms. The circotherapist is then someone who encourages the subject to express themselves,

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their subjectivity. Circotherapy provokes an engagement with the self's desire/demands rather than those of a director/trainer/choreographer/writer who seeks to impose their own demands/desires onto the circus subject. It allows subjects to be the material/instrument of their own desire, if they can first uncover it. When a performer asks a director to come to work with them on their own material they have reached a point where satisfaction is not enough anymore or where the repetition of what was once pleasurable no longer delivers the same satisfaction and they have no idea why. So to the question Why psychoanalyse circus? or Why circotherapy?. Is Circus ill, neurotic, unhappy, does it have a problem? In my experience as a director, artists can reach a point wherein pleasure is no longer enough, the point where enjoyment comes into question, where they do not know why they are (still) doing the same thing. A circus act is indeed a symptom if you dont know why youre doing it. Critical thinking then arises because of a problem, an impasse. Circoanalysis is an analysis of that block, that problem, the realisation that the act might have something in common with the symptom. The interpretative procedure of circotherapy is not the same as Freudian psychoanalysis in that it does not seek to cure the symptom, but rather produce knowledge about it, to accommodate it, incorporate it into ones conscious narrative, allowing a limited access to the desire that the symptom masks with its opaque metaphors and theatrical disguises; the result of which is, not happiness necessarily, but a productive compromise, a way of enlisting difficulty, friction and impossibility to the task of creation. In order for there to be a practice called circotherapy then, there must be a theory that is made up of certain fundamental propositions: i) That there is a circus unconscious that is founded through repression, disavowal or foreclosure of certain traumatic elements i.e. that there are defence mechanisms or negations at play in the production and the choice of circus and that these can be worked with in the circothera-

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peutic situation via a transference with the circotherapist, which is a prototype for the relation with the audience as other, ii) That at a certain stage of its development circus technique/creation is symptomal; that it operates, structurally, just like the symptom and that by talking about the symbolic nature of its manifestation (the act or idea for the act) one can get to the real root of it, not to cure it but to understand and manage it as a choice not a compulsion so that the act is less involuntary acting-out and more of a conscious decision iii) That the circus act, qua symptom, is addressed to an other and is therefore relational. (Lacan, 1991b, p.157) iv) That in this relation there is a transference and that the circotherapist stands in the place of that other of the symptom. (Brousse in Feldstein, Fink, Jaanus 1995, p.103) v) In dissolving, working through the symbolic components, the ideas of the symptom/circus act, we bare the real of the drive/what drives the act. Using Ricoeur's On Psychoanalysis (2012) as a guide there are criteria that circoanalysis will adhere to: it will take as its object only that part of experience which is capable of being said ii) the condition for this utterance to be the object of study is that it is said to another person iii) the reality at stake in the research is psychic and not material, thereby placing more importance for example, on fantasy than concrete, positive material iv) the psychic material spoken to another that is selected as important is that which can be used to construct a narrative v) the practice remains in the circus clinic and does not enter the studio, just as the analyst has a consulting room and does not follow the analysand into the bedroom to observe what he speaks about. The i)

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practice remains an analysis of the semantics of desire. Therefore this is a practice involving a subject who speaks about circus. The making of this object, this circus act about whose origins I ask is a primary goal of the research. As I am a professional circus practitioner and educator the encounter with psychoanalysis is not therefore one that is concerned with whether or not its claims are true or false but whether or not its theories and practices are strong enough to be productive in the making of circus. Here I lean on a philosopher who has extensively engaged with psychoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze, who has variously been a proponent (2004, 2006) and an opponent of it with Felix Guattari (2000). Throughout, however, his method has not been one of logical argumentation, for the sake of being right, rather he picks up what is of interest to him and moves on. Instead of discussion, or polemic, philosophy thereby becomes a series of coordinations. (de Bolle, 2010, p.9-10). Circoanalysis seeks to establish a series of coordinates with psychoanalysis. However it would be prudent to state two main objections to the psychoanalytic method which put into perspective circoanalysis' own methods and goals; Karl Popper's contention that it is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific and Grunbaum's argument that the means of gathering information in psychoanalysis does not constitute good scientific research. Popper states that psychoanalysis is such an overarching theory encompassing the totality of human mental activity that it is impossible to refute within its own milieu. Take the example of interpretation; if the interpretation given by the analyst of material supplied by the analysand is accepted, then this is proof of the correctness and success of the procedure; if however the client refuses the interpretation that is meant to lead them forward to the cure, then that must be because they are repressing the painful trauma that the truth of the interpretation provokes and again the analyst is proven correct. Or, a man may have married a woman that resembles his mother, or married a woman who looks nothing like her. In both cases he could be said to be suffering from an unresolved Oedipus complex; in the first instance because he has married a substi-

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tute and in the second because any resemblance to his mother would be unbearable. Both versions corroborate and justify the theory. Grunbaum's objection to psychoanalytic research is that the material supplied in the analytic situation, through free-association, the recounting of dreams and slips of the tongue for example, are all contaminated, in advance by the analyst's presuppositions and adherence to the bank of psychoanalytic constructions. It does not constitute research because the analyst is actively looking for the Oedipus complex, or the fetish/castration anxiety or the mechanics of obsessional neurosis for example. In other words the analyst is always already seeking to coerce the material to conform. In this respect it is not research. (Luytebn, 2005, p.577-578) These objections, valid as they are in the debate over whether or not psychoanalysis is a pseudo-science concern me only to the extent that they help define the parameters of the investigations of circoanalysis. The goal is not to oedipalise the wishes the subject expresses in a session or to actively search for evidence of a particular pathology so that the subject validates psychoanalytic theory. Simon Critchley makes this point rather clear:
To see an artistic thing as the illustration of a theory is to engage in what we might call philosofugal uses of theory, where theory spins out from itself to try and cover the artwork. What we should be attempting, I think, is an artopetal approach where theory is drawn into the orbit of the thing and whatever theoretical reflections are pulled back to the artworks centre of gravity. So, in place of a top-down philosofugal model of the relation of art to theory, Id like to suggest a artopetal model where theory finds some affluence, some contact with the thing and thing finds some contact with the theory which is being used to elucidate it. (Critchley, 2010, p.3)

Therefore it is to treat the subject as a singularity that cannot and should not be indexed as an example of this or that psychic construction. Badiou makes the case for this when for example he cites the scientific experiment as an artificial construction which must be repeatable. opposing it to a clinical experience which concerns a singular subject. Thus no subject is ever the repetition of another. How these statements relate to the subject and listener in the situa-

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tion of the circoanalytic set-up and consequently the artist and spectator in the clinic of the circus performance is that if the concrete situations dealt with are singular and unrepeatable, you can only verify your thinking in a subjective manner, by transmission to others. (Badiou, 2004, p.80-81). This is the transmission that occurs in the form of verbal attestations/confessions given up in the circoanalytic sessions. These can be seen as precursors to the subjective, corporeal enunciations in the form of the act or making offered to the public. What we see in both are relations. Similarly both situations can involve a catharsis. Further support for the analogy between circus and analysis in the context of education comes from Badiou's discussion of the potential links between philosophy, art and education. Again Critchley in discussing the difficult relationship between art and theory suggests that:
perhaps art and theory have adopted a form of triolism, a mnage a trois.....where art and theory might be said to get together collectively around a third term. We have to learn to count to three, then. Maybe even four and five. (Critchley 2008, p.4)

Critchley goes on to say that a contender for that third term is politics. In this research that third term is education.

4.2. The Practices 4.2.1. Phase One: Testing and Laying the Ground for the Methodology
Following the ethnographic immersion in Stockholm that inspired the research topic, the research moved to the circus milieu in London, United Kingdom. Before beginning the first phase of practice I immersed myself further in psychoanalytic theory trying to find themes convergent with my observations of circus practice. This resulted in a questionnaire as a preliminary method for accumu-

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lating information that could form a ground of knowledge that would facilitate the formulation of a methodology I would later call circotherapy. Chapters Two and Three detail this first phase. The questionnaire was divided into three sections i) How did you come to be in circus? ii) Circus Training, iii) Circus Production and is detailed in Chapter Two. These were questions that allowed me to map out a qualitative, context specific and highly contingent topography of the contents of the circus psyche, from which I could then develop the methodology. The participants were artists covering a wide range of styles and contexts that are detailed in Chapter Two. Concurrently the questionnaire was delivered as a series of focus groups for students at Circus Space London to trace the genealogy of their decision to become circus artists. Over three successive years, these focus groups built upon the previous year's findings. The questions became more refined, genealogies more relevant to the nature of the circus artist, participants less reticent to apply a hermeneutics of suspicion to their decisions to make circus. These focus groups were part of their education in the first year of their B.A. Hons in Circus, Autumn, 2009 - 2011. A series of surgeries followed in their second year to explore in detail the genesis and motivation for the act they would produce at the end of that year. My own hermeneutics of suspicion regarding circus as a life choice proved founded and called for a deeper and longer engagement with subjects, resisting the temptation to go into the studio space with them and to hold fast to the methodology of a talking cure. These were not a part of their course, but were optional and introduced to them via a seminar, that was a part of their second year studies, investigating where you are now. These three practices form the material for Chapter Two. My experience in the one-to-one surgeries in the second year of my research prompted me to engage in a personal analysis with a Lacanian analyst for a period of two years. I intended the first year to be a preparation to going into the practical methodology of phase two which involved a one to twenty session programme of circotherapy with students. I planned to continue being

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an analysand while treating students who had become circoanalysands. This research action then, straddled both phases of the research. The possible traumatic, shameful, humiliating or identity-threatening causes of the act seemed manifold, yet they were not yet manifest in the discourses of the subjects in the research. In order to explore whether my interpretations were justified, I turned towards professionals at a point in their creative journeys where they were genuinely interested in asking the question Why circus?, since what had, up till now been self-evident, an assumption not worth challenging, or an enjoyment still doing the trick and therefore unproblematic had now become a question. This is the moment a person becomes an analysand, when there is a crisis of enjoyment. This took the form of one or more conversational interviews which were recorded and transcripted and subjected to a discourse analysis. The absence of such recording techniques in all previous research phases had been due to the fragility of the situation or stage of development of the subjects involved. Recording apparatuses might have been experienced as intrusive, non-conducive to the atmosphere of trust and safety required for subjects with still unstable, uncertain or still-forming circus-egos. The professional interviews coalesced around one crucial point, anxiety, which forms the subject of Chapter Three. In circus students this aspect of their psychic life was disavowed, to the extent that it never appeared in their discourse. The other crucial aspects that did not emerge but which I suspected to be latent or repressed, were sexuality as a driving force, interwoven with the death drive or aggressivity and most crucially, the Other Other as spectator, the crowd, the audience, Other as The Circus. The Other as enabling condition of the act, the Other as the source of anxiety, as an object that is indefinable led me to fully explore the ideas of Jacques Lacan as the psychoanalytic theorist of choice for the final phase of the research methodology of circotherapy.

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4.2.2. Phase Two: Circotherapy The Methodology in Practice

This phase was constituted of a course of circotherapy for graduating students at Circomedia, Bristol in Spring 2012 who were creating their final piece of work i.e. the circus object that would be their starting point for making a living as an artist. As with the second year students in London, they attended a seminar as part of their course, with the option of coming to between one and twenty sessions of circotherapy. These circoanalysands are the subject of discussion in Chapter Four. This also included an intensification of my personal analysis, from two sessions a week to three and a final period of immersion in Lacan's training seminars to facilitate the formulation of a theory and an appraisal of the practice so far. The final aspect of phase two was a return to the thinkers that I had discarded along the way subsequent to my decision to focus on Lacan Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt and Martha Nussbaum in order to formulate my conclusions.

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Chapter Two: Towards the Methodology of Circotherapy

1. Introduction The Questionnaire and the methodologies emerging from it
The interviews with students in Stockholm and my experience of working with them confirmed an originary intuition about the need for artists to express an authentic voice that had been stifled by the physical demands of training and the imperatives of the cultural construct called the circus. In the first six months before starting my first phase of practice, I looked at adopting and adapting elements of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice in order to define a broad definition of circoanalysis as a methodology to produce knowledge about the circus subject; a method analogous to psychoanalysis in that the circoanalysand would talk about, not directly the psyche, but about circus. In order for there to be a practice called circoanalysis then, there had to be a theory that was made up of certain fundamental propositions, as listed in Chapter One. The psychoanalytic research was based around a reading of the symptom, transference, acting out and repetition compulsion in which I found theoretical analogies with the circus act and a way of re-writing these concepts as potential tools of circoanalysis (Freud, 1975, 1997, 2005, 2003, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, Egginton, 2007, Bollas 1987, 2006, Klein 1997, 1998, Lacan 1991a, 1991b, Laplanche and Pontalis 2006, Winnicot 1990, 2005, Philips 2007, iek 2000). Out of this research I produced the questionnaire which professional artists volunteered to respond to as research participants. At the same time the questions therein were adapted to create student focus groups. Professional responses and student discussion groups thus occurred simultaneously. The answers submitted by professional artists provided evidence of material and relations that may not yet have been thought through by the student. This allowed me therefore, with students, to have in mind that such things were possibly latent

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in their discourse and this guided the way I conducted my research with them. I discuss the rationale and genesis of the questions, that are in italics, below. What are your earliest memories of doing circus like activity as a child? i.e. climbing trees, jumping on the bed etc..... In my observations of the training hall in Stockholm during open training time, a time where students could have their own time to play and develop their technique, I could not help but notice the similarities with a children's adventure playground. People climbed, threw things, swung, jumped, span and they walked precariously high pathways to the approving sounds of their peers who egged them on. Dangerous, daring things were permitted and encouraged within certain limits prescribed by circus training. Experimentation was prescribed not prohibited. This first question was designed then to see whether my observations correlated with the experience of circus artists. The two examples I gave were from my own personal experience, two instances I experienced as a child which corresponded to some of the actions I went through training as a circus artist. Are there things you remember enjoying, that although not precisely like circus gave you the same sensations as circus does now? This experience, of climbing trees or jumping on the bed, gave me a sense of joy as a child. This joy, this enjoyment was something I observed in the training hall. Free from the gaze of the trainer, from the demands of a specific class, this felt like recreational time, play-time. My intuition was that circus training in this type of free space was akin to the games played by children when their parents were not watching. I chose the word sensation because I was interested in something direct, not mediated through something else, associated with a specific goal or symbolic achievement, but purely pleasure, satisfaction. Are there things that you were forbidden to do which you now feel able to do in circus? I was reminded, watching the open training, of the link between pleasure and

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prohibition, more specifically the prohibition we experience as children of experimenting with things that may cause us harm, such as walking on high walls, or with things that are deemed inappropriate from an adult's perspective, such as screaming too loudly or showing one's genitals in public or playing ball inside the house. In this training space people played with knifes, with fire, took their clothes off, hurt themselves, climbed ropes high into the ceiling, swung on trapezes till they were parallel to the ground and threw many balls up into the air. As an observer, it looked like they were trying to disprove the theses of their parents that these things were both dangerous and unacceptable. Here, in the circus, these activities were both cleansed of their danger and thoroughly accepted as good research practice. There was then a sense of joyful rebellion in the space, that circus was a parent that could house/contain the artist's desire to perform these enjoyable actions. In a way, the prohibition of the real parents/caregivers was put in parentheses, bracketed. Can you remember any dreams you had, before you came to circus, that you feel are linked to your desire to do circus? If the first three questions sought some form of correspondence to my own intuitions and experience, here I was looking for material that I had no reference for. I was specifically looking for possible motivations, in the unconscious formations of dreams, that the subjects of the questionnaire had not previously noticed. Since the dream was, for Freud, the royal road to the unconscious, it seemed that inviting participants to consider their dreams was the best way to start uncovering unconscious genealogies. Do you have any circus dreams now? What was interesting for me in this question was whether doing circus effectively removed circus-like dreams uncovered in the previous question. That is to say, whether the desire to do circus was still being manifested in the subject's dreams now that their desire was being fulfilled.

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As a child, did you feel an affinity to a particular image/text that may have brought you to circus? An image in a circus, a superhero, an action hero, a gymnastic display, a sculpture, novel, poem etc.... This question was based on the psychoanalytic concept of identification. The idea of circoanalysis is that it would treat the circus psyche, that it would have as its area of enquiry the circo-psychic elements of an artist's discourse. This would be to posit a circus ego built up of identifications subsequent to those that made up the subject's ego proper, as posited by psychoanalysis. This is what will ultimately differentiate the practice of circoanalysis from psychoanalysis and allow the subject a space to give an account of itself within circus. The examples I gave here were, again, derived from personal experience and observation. Upon reflection, these examples may have led the participants to respond in such a way as to prove my intuitions as evidenced by the large amount of responses that quoted superheroes as ideal images. Describe the moment/or moments when you decided to do circus and the reasons leading up that to that decision. This was designed to crystallise answers previously responded to into specific historical moments. Again, upon reflection, the question is placed strategically and again may have served to provoke the answers I was looking for, an autocriticism which I feel reflects the objections to psychoanalysis as a scientific method by Grunbaum and Popper mentioned in the previous chapter. Who, from your past, would you like to perform your circus to and why? This has to do directly with the concept of transference. If it was my intuition that the circus act is directed towards a specific, repressed other, that it was a working through of a difficult, unresolved relation, this question hoped to uncover purport of the relation between the artist and spectator or the student and trainer, which is its predecessor.

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Even if you repeat some of your previous answers, list a minimum of ten incidences, images, people, dreams, texts etc....that you believe may have contributed to your being in circus now. This concludes the first section of the questionnaire regarding the genealogy of circus within the subject. Part Two was constructed at a point in the research where I intended to interview and analyse circus teachers and trainers as well as students and artists. The intention was to provide an overview of a pedagogic situation that I felt was in need of a circoanalytic contribution. However, during the research this proved to be an area of research that would merit a dissertation in itself. Consequently the answers given to these questions did not prove relevant to the emerging methodology. The relationship between the subject and training or the specific trainer as an authority emerged as a micro-instance of the problematic between the subject and the circus as a whole. Describe what you feel to be the difference between training and teaching or being trained and being taught. Be specific to your own discipline. Within a circus education which one of these is most prevalent? How did you come to choose your discipline? How much was this your choice? What is it about your discipline that makes you suited to it? Physically and emotionally. Do you feel that you impact against or meld with circus technique? Describe your relationship to pain and how this has changed over training? What is/was your relationship like with your primary trainer/teacher? How could it be/have been better? Describe the developing relationship between you and your own body during the process of training. Describe how the changes in your body affect(ed) you. Do (did) these changes conform to a specific ideal that you held before or has (did) the training produced something unexpected?

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The third and last section of the questionnaire sought to produce some form of conclusion for the participants, focusing on the form called circus itself, the object they produced or sought to produce. As such it denoted the downward, or sideways slide into metaphor discussed in the Introduction and asked the participants to be aware of and compartmentalise the formal structures of discourse, for example distinguishing between the use of adjectives and verbs. What are the main adjectives you would use to describe circus in general? What are the main verbs you would use to describe circus in general? What do you think your circus act does? What are the spectators for you? What are you for the spectator? Who do you think your circus act does? Who are the spectators for you? Who are you for the spectator? Here I was hoping for some clues into whether or not participants could differentiate between the what of circus and the who of circus, in other words between the object and the subject that produced it. The instructions preceding this last series of questions was that they should reply intuitively and/or poetically/metaphorically should they see fit. The invitation to respond to the questionnaire was a call for research partners in the dissertation. The responses of Layla, Natalie, Yam and Helen C., Helen D., AS, CW, HT and AA are used below. Layla is a devised theatre practitioner with the U.K. Theatre Collective Shunt, who produces her own circus work outside of the group. Natalie is a handstand artist who studied at Circus Space London and has experience of both the corporate market and of contemporary circus creation. Yam is an aerialist with her own company that creates both cabaret, corporate and narrative based contemporary circus. Helen C. and HT are recent graduates of Circomedia Bristol. Helen D. is a contemporary dancer who came to the circus later in her career. AS, CW and AA are professional aerialists working in both traditional and contemporary formats of circus. The

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total number of respondents was fifteen, only two of which were male. The eight chosen here, only one of which is male, were chosen for inclusion in the dissertation because of the clarity of their answers. These questions were put to focus groups at Circus Space, B.A. in Circus, London, as part of their degree in circus arts. These focus groups developed across three consecutive years and the findings shown here come from the last year (2011) in which I incorporated writing exercises to distil the nature of the discussions and which allowed them to formulate their own, personal responses out of those discussions. The students were then asked to supply this information anonymously for use in the dissertation, using pseudonyms to help them feel comfortable writing material they might not have wanted to share with the group. The following pseudonyms are from this focus group; PartyBoy69, RocketLauncherSaucyTits, Myrto, Gonzalo, Hazy, The Baker, ZROCK, Squibbs, Bez, Paula, mdg4000, HHM. In their second year, after the first year focus groups, a second seminar was held where the discussion revolved around how they felt they had changed since our first meeting a year before. In this year they had to devise a piece of performance to be presented to an in-house audience of teachers, fellow students and invited friends. In the seminar one-to-one surgeries were offered following the psychoanalytic investigations they had experienced in the focus groups. These were also held and developed across three consecutive years. Here I use Fabrizio's ideas (2010) for his performance as an example.

2.1. The First Question: What brought you to Circus? Negotiating between the Trick and the Word
Circus is a form of non-linguistic embodied knowledge:
Performances on trapeze are created by muscular bodies with a facility that has been termed muscular memory in the martial arts (Anderson 1998). The phrase muscular memory or muscle memory (Grayland 2004) is also widely used in conversation by

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young aerial performers in Australia to describe how the body acquires bodily skills and heightened physical action through practice and repetition. Therefore.....a muscular body can be trained to develop a memory for action on its own accord. (Tait, 2004, p.1)

This knowledge arises out of a mimetic relationship to the trick, this particular action which comprises the basic vocabulary of circus and the building blocks of the circus artefact. If this artefact is an object, then it must be one made by a subject. This embodied knowledge of the circus artist is the knowledge of the trick, the knowledge of the object, of themselves as object. The participants express pleasure and satisfaction in learning these tricks constant excitement and anticipation. Physical pleasure from the aftermath of stretching (PartyBoy69, 34-35) excitement and fear of learning something new sends an adrenaline rush through my body. When I achieve or excel a goal, I feel emotionally satisfied. (RocketLauncherSaucyTits 71-72), Mentally I feel pleasure through circus when I learn a new trick, (The Baker 157158), Satisfaction for me is also sort of aching from the day before (ZROK 266-267). Critchley writes that critical or creative thinking arises, not from pleasure but from disappointment. These thinkings include religion and philosophy (Critchley, 2008, p.1). The client arrives on the couch precisely because he/she is not satisfied, because they are searching for some form of knowledge/truth. I propose that the subject comes to circus for exactly the same reason. The focus group was concerned with producing some form of linguistic knowledge/truth and was a compulsory part of their course. The surgery and questionnaire were optional and therefore constituted an active decision on the part of the individuals to question their practice. To enrich and develop this knowledge I was looking to the subject to see what it knew about itself. This was a return to the subject of circus to produce subjective truths about it that could inform its objective knowledge of itself. If the circus act is already a form of embodied language, a corporeal enunciation, then the languages of psychoanalysis and the philosophers who discuss it are used here to create a meta-language called circoanalytic theory and a meta-

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technique called circotherapy. Theory starts by way of analogy the analogue symptom/circus for example. The technique is then a strict homology the circoanalyst attempts a homology between educator/director and analyst in order to work the student/artist through the position of analysand towards the position of analyst. Natalie, a professional artist who completed the questionnaire describes herself in relation to the audience as the projection surface for their ideals and desires (Natalie, 235). In order to be productive or materially creative this metalanguage/technique about the knowledge of circus needed to be developed within a third term, or, as it were, returned to the body. I did not think it useful for the artist or art-form if it stayed in the realm of theory. This third term, this re-insertion into the body happened within the context of an educational procedure that privileged self-knowledge, not the knowledge implanted by the trainer, as a way of understanding the capacities of the circus body in relation to the world the focus group, the surgery and further on circotherapy in Chapter Four. Teaching allows for an experience of discovery, so that the student is led towards an answer but not handed it directly. Teaching describes a journey. Bollognini, discussing the point of interpretation in analysis remarks that solutions should not be formulated until the patient is so close to the solution that it would take but a short step for him to reach it himself. (2004, p.33) This educational procedure produces a circus object that knows enough about its place in the world of artefacts to directly effect its environment with that knowledge via transmission or transference. The goal would be that the object be transformative without the need of the meta-language anymore (Bollas, 1987). With regards to the technique, just as I as director, choreographer or teacher try to position myself in the place of circoanalyst, to facilitate a transformation in the artist, so the artist must work toward the position of circoanalyst, so that the object they create with themselves is a transformative one for each spectator. Circus is call and response, it gives signs for when to applaud, it expects reactions from the audience. Natalie wrote And when I do a lot of shows, they

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are dummies who always sit there, always in the same place, always react at the same time, as expected, like the laughter in American sitcoms. They become part of the show without knowing it. They become props. (229-231). The same applies to being trained in circus; one looks for signs of approval and one takes note of the signs of discontent in the trainer. So, students talking about their circus rather than doing it may not have been in a situation that they were used to. When an audience does not respond when they want them to it is somehow experienced as a failure and it is this point of failure that both circoanalysis and psychoanalysis is interested in. This silence, this failure denotes a problematic, a question. In psychoanalysis this failure is denoted by a loss of words, a part of a dream they can't remember or slips of the tongue. The symptom is first of all the silence in the supposed speaking subject. (Lacan, 1991b, p.11) The trainer who instructs via mimesis, who instructs that the student copy to reproduce the trick successfully, provides ready-made answers to the circus discipline in the form of tricks/techniques
It is because the largest part of the circus education focuses on learning tricks, and teaching a trick involves a student who learns and a teacher who instructs and doesnt really allow for a shared process of discovery. The aim is clear, so there is someone who defines the path. If the aim, the trick wasnt so clear, the teacher student relationship would be more research oriented. (Natalie, 141143.)

The analyst on the other hand would pose the discipline itself as a question, as a problematic and allow the student to define their own path towards the aim. Silence, from the analyst, rather than instruction on the one hand, and silence from the analysand, denoting a question, on the other. The call-responsecircuit of circus is disrupted. Natalie had daydreams of not feeling the pressure of social expectations. Of not feeling the pressure of my own expectations. (51-52). Consequently here I was experimenting with how it would feel to be judgement free, to not produce an expectation from the participants, to be a CCTV whose recording

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would only be watched and interpreted once the participants had left the scene of the confession and to whom they could deliver whatever vitriol or love they chose, without fear. Prior to this research, Par, in an interview in Stockholm stated this clearly,
so many eyes watching and judging and people I know I cant juggle with, so I need to stay away from there need to create a safe atmosphere [pause] when I juggle, it feels good but still there are thoughts in the back of my head, comparing myself with other jugglers. (Par, 26-28)

Comparison and judgement are staples of rote training. The efforts of the student are measured up against a model. Getting to the perfect balance in a handstand is like finding the result of a mathematic equation. (Natalie, 33) The handstand is a particular shape which the student must conform to, measure up against. The aim is clear, like in a school test, when it comes to circus tricks there is a clear right and wrong. (29-30). Therapy in this instance would listen to the artist/student used to being seen, being told and not heard. It would be an attempt to make some space for the subject that has traditionally been prepared to be the admirable, obediently passive object of circus who aims to get the trick right, not its active subject, the subject that actually creates circus. It would be a space without right or wrong. I propose that one does not create this space. Its always already there, it only needs evacuating, of all the external demands that hem in it, de-liberate it. To do this then the analyst should respect those silences which contest legibility, understanding. Those silences are the most useful tools for clearing that space of empty speech, the speech that seeks to paranoically fill space, to cover up its own inadequacy. A speech that seeks, with sophistry, rhetoric or the fireworks of poetry to distract from the immediacy of lived experience. Words, like the circus act, can either fill space or clear it for the new to emerge. Or, to put it as Bollas does, something we existentially know but have not consciously thought. (Bollas, p.29-39, 1987)

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iek explains the difference between what the early Lacan in the 1940's1960's called full and empty speech. Empty speech may well convey factual accuracy but full speech, even in the form of lies, unwittingly articulates the truth. It is a speech in which subjective truth reverberates. This is analogous to the philosophical opposition between inauthentic knowledge and authentic truth, where the former is a form of objectifying knowledge which does not take into account the very specific position from which the subject speaks and the latter is where a truth appears that one is existentially engaged with and affected by (iek, 2008b, p.49-50). Layla seems to be in this subjective position when she describes who the spectators are for her A void of potential revolution. A sea of possibilities. An abyss of suspended life forms. Trapped, congregational, worshippers, A chorus who provide the harmony. (182-183) It is not just the subject that is affected but the addressee as well. Autobiography is only possible with someone to tell it to, one can reference an I only in a relation to a you: without the you, my own story becomes impossible. (Butler 2005, p.32). As Natalie wrote, the spectators are the ones who listen to the story, the ones that have agreed to share this moment with me. The ones that gave me a space to speak. (243-244) Choosing circus means one wants to express or relate or recount through the body. Traditional and much new circus is non-narrative and non-linguistic even though it is replete with signs (Bouissac, 2010). It could be said that it has a challenging relationship to the demands of narrative, to the demand that the act mean something. Often this pressure for the act to mean something is confused with a demand for it to tell a story, which I describe below with Fabrizios performance. What Natalie means I think when she uses the word story is an emotional journey, i.e. as in Butler's quote her own story and when Bollas tries to understand the representation of one's being through object relations as well as narrative content. (1987, p.3). There is a transitivism in the act that bypasses the symbolic when the artist falls down a rope to catch herself, we also feel a direct empathic sensation that bypasses cognition to strike the senses (Tait, 2004, p.2). This explains the difficulty some participants had in

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accounting for what they do in words, since, the act itself is already the account. I am not sure that I can put it into words. I think that if I could use words to describe it then I wouldn't need to do the act itself. (Helen C., 157158). The circoanalytic procedure would hope to bring forth these words that she currently cannot use, in the hope that the act would be informed by them, rather than cured. The first task of the circoanalyst then would be as a witness, an other, to allow the confessional relation to establish itself in the circoanalytic set-up with the question What brought you here? Natalie described a moment where I jumped off quite a high wall and everyone in the street stopped to stare cause they thought that I must be hurt (22) as a memory which precipitated her decision to do circus, invoking the importance of the spectator, the attention that one can receive by doing something dangerous and the feeling that it provokes in this case concern. She continued with (I think that this is not my memory but something my parents told me later) (22-23). This was not the case with Layla who perceived a different sort of other as an inspiration I had lots of dreams involving fear, about someone else having power over me, the power to harm, and I think my desire to do circus was partly about wanting to be powerful and in control. (38-39) This is to state that in the first instance, the analogy between circoanalysis and psychoanalysis begins with the symptom, in that one must account for the appearance of circus/the symptom in the subject. This is done by delineating its history, finding the gaps or discontinuities in that narrative and the identifications or fixations from the past that produce it in the present. Natalie identified with the image of a girl doing handstands on a bike (66). Identification works by adoption of admired characteristics and all participants found it easy to recount their inspirations. AA cited her boyfriend at age 16, Sunshine Dan....he looked like a clown and was very athletic. I was so inspired by his vitality and creativity I wanted to improve myself in these ways. (32-33). Yam wrote of being full of admiration to women who have a job which is physical like dancers, Olympic games participates, aerobic teachers etc. (32-35). Gonzalo quoted superheroes such as Spiderman (as did several other participants) clarifying

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that he did not want to be a superhero but have the skills of that he has and use it in circus,(206) or martial arts experts, from Shaolin Monks to Bruce Lee, (Bez, 306-307) or seemingly random images which only retrospectively they identified as inspiring them in their choice a duo in a Leopard costume, a woman doing a jump in a big red skirt. A guy with a burning torch. (Natalie, 64-65) or even more imagistically AS wrote Punch in the stomach....Relationship that caused a big change in my life....Knife in the table. (105-130). A subject goes into analysis to find the meaning of his or her symptom, which is always a question addressed to another; Why am I suffering? This begs the questions What do I want, if not this? What am I asking of the world? which is another way of asking Who am I in this world? For the purposes of circoanalysis these are reformulated as questions pertaining to what it is like to be a being-in-circus. The tools the listener has to bring to the situation are empathy and suspended judgement. This approach leads to an identification with the subject and an attempt to immerse oneself in the subject's world (Bolognini, 2004, p.53). The dialogic aspect of the immersion is that the researcher as educator becomes an educatee, freed from the straight-jacket of the one who knows which has echoes with Lacan's subject supposed to know. (Lacan, 1998, p.230-43, Freire, 2008, p.43). Bollas speaks of the moment when the analysand goes quiet, is lost for words and remarks that psychoanalysts need to share in the construction of this pre-verbal world through the analyst's silence, emphatic thought and the total absence of didactic instruction or else risk a perplexed and irritated client. (1987, p.26, emphasis mine.). This clearly delineates the provision circoanalysis makes in the education of the artist, since the training of the student is via didactic instruction and mimetic obedience. Badiou makes the point that although psychoanalysis is both a theory and a clinical practice, what should concern the philosopher engaging with it is whether or not it is a thinking, what he describes as a non-dialectical or inseparable unity of a theory and a practice. (Badiou, 2004, p.79). What concerned me then, as a circoanalytic researcher, was whether or not this methodology

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could assist or facilitate a making, the making of the circus act, a making that would be just such an inseparable unity of theory and practice. [D]o, make, repeat, discover, excavate, reflect, push, relish, transform, give, open as AA describes what circus does in its transitive verbs, making it clear that the circus act for her, acts upon something/someone. (59-69). The circus act, in other words, makes something happen to someone, even if that someone is only the artist. This set an important agenda for circoanalysis, that it should free the analytic set-up from what some have called psychoanalysis' narcissistic emphasis solely on the self to re-focus it towards the production of an object that mediates a relation with an other; in the first instance the listener/circoanalyst and consequently the spectators who for RL are people who want to be entertained, have an expectation, will be touched or disappointed or just entertained, be impressed, want to be moved and for Natalie who are an unpredictable bunch of strangers, who go away with what I told them and do with it whatever they please. (254-246) In asking about the personal, singular origins of the circus act in the subject, it is worth taking note that in psychoanalysis the earliest origin we can remember of ourselves, that we can recount is a relation to another; human being begins with a relation. And satisfaction, which both circus act and symptom aim to provide, is evidenced in the first set of quotes from the student focus group when writing about training. As Laplanche points out, satisfaction has to pass through intersubjectivity, i.e. the first relation with the mother who, if she is Winnicot's good enough mother will encourage us to live through her devotion and active adaptation to our needs, as opposed to leave us to die. (Laplanche, 1976, p.60, Winnicot, 2005, p.13-14) These attestations/confessions of what/who led the student to come to circus allowed me to formulate a further series of questions designed to initiate participants into a deeper process of self-analysis, where the emphasis was placed on one's subjective wishes to make circus rather than the external conditions that one is faced with in the process of making; the prescriptions of a preestablished educative programme or the aesthetic delimitation placed on the act

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by the market-place. The response to these questions demonstrated lines of correspondence that could provide a quantifiable index of the motivation or psychic origin of the act that would contribute to a global theory of the desire to do circus. However, circoanalysis is not a totalising theory of the psychology of circus performers. It is a practice that facilitates the understanding of the difference between the interior psychic forces of the desire to do circus and the desire of the other (university or market forces) that impinges and indeed founds desire as such. At this point of the research I was covering Freud, Klein, Winnicot and those psychoanalytic writers that came from this strand of thought, deciding to leave Lacan out of the equation for both pedagogical clarity and for the fact that I just did not understand what he was saying, exciting though it seemed! However, it was becoming clear to me that if I was ever going to explore the relation between interior psychic forces and the forces of the market/university/Circus, I would have to find a way of engaging both with Lacans concept of the big Other and of desire being the desire of the other. (Lacan1991b, p.158) Here again I came to the difference in goal between the scientific and the circoanalytic method. Certainly circus training is conducted under a rigourous mechanistic schema to prevent injury, maximise results and produce a technically adept circus body. This emphasis however can produce subjects who objectify themselves by placing all the burden on the mechanics of the trickperforming-body, rather than the creative capacities of the imagination. Dance and theatre training provide a balance but they are still techniques to be accumulated and used in service of the construction of a successful circus object rather than taught as experiences to be had. Circoanalysis does not aim at efficiency, it rather looks to what fails, what gets missed out as an antidote to the necessarily technical and scientific formality and reproducibility of circus training. So far what seemed to be missing in the discussions was who the audience was to the student, and since, for circoanalysis, the audience is the enabling condition of the circus act, it was a psychic object that spoke loudly in its si-

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lence. The first question analysts, without exception, asked when I told them about my research was what is the transference in the act?

2.2. The Second Question: Who, from your past, would you like to perform your circus to and why? - Transference, Transmission, Transformation
In order to understand who might be unconsciously present in the transference when they performed, I asked the participants to think of whom they would want to perform to if they could. This was another way of asking who the ideal audience would be and a way of uncovering possible projective identifications which might have remained unconscious. This would be when an audience might experience feelings that the performer has but is unaware of or cannot access and so projects them into them, not merely onto them as in straightforward projection. This is a way of compelling the analyst to relive with the analysand the nature of the patient's early life (Bollas, p.2, 1987) Transferences are unconscious and so making the student aware of them was a way for them to clarify their position in relation to the audience. For circoanalysis, it is not so important that the act mean something or drive a narrative. It is concerned with what relation is being established with an audience and whether that is a conscious decision or a compulsive acting out. The majority of participants wished to perform for someone, a peer, teacher, family member or romantic partner, whom they wanted to impress for a variety of reasons. RocketLauncherSaucyTits (RLST) would like every person who doubted me, laughed and thought it was being ridiculous to see me now and when I finish my degree. I would love them to realise they were wrong. Also to earn at least twice as much as them doing half the work and say who's laughing now. (64-67). His girlfriend at the time made fun of him and destroyed my self-confidence and I grew a complex about expressing myself. (62-63). Doing circus appeared to be the result of a wound. In his psyche there was a constellation of people's responses to his desire that carried a highly neg-

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ative charge. At this point I could only hypothesise how his performance would have been if this bundle of negative responses that he held onto was not worked through. Let us say that they were not worked through and he carried this onto the stage and projected this onto/into the public, how would they have felt? Would they have felt attacked, or that he had only scorn for them? Certainly the aggression in his words , who's laughing now suggested that circus was an apposite choice due its extreme physicality and the pain it involves to the physical self and it may well have been a useful way for him to work through the trauma of being mocked. The point at this stage was for him to understand how he came to be there so that in the working through he could use it rather than let it use him. This was to allow him to make a conscious decision about how he performed rather than being compelled by something unconscious. The latter would an example of compulsive repetition wherein the subject repeats a traumatic relation over and over again in order to retroactively master it, so that the bad objects he has internalised no longer have a hold over him. These re-stagings are for achieving gratification and with any luck for turning those objects into much needed good objects. (Freud, 2003, p.50-51, Kernberg, 2009) In an earlier session he described wanting to be a Power Ranger and flip around and beat up the bad guys. (55). The bad guys could be seen as those that scorned him, including teachers at school (who) thought I was joking. (64). These relations can also be transferred onto trainers, teachers or directors, preventing a successful education. This is an apt description of a negative transference. I could see what he was projecting onto the world and his need for circus as a good object/environment when he wrote watching circus videos made me want to live in my own world to escape the evil in this world. Circus is the closest to being in an other world. (58-60). He clearly was in need of circus as a restorative practice; this seemed to be the purpose of circus for him. The desire that brought him to the object of circus was a perceptual identification of the object with its function: the object as enviro-somatic transformer of the subject. (Bollas, 1987, p.14, emphasis mine)

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Gonzalo wrote I do this to show myself that I can do it. But when I was a boy I had co-ordination problems and a girlfriend of my dad would always tease me.(206-207). He found it hard to express himself in real life, not a problem he had in circus life and here we see a link with RLST. He is afraid of heights and sometimes feels claustrophobia. The therapeutic aspect here is that he showed himself that he could do it as he understood himself as the potential obstacle to satisfaction. He wrote that:
I get scared when I think how can I hurt myself (197)....I hated pain before circus and would have no tolerance for it at all, but when I started circus I found out that in many ways I enjoy the pain of stretching and rope and conditioning, but when I get pain from something else I hate it again, like before. If I say I like pain, I mean muscle pain, I can't take it when I hurt my inner bits. (211-213)

He chose his circus discipline, the rope, as a transitional object from real pain/fear to symbolised pain/fear (Winnicott, 2005, p.8). This phase is heir to the transformational period wherein he would evolve from experience of the pain/trauma/fear to articulation of the experience which in this instance signifies the circus act, the articulation of a process. (Bollas, 1987, p.15) This is precisely the kind of engagement that circoanalysis asks for: an understanding of the difference and connection between the surface and the depth, the exterior world of circus effects and the interior world of psychic affects/ideas. This introduces the student into the oppositions objective/subjective, knowledge/truth, history/phantasy.
The historical and the fantastical, the actual and the imaginary, are engaged in an endless and inevitable dialectic. To give up the effort to speak about actual history (as opposed to the history of phantasy) is to absent oneself from this dialectic and inevitably, in my view, to diminish the richness and complexity of human life. (Bollas, 1987, p. 6)

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Myrto said something similar, I would show it to myself, especially in a specific period of my life when things were a bit bad. I would do that because it would offer me strength (inner strength) much quicker. (121-122) Those that wished to show their act to figures who approved of them in supportive environments reinforce the classic idea of the circus artist who aims to please. There can be no doubt that we have here an example of showing off for mummy and daddy See what I can do! When we learn to ride a bike or master toilet training, when we can eat without assistance, all these are examples of the pleasure received via praise. Mastery of something then is equivalent to acceptance, love, attention. Since there is rarely a fourth wall in classical circus, it is stated that the performer does this for the public. Often, after a trick, the performer will look to the public for recognition of what he/she has just done. This is the prompt for applause, for praise. The transference is a positive one. Badiou discusses three schemata for the possible knotting together of philosophy and art in Handbook of Inaesthetics; didacticism which he sees as manifesting in Marxism, romanticism, whose view of artistic production and its relation to truth is in line with Heideggerian hermeneutics and classicism which has its proponent in psychoanalysis. (Badiou, 2005, p.1-15) The classical schema contains two theses; that art is incapable of truth, which Natalie contests - there is a moment of total safety, a moment without contradictions, a kind of truth in that moment (33-34) and that it is essentially mimetic, its regime being that of semblance and that instead of being under the sign of knowledge it is placed under the sign of catharsis which involves the deposition of the passions in a transference onto semblance. What is crucial here is the use of the word transference, the projection onto the analyst of feelings and interactions from a past important other. This dynamic that is so essential to clinical practice becomes the transference that is essential to the dyads teacher/pupil, artist/spectator and so to the circus act itself. He goes on to say that the classic schema dehystericizes art. Above all therefore art has a therapeutic function and not a cognitive or revelatory one and as such he places it firmly in the realm of Lacan's Imaginary, the realm of the image and the do-

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main of transitivism. Nor does it pertain to the theoretical as it might in the didactic schema. Rather it belongs to the ethical because of its utility for the treatment of the affections of the soul. This thought is echoed by Critchley when he says that in sublimation aesthetics reveals a crucial phase of ethics (2008, p.69-72). Semblance is important here which he links with the word liking. A spectator likes what she sees because she sees the verisimilitude of it. Art must be liked because liking signals the effectiveness of catharsis, the real grip exerted by the artistic therapy of the passions. Being semblance means that it is not truth. Whatever truth or resemblance of truth there is in it is required only to engage the spectator in an identification that organises a transference. (Badiou, 2005, p.3-5) The transference is an illusion in the analytic space, it is a tool to encourage catharsis, remembering as opposed to repetitive acting out. So, this transference with the art object, which is not true but merely a semblance of truth, is therapeutic, just as the transference onto the analyst in the clinical setting is therapeutic but also not true, being an illusion, a semblance. Natalie may well already be a circoanalyst in the next quotation from her if the content she speaks of is her self-analysed subjective truth no matter how much they are aware of it or not, I am a performer making them believe an illusion and manipulating or guiding what they see and in which way they see it. (252-253) Above all the transference, like the circus act, needs its other. Therefore the question that strikes me as more urgent than what is circus? is who is it for?. This is to posit it less as an artistic object to be observed at a distance and more as a relational practice that involves a subjective thinking transmitted to others. The analysis of who this other may be for the particular circus artist will facilitate the making of what the circus act might become. The two forms of knowledge/truth become inseparable, become a making, recalling Badiou's description of a thinking, a non-dialectical or inseparable unity of a theory and a practice. (Badiou, 2004, p.79) Butler makes the case that in the scene of address, the act of telling not only communicates information but also seeks to act upon the scene itself asking can there be telling without transference? (Butler, 2005, p.51). The transfer-

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ence is a conduit of desire that for circoanalysis reveals the subjective truth of the subject. HT, in the questionnaire described himself as a conduit of the spectators' dreams (180-181). This self-disclosing act cannot be evaluated purely in terms of whether or not the account is adequately accurate. It must also be asked if it manages to establish a relation with the addressee and whether both are sustained and altered by the scene of address. This would be the criteria for whether or not the account is transformative. Transformation is key to Bollas' idea of the aesthetic object. Our lives are marked by critical moments of transformation, the most primal being the transformation of hunger, pain and rage into fullness and contentment. We see both pain and satisfaction in the words of the participants of the second question and how the wish to transform bad objects into good ones motivates their choice to do circus. There is a necessary physical pain in the circus act that is transformed into the fullness and contentment that both addresser and addressee experience. In this way circus can be seen as a form of self-care (Bollas, 1987), a handling of oneself that either reiterates a good enough maternal container or one that was found inadequate and also a form of care for the public. Here circus is a form of therapy and catharsis. The process of a circoanalysis then would be to facilitate the transmission of personal catharsis to the spectator. In this way the circus artist holds, contains the spectator and invites them into a therapeutic space. Even though there is certainly an anxiety in seeing such dangerous acts the artist never wants the spectator to feel truly anxious for her/him; it is after all a trick as Natalie reminds us when she speaks about the illusion she presents (252). In this way the artist remembers for us, because he/she no longer needs to act out a traumatic relation but has remembered it and offers it to us, cleansed of its original anxiety, presenting it as a transformational tool for the spectator's own un-remembered traumas. He/she then provides the occasion for the other to experience memories of transformation. This is where the link resides between the revenge act and the loving act we read in the participants' texts. Transformation does not arise from gratification, satisfaction or approval alone,

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it also is initiated by frustration. Plenitude and lack need each other. In the next chapter I will discuss what happens when the lack plenitude needs is absent. Bollas writes of being embraced by this aesthetic object, of how it offers a non-representational knowledge that invites the spectator into an experience of being rather than of cognitive mind, with its capacity to trap us within itself in a moment of transitivistic empathy; a total involvement of the self rather than an experience of a separate object. Here we have echoes again of Lacan's Imaginary. He describes it as being outside of cognitive coherence. I would say that the best making is like experiencing a deja vu with all its uncanny implications because, as he says, the experience of the object always precedes the knowing of the object, the point being we already know it existentially we just have not thought it. (Bollas, 1987, p.29-39) In terms of both the clinic of the studio and the clinic of the performance space, this object is sought to reach symmetry with the environment or to recreate traumatic gaps in its symmetry as we saw with the participants. Circus as transformative aesthetic object for both self and other. At this point the next phase of research necessarily had to explore the construction of that aesthetic object.

3.1. The Surgery

Over three years, students in their second year had the option of between one or two sessions with me to talk through their ideas for their end of year devised performance which was presented to staff, guests and students. It was an experimental moment before they finalised their circus act at the end of the third year, the act that would take them into the market and define the beginning of their careers. This moment of the research allowed me to begin to invite them to question elements of their proposals and to explain their choices. The aim was not to provide them with an interpretation of those elements but to bring the genesis of those ideas to light, often relating it back to their personal history, in much

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the same way as a classical dream analysis. Each group of second year students that came to this surgery had attended both the first year focus groups and a second year seminar where I explained the notions behind circoanalysis and invited them to reflect on their choice of discipline. In this circus school the first year is spent trying as many different circus techniques, or disciplines as seem suitable to their body type and ability. At the end of the first year they make a choice of a first discipline and a second, for example juggling and acrobatics, or static trapeze and Chinese pole. The methodology at this point extends beyond the general choice to be in the circus towards the particular manifestation of the subject in circus and the object they wish to produce in it. Here is an example of an idea presented to me by Fabrizio: a cleaner walks into the living room of the palatial apartment in which he works. There has been some form of party the night before, there are half drunk bottles of champagne and clothes strewn everywhere. In the centre of the room is a black, rubber coated pole that shoots up into the air. He dusts it, and then in order to clean its full length, finds he needs to climb it, higher and higher until he reaches the top and perches in a sitting position, where he sees a fur coat that he surreptitiously puts on to feel the sensation of being glamorous. Here he starts his choreography on the pole with a trick that he hopes will garner applause from the heretofore unnoticed crowd of people sitting in the darkness watching. If we were to take away the pole, there would be nothing out of place in this scene, it would be a standard theatrical representation of a domestic situation. If, on the other hand, we took away everything but the pole and his body we would have a piece of non-representational circus, in other words a literal phenomenality of a body moving on a pole. Examples such as Fabrizios are not rare. Along with cleaners I have encountered, postmen, sailors, beach girls, mermaids, secret agents, hit men and art thieves over the years of directing students and professional artists. There is an aspect of circus production that assumes that in order to be valid, it needs to

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have a character that performs it, that carries the action and that this action, in order to have meaning, must find a suitable representational vehicle. If the first phase was looking at the genealogy of circus in the subject, here it goes directly to the origins of the act. The primary homology here is between the idea/wish for the act, which, as in Fabrizios case was a confluence of character, scenario, theatre and a circus medium, and the dream which is also a network of various trains of thought. This idea of confluence of various trains of thought can be detected also in the identifications made early on with circus images or superhero images, parental relations, object relations of humiliation or fright and early experiences of pain or mastery. If in the focus groups, which were informed by the answers given in the questionnaire, I provided a space for participants to explore a genealogy of their wish to do circus, now in this stage I provided a space through the surgery to unravel those strands of pain, humiliation, mastery and object relations in the act. Following the link with the symptom introduced in the previous chapter I now treated the dream itself as a symptom and inserted it into the psychical chain that has to be traced backwards in the memory from a pathological idea (Egginton, 2007, p.20, quoting Freud's Interpretation of Dreams). This facilitates the subjects process of tallying or cross-referencing the idea with the previously delineated narrative or genealogy, to find the idea's position in the overall circus narrative or topography of the participant; idea as dream as symptom. Pathological needs some clarification here since it gives a sense of morbidity, compulsion or lack of control which seems at odds with the joyous celebration of control that circus proffers. The pathological idea then, would suggest that the artist is not in control of it, that she/he suffers from it, just as the analysand suffers the pathos of the symptom. To suffer also implies that the artist is subject to the idea and this then conjures the Kantian use of the term whereby the pathology of the will or wish is heteronomous and not autonomous meaning that whether it comes from without or from deep within, the subject is not freely self-determining it but rather pushed around by it (Egginton, p.21, Gruyer, 2006, p.203-204). Both uses of the term are relevant and

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this will become clearer when later on I discuss just how much pleasure the symptom provides; as iek says The symptom is not only a ciphered message, it is at the same time a way for the subject to organise his enjoyment that is why, even after the completed interpretation, the subject is not prepared to renounce his symptom (iek, 2006, p.74).

3.2. The Act interpreted as a dream in the Surgery

In order to contrast the dream as it is retained in my memory with the relevant material discovered by analysing it, I shall speak of the former as the manifest content of the dream and the latter.as the latent content of the dream....I shall describe the process which transforms the latent into the manifest content of dreams as the dream-work. The counterpart to this activity one which brings about a transformation in the opposite direction is already known to us as the work of analysis. (Freud, 1997, p.88-89)

The manifest content of his idea, which is the form of the act, the dream in its literal phenomenality as iek puts it, (1999, p.12) is what he presented to me, what he had been repeating in his training time, rehearsing over and over yet not quite knowing why . The latent content is that which I invited him to discover via the detective work of analysis. The work of this analysis decodes/unpacks the dense imagistic narrative of the act into an organisation of thoughts that express various wishes/desires (Laplanche and Pontalis, 2006, p.235). The dream-work then is the process by which the meaning, intention or unconscious desire within his act comes to be displaced, distorted and condensed into the manifest content (Freud. 1997, p.169). The idea of two contents, one veiling the other, is immediately disavowed via the notion of distortion, for the manifest content of the dream is not another competing content but rather the distortion of the latent content via the dream work. (Egginton. 2007, p.23)

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The dream-work, the process by which the real meaning becomes displaced, condensed or over-determined, ending up in the form of the dream, is analogous to the theatre-work that has been performed on the circus act. They share the same goal, to disguise something. The work of synthesising the pole, the fur coat, the aftermath of a party, the character of the cleaner in Fabrizio's idea is akin to the dream work.
The dream, which fulfils its wishes by following the short regressive path, has thereby simply preserved for us a specimen of the primary method of operation of the psychic apparatus, which has been abandoned as inappropriate.Dreaming is a fragment of the superseded psychic life of the child. (Freud, 1997, p.404-405)

HT had written I am something distant and mythical. An ideal of their childhood. A conduit for their dreams. (180-181). The regressive path is the quickest route to satisfaction, it is pleasure-seeking without the annoying detail that comes with the more mature reality principle which can be equated with secondary, more conscious processes such as waking thought, attention, judgement, reasoning, controlled action. (Laplanche and Pontalis, 2006, p.340). These primary processes which first appear in Project for a Scientific Psychology are particularly well illustrated by dreaming. Freud refuted classical psychology's insistence that the dream had no meaning by stating that the dream rather showed meaning constantly in flux, shifting from one point to another. (Laplanche and Pontalis, 2006, p.339). By way of analogy I would suggest that the circus act has a similar slippery relationship to meaning in contrast to how a linear narrative theatre fixes and delivers it and it is the fear of meaninglessness that instigates its theatricalization, the theatre-work, the condensation of various strands of thought, that metaphorises something that is already a metaphor. As we worked through the manifest contents of Fabrizio's idea in the forty minute surgery, we found certain links to his personal history of which he had been unaware and certain links to his motivations for being -in -circus. These surgeries were meant to instigate a self-guided process of reflection on the part of the student and therefore merely opened up a first layer of meaning, relative-

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ly superficial. What it did achieve however was a way of signalling that there were indeed layers of meaning underneath the apparent simplicity of the idea. My first question was Why a cleaner?. The question behind my question was why transpose the fantastical into the mundane, the extraordinary into the everyday? Fabrizios mother had been a cleaner when they moved from Brazil to Italy. It was a change of fortune and he associated this at first with a feeling of shame on behalf of his mother. This was reinforced by the fact that they lived in a small apartment within the palatial home. They were kept. He described it as a fall from grace. At some point though he felt pride in his mother's assumption of the task and no longer felt ashamed on her behalf seeing her grace in diligently performing her duties without complaint. The act happens in the palatial home, someone else's private domain. Fabrizio has placed the pole in the centre of this domain. The diagonal rigging lines which hold the pole in place have clothes on them that he must tidy. When he reaches the fur coat at the top, a symbol of the wealth that puts him to shame, he dons it and enacts a fantasy of what it may be like to be rich, to be in the place of the other which conditions his own place as inferior. Linking this back to the fall from grace he ascends to this place of fantasy at the top of the pole. His circus discipline is one of ascension and descent; one climbs the pole, one performs astonishing feats of descent. Circus can be said to describe for him an ascension to pride and superiority and this is why he has placed the pole within this environment; he is making a bad object good, revisiting it in order to re-vision it in healthy terms. The floor space then is a realm of boredom, mundane tasks, reality and the pole represents desire and fantasy. A Kleinian interpretation may well see a huge erect phallus driven right in the centre of this palatial home, so that finally he stakes his claim on it. There is an aura of the diva emanating from the fur coat; when he wears it he becomes a diva, in other words someone who is celebrated, unlike the cleaner who is not. He mentions something of the clandestine nature of this donning of the coat, he is not allowed to, it is not his, he has no right to it. But he wants to have a right to it, it symbolises aspiration. It now becomes apparent what circus is for him, in this moment, a transformation within which he is ce-

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lebrated, applauded, where he can feel proud, albeit only in fantasy. Fabrizio is aware then that circus is fantasy, aspiration and the need for adoration and so becomes cognisant of what he is demanding of circus. Then I asked the question And who are the audience in this situation? Where do you position them? This he had not thought about. He did not know whether they were in the same room, witnessing a clandestine activity, something naughty, rebellious. He did not know whether they were the occupants of the palatial home, or whether they were his mother being proud of her son or merely a mirror in which was reflected back some form of validation that would repair his sense of humiliation. If a circotherapy would be about tracing a line of signifiers, the psychic chain, about picking apart the condensed image into its components then the question who are the spectators? is dense. It contains within it the questions Who are you doing this for? Which internal other do you need to make proud? Who is your account of fantasy, or desire, addressed to? Since the session was brief it was meant to invite the students into a selfanalytic process that they could continue on their own as an investigation, by showing them the links between the image/idea, their choice of circus, their choice of circus-discipline and its inherent dynamics (be it up and down or side to side or backwards and forwards) and their personal life history which may have brought them to circus. I suggested that the theatre-work of the circus act was akin to the dreamwork, in that it disguised the wish, the desire that gave rise to the act/dream. Treating the idea as a dream suggests that it arises unbidden, it is pathological, it literally appears within the subject's consciousness. If I take for granted that the idea is a production of the unconscious, then its purpose, like the dream's is to communicate something to the subject. Treating the dream like the symptom is to posit that the same mechanisms of displacement, metaphorization and condensation are at work in both psychic constructions. What marks the symptom out for special consideration in the context of circoanalysis is its relation to the body, how it appears or speaks this communication on/in/through the

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body, the language of the symptom is, so to speak, incarnated, embodied (Soler in Rabat, 2003, p.87). Therefore the process of theatricalization use of scenarios, metaphors, characters in some way gags the discourse of circus within the subject (Ibid., p.86). Bollas describes the dream as an emblematic theatre in which the subject is compelled to re-experience his life according to the voice of the unconscious. (1987, p.70) For the time being it was enough to ask why he had placed himself within this scenario, a question Bollas asks of the dream; What kind of world does the dream provide for the dreaming subject? How does it handle the dreaming subject within the dream? (Ibid., p.71). What kind of world had Fabrizio provided for himself to return to again and again, and how did it handle him? Since the act is something the subject returns to again and again, one must ask what is there, in the act, this dream-like environment that provides satisfaction, why this specific constellation of subject/object positions? Fabrizio did not know why he wanted to present his act in this way, with this particular character and did not know how to place the spectator. He only knew that this was what he desired. As such his motivations were unclear, meaning that the act might have been unclear, incoherent the spectators might well have asked What is a cleaner doing up a pole performing these tricks?, since after the initial dusting of the pole he stops cleaning and performs a circus act. To rephrase this in Arendtian terms, this application of a cleaner character could have been in the service of concealing Fabrizios personal identity, a category which postulates another as necessary. (Cavarerro, 2000, p.20). In this position Fabrizio would not be attempting a truthful account of himself, he would be taking up a false position. In Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) there is a detailed analysis of the necessary impossibility of giving a complete account, since our origins are forever opaque. However this opacity is an enabling condition of our communicability with the other; communications are attempts at some form of impossible transparency. The artist who hides behind the mask of a false character has foreclosed this possibility. In Win-

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nicottian terms the purpose of the false self is to protect an injured true self, that should never be found or hurt again, which merges with the Kleinian idea of manic defence (Winnicot, 1990, p.33). Just as wish-fulfilments in dreams hide other, deeper wishes, so it is with the idea of masks. If the cleaner is a mask, then so is circus itself. The ways in which the dream-work performs this sliding of meaning are as follows: condensation the process by which many different meanings come to be condensed into one thereby creating one representative for them all: the sense of resentment, the fall from grace, the fantasy of appropriating a superior social position, staking a claim to something not rightly his, an acceptance of his mothers grace. These are different thoughts but their communality can be glimpsed in the act because of how they have been condensed into one action, or one thought. It can be explained in terms of censorship whereby the idea underlying these disparate thoughts is deemed by the ego (simply put the subject's character) to be unpalatable or, inappropriate. displacement the means by which the interest within or the intensity of the idea is passed onto other ideas which may seem trivial or have been of no apparent interest (Freud, 1997, p.190-194). In this case the intensely cathected ideas of inferiority and the desire for mastery over that had been displaced onto a pole and the ensuing performance. over-determination is a consequence of condensation and details how the dream comes about from a multiplicity of sources. Laplanche and Pontalis explain that in Studies on Hysteria Freud gives the example of the hysterical symptom that has come about from not only constitutional predisposition but also from a variety of traumatic events. It is this confluence of the two, this over-determination, that produces the hysterical symptom. In the dream, they continue, this may be seen as different latent trains of thought converging in one manifest dream (Laplanche and Pontalis, 2006, p.292). The pole had accrued all the importance in his life in that five minute act (dream), all his energies were devoted to it and the rest of his life,

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with its details and connections, desires and anxieties, in other words its realities, had all come to roost in this one, otherwise unremarkable object, the pole. The pole had been over-determined.

3.3. Discovering Repression and Censorship in the Surgery

Why does a dream distort the idea, this visual representative of unconscious desire, if it is said to be, at base, a matter of wish-fulfillment? (Freud, 1997, p.117). These primary processes operate as sleeps guardians. Material of a traumatic nature emerging in a dream may wake us and so these primary processes work in the service of sleep by distorting or censoring its contents. There is something inherently traumatic in circus. The possibility of failure and injury is great or sometimes fatal and it is precisely the staging of the avoidance of failure that demarcates the circus act. A relationship to trauma is one of its enabling conditions and its therapeutic value for artist/spectator is the overcoming of the fear of that trauma, a mastery; I was very scared of hurting myself, and not very sporty or gymnastic throughout my childhood. I now do some acrobatic things I never imagined I could do because of the fears that stopped me as a young person. I think my mother used to say don't do that or you will hurt yourself quite a lot! (AA, 9-11) Without the repressive procedure of censorship and the distortions of the dream-work we would never get a good nights sleep. This amounts to saying that our unconscious desires are potentially traumatic and that repression keeps us functioning socially, within the mandates of symbolically authorised acceptability. Repression keeps psychosis in check. On the one hand the psychoanalyst acknowledges the pathological consequences of repression, in other words the symptom, but none the less claims that repression is the condition of cultural progress, since outside symbolic authority there is only psychotic void. (iek, 2000, p. 250). In other words, we need to repress both our ani-

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mal desires and our traumatic pasts in order not to act on our every impulse. If censorship in a dream keeps us sleeping, then repression keeps us social. My question at this point was: what was being repressed then, in the discourse of the focus group and in the relating of Fabrizios idea? What was not emerging in the focus group that I was expecting to emerge? My original intuition, which came from my seventeen years as a circus artist, revolved around trauma, the death drive, seduction and the threat of an other. What was missing in the discourse of the students was this other, the other that Fabrizio had not considered. This was what seemed repressed in his idea and that was elucidated during the session. In the surgeries I was attempting a reconstruction of this other, bringing together various strands of relations, images and identifications, my intuition being that if circus was about anything at all, it was about the other. Of the students who came to the surgeries, I chose Fabrizios discourse because of one significant moment, the realisation that he was indeed performing either his mother (as himself), for his mother (on her behalf) or to the mother (as audience). His unexpected linking of his idea to a particular moment of his history provoked tears in his eyes. An idea was reunited with an affect. Therefore, out of all the students, Fabrizio demonstrated a moment of analytic work happening the remembering that is accompanied by the affect of the memory in the presence of an other. Repression is a result of the two things becoming dissociated, leaving the affect unmoored from the idea, allowing it to roam free looking for suitable metaphoric substitutions in order to discharge itself; this metaphor is the symptom and here lies the analogy between symptom and act. The act can then be seen as a metaphorical substitution disconnected from the event/idea. The symptom only grants partial satisfaction, which is why it must be repeated. The cathartic nature of analysis, evidenced here by Fabrizios tears, is produced by this remembering; the reunion of idea and affect. Only ideas can be repressed, not affects, for they will always find a way out. Without the idea the affect produces acting out, which, in this context, is one way of looking at the circus act.

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The dream is a construction that can repeat, like the symptom and like the act. There must then be some satisfaction to be had in it. This satisfaction is ambiguous bearing in mind that Fabrizios idea would force him to revisit a scene of dissatisfaction. If this was his professional act he would have been required or compelled to revisit this scene night after night, like a recurring dream. The adjectives Layla used to describe circus confirmed this ambiguity crazy, desperate, dangerous, painful, wild alongside powerful, beautiful, meditative, strong, vital (168-170) while the verbs she used were break, contort, force, push, cut bite alongside love, lust, exist, work, succeed, enjoy (172-173). There is a co-mixture of pleasure and pain in the act of training which may be at the root of this ambiguity; Circus has not increased my tolerance of pain but only increase my chance of receiving pain. (Hazy, 104-105) I think I try to understand and be patient with my new pains, but my neck and the backs really hurts a lot, I can't sleep at all (sometimes) and bruise everywhere. But in a way are signs that I worked, no? And is between pain and pleasure (Paula, 190-192), without some of the pain we wouldn't feel we achieved as much (mdg4000, 241). Circoanalysis is concerned with psychic reality, with what can be spoken about it to another and how we can speak of our dis/satisfaction. Hazy has placed herself in an environment where she is more likely to receive pain and this informs her choice to do circus much in the same way as Fabrizio unconsciously chooses a painful scenario to repeat in his act. That he achieves some satisfaction or pleasure in this painful acting-out of a situation he does not remember until the surgery is re-iterated by Paulas confession that circus is at the interstice of pain and pleasure. Is this ambiguity not transferred to the spectator who experiences the anxious pleasure of watching something dangerous and potentially life threatening? Pain however is there for a reason, it signals achievement and Fabrizio achieves a certain fantastical status as the diva in the fur coat, ascending to a superior position that he has longed for. We most often take dreams to be real while we are dreaming them. Only in the awakening do we understand them, interpret them as dreams. The fact that

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we believe that we are experiencing them for real is not a question of their content, for this is the clearest proof that they are not real, but of the position of the subject experiencing it. They have the quality of a hallucination since they share the quality of being indistinguishable from reality. What pertains to the level of representation is experienced at the level of presentations. (Egginton, 2007, p.16-17). Or, to put it another way, what might be considered literary, of a fictional origin, is taken to be literal. This is why Freud says that the dream state most closely resembles the state of belief of the psychotic. At this stage, I felt an affinity with Lacans concepts of the real and the symbolic in that there seemed to be a real element to Fabrizios act that was masked by a symbolic formation of condensed metaphors. It was the real of an affect that had been dislocated from its source/idea via the production of a metaphor as a substitute. My proposition here would be that what gives the circus act its power is indeed its hallucinatory quality, that what is representation is taken, by the audience, as presentation, as a real and not fictive form, not a rendering of reality but reality itself. The circus artist is able to operate at this limit of reality/fiction, literary/literal, since they really are doing what they are doing, they are in no way pretending or acting. Strip away the scenario of the cleaner and his props, the pretence, leaving just the body and the pole and we are left with something that is presentation, not representation. This may bring circus practises that do not rely on theatrics more in line with craft than art. At its purest, without, in other words, the overlaying of an extrinsic narrative to validate it, circus is real:
There can be no illusion, for there are eyes all round to prove that there is no deception. The performers do exactly what they appear to do. Their feats of dexterity and balance and strength must never be confused with the make believe world of the actor.This view of the circus as a spectacle of actuality leads Coxe to a reclassification of the circus as a craft rather than an art because, he believes, it is purely demonstrative and, unlike the theatre, has no interpretative dimension to it.when he describes it as simply a craft next to the art of the theatre he bestows greater value on the craft

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since for him this term connotes the associated virtues of authenticity, integrity, vitality and honesty as opposed to arts implied artifice and effeteness. (Stoddart, 2000, p. 79-82 quoting from Coxe, A Seat at the Circus, p.24-5 and Coxe, Equestrian Drama, p.109)

Coxe is writing here of what we now call traditional circus, but what contemporary, cross-disciplinary circus may need to hold onto are those virtues of authenticity, integrity, vitality and honesty that become muddled in the attempt to validate the act via recourse to another performance tradition. This would be to say that circus practise may have closer links to primary processes than secondary, that it could depict a desire that has not undergone translation, or interpretation. At this point circoanalysis is driving at this aim to demetaphorise, to aim at the real of the act, in other words what is really going on in the act directed towards an other. The secondary process binds psychical energy to ideas, and in so doing forms concepts out of those bound ideas. The energies of the primary process are unbound, free. In Egginton's wording, the secondary process is deliberate; we deliberate over our thoughts whereas the primary process is liberated. This is what analysis seeks to do with its technique of free-association, to relax the deliberating mind in order to release the flow of unbound ideas that are stored in the unconscious without the translation which is demanded by the secondary process. Circotherapy in its final from would have to bring the analysand closer to the primary process that inspired the act and in effect, unbind it from the restrictions of the secondary process. Falling asleepinvolves a relaxation of the deliberate activity of influencing the course of our ideas such that we might claim that the course of our ideas is liberated from the authority of our deliberation, but in sleep this process transforms those ideas into images. (Egginton, 2007, p.21). What might circoanalysis hope to liberate then? The latent content of the act? What, following Lacan I have called the real of the act? In dream analysis this idea of a real and a symbolic element that masks it could be seen as the way the latent content is metaphorized by the manifest content.

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iek explains that the latent idea is nothing very mysterious once it has been discovered, it is often a quite banal worry, need or demand and probably not even sexual in the final interpretation of the dream. What is more interesting is the reason why this latent demand has been submitted to such censorship, distortion or repression in order to keep it from consciousness. He explains that the only reason why this banal or normal train of thought, one that could be expressed in everyday language (secondary process) is submitted to the dreamwork (primary processes) would be if an unconscious wish, derived from infancy and in a state of repression, has been transferred onto it. (iek. 1989, p.12-13) My question here was how might the methodology of circoanalysis be constructed so that it could facilitate a students understanding of how a certain real, primary desire or infantile wish, had become bound with the secondary demands of circus? At this point in the research I therefore had to look for where this infantile wish showed itself in the various discourses produced so far, this infantile wish, that had transferred itself, grafted itself onto the choice to do a circus act. If I looked hard enough, would I find it hiding somewhere, hoping to be found?

3.4. Conclusions about the Surgery - The Infantile Wish hiding in the Act
Discussing hysterics Freud remarks,
their repression of the idea to which the intolerable wish is attached has been a failureBut the repressed wishful impulse continues to exist in the unconscious. It is on the lookout for an opportunity of being activated, and when that happens it succeeds in sending into consciousness a disguised and unrecognisable substitute for what had been repressed.the symptom.we can trace in it the remains of some kind of indirect resemblance to the idea that was originally repressed.the symptom must be led back along the same paths and once more turned into the repressed idea. (Freud, 2001a, p.27)

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If doing circus could be described as a wish for the students of the focus group and if the dream as Freud described is a wish fulfillment then it is instructive to see what recurs in the childhood dreams of the focus group that for them may have precipitated their entrance into circus: I used to always dream of flying. Most of my dreams are nightmares but I escape when I can fly away. (RocketLauncherSaucyTits, 52). Being chased, sometimes being chased but I can't move. Falling over and waking as if I'd hit the bed. (Bez, 303). .working out the secret of flying unaided. Feeling like something powerful and ominous was going to consume/squash me, nothing visual. (RB. 344-345). .a recurring dream that I was the driver in a runaway camper van with my big brother and sister, and it could fly. Another recurring dream that me and my friend were getting chased by a woman who came out of a painting in an old house, while we were on roller-blades. (HHM, 440-442). Nightmare where I was chased by someone who caught/trapped you and turned you into the same person and forced you to conform. (Squibbs, 492-493) All these dreams describe a threat, being chased, consumed, squashed, caught/trapped. Then there is a recurrent theme of flying away, escaping, developing powers to avoid the threat. These might be the anxiety dreams of any child. However these are the dreams the participants chose to relate concerning circus and the ones that clearly show this indirect resemblance to their circus practice. I repeat here Layla writing that I had lots of dreams involving fear, about someone else having power over me, the power to harm, and I think my desire to do circus was partly about wanting to be powerful and in control. (38-39) The wish is to escape a threat. What is more interesting here is the place of the other the other is a threat here. The other, for these circus subjects is a threat and circus is a response to this other. In the case of Fabrizio, who could not place the audience in any specific role, the other/spectator was the owner of the palatial home. Was he directing his act towards this other who may threaten or punish him? Was he trapped by this other, did he feel squashed by this other who forced his mother to be a cleaner, forcing them into the tiny apartment?

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The question of the other arose here most clearly. This question would inform the later practice of circotherapy and form the core question of its methodology who is the other and how do you position yourself in regards to it? Since the other/spectator is the enabling condition of the act what prevents you from rounding back onto it, what resistance's are at play in not being able to speak about the other who is the guarantor of your satisfaction, or place them in some symbolic way? The idea of resistance, in this case to articulating the other, reminded me of the condition of the act as pathological, because it seemed heteronomous to the subject and therefore not a question of choice but of compulsion, recalling Freud in his Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis; The force which was maintaining the pathological condition became apparent in the form of resistance on the part of the patient. (2001a, p.23) Here I thought that anxiety might well be a defining condition of the pathological nature of the circus act. The dreams describe fear but the object of fear is undetermined, it is always a someone, a something and most powerfully described as something powerful and ominous that was going to consume/squash me, nothing visual. This nothing visual, this ominous describes anxiety in its purest form for unlike fear, anxiety has no object. (RB, 344-345) Matilda Leyser, a professional aerial artist and writer who is interviewed in next chapter, wrote An Aerial Autobiography as part of a joint research project with me, to respond to the lack of creative writing surrounding circus in 2007. To find a way to join the real of her circus craft with the symbolic nature of her life as a writer she decided upon the format of literary autobiography. Her infantile dream is written as follows:
I have a recurring dream: it begins with a small crack appearing underneath my feet as I walk. I barely notice it at first but with each step it grows wider, a grin that spreads across the ground. I look down. I can see down the throat of the earth; it is endlessly thick and dark. I begin to run, and the cracked world splits open beneath me, wider and wider, so that I have to leap, the impact of each landing cutting new edges, the earth has a thousand corners, its circular

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solidity cease to exist. I keep running but now I can no longer tell whether I am stepping on earth at all, or just wildly bounding on into blackness, deeper and deeper. (Leyser, 2007, 19-26)

As an affect this anxiety is not repressed, It is unmoored, it goes with drift. One finds it displaced, mad, inverted, metabolised, but it is not repressed. What is repressed are the signifiers which moor it. (Lacan, Anxiety, unpublished translation, 1962-1963 p.11). CW's dream echoes this A game where I had to get downstairs quietly in hiding and the floor is out of bounds, therefore walls and ceilings were the main part of the travel. (CW, 522-523) In a conversation Leyser spoke of the difference between rock climbing a socially accepted system to enable one to learn the techniques of rock climbing and this game she played as a child trying to climb around a room not touching the floor. In order for there to be any pleasure in the activity it needed to be inappropriate, in the way that rock climbing was not. The thing to be climbed therefore had to be domestic, something that was not allowed to be climbed. This pleasure (or may we call it joy, that joy reserved for children discovering their own instinctive way to organise their enjoyments in this thing we call their play) reminded me of other childish activities that have to be snipped in the bud because they are socially inappropriate throwing things, jumping on the bed, walking along walls, playing with matches that are deemed dangerous to the physical self and which we naturally curtail our children from exploring until they know the rules of gravity, property, the physics of fire. I remember standing on the window ledge in the upstairs bathroom at age 2. I jumped into a well, age 5. Both these incidents were done out of curiosity with no awareness of the danger. (AA, 3-4). The inappropriateness of her infantile wishes is made clear by the intrusion of the law that I quoted earlier I think my mother used to say don't do that or you will hurt yourself quite a lot! Natalie verifies this,
In my work environment as a circus performer I can move whenever i want, I can make noises, I can behave in odd ways without people necessarily sanctioning my behaviour can express what I feel in any moment. I can even make any of these things the materi-

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al for a performance. In school I was forbidden to do any of it. I can also perform potentially very dangerous stunts that you are forbidden to do if you are not qualified for it. On stage I can impersonate any kind of social deviation, without fear of judgement of myself as a person. I can perform naked, play a schizophrenic, throw eggs at people. (40-46)

Some of us grow out of the need to explore such dangerous activities and find other ways to express our lust for risk. As I mentioned in the introduction, risky sex, anorexia, alcohol or drug use are all symptoms of a pleasure curtailed and are dangerously pleasurable to us precisely because we ignore the rules. The alcoholic conveniently forgets the fact that his pleasures are killing him. Pleasure of this sort erases critical judgement. In comparing the effects of love and alcohol on the super-ego Edmusson says the great essay on the psychology of the hangover is yet to be written (Freud, 2003, p.xii) and he makes explicit the fact that these pleasures suspend that critical agency for a blissful moment, only for it to return doubly harsh, severe and demanding the morning after. The difference between the circus artist and the alcoholic, anorexic or psychotic is that she has taken the time to learn those rules. One could say that it was then a mature way to manage an immature desire that previously paid no heed to the reality principle or to the secondary processes, a desire in thrall to the pleasure principle. The survival instinct becomes finally an attractive, desirable option. Freud is keen to emphasise that we find it difficult to renounce something that has previously satisfied a desire or drive in us and that we will always be on the look-out for substitutes for that initial object. This search will be doubly urgent if that object was forbidden by the law, in whatever form, before a full satisfaction was achieved. Here then is the infantile wish that has been attached to an otherwise mundane idea, the infantile wish that stows away, hidden from sight on the vehicle of the image or object. Freud writes
All these experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which was in sharp contrast to the subjects other wishes and which proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality. There had been a short conflict, and the end of

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this internal struggle was that the idea which had appeared before consciousness as the vehicle of this irreconcilable wish fell a victim to repressionand was forgotten. (Freud, 2001a, p. 24)

So, if circus is the re-emergence of what Freud called the return of the repressed, of an infantile wish that was prevented full expression by the subjects ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality or by the law in the form of a parent or teacher or girlfriend and has found a higher and consequently unobjectionable aim.sublimation (Ibid., p.28), one that now serves some social function and is accorded some sort of acceptable, albeit minor, social status, then surely circus could be said to comment on those infantile wishes that many do not, in fact, find a mature, healthy way of bringing into and in line with reality. A wish that in others may end in such deathly practices that are actually harmful to the subject as mentioned in the previous chapter. To say that circus recalls childhood fantasies is not to say that it is childish. However, much circus is just that, childish, infantile, uncritical, pleasing. There is more to childhood than joy, amazement, wonder, play. Therein also lies fear, rage and paranoia of extreme sorts. There is the fear of annihilation (Klein,1997,p.61), castration (Freud, 1905,p.334), abandonment, (Philips, 2007) all of which can be seen to be signifiers for death. Circus is indeed childish, immature if it does not encompass these feelings too. Circus in this instance would be indicative of Klein's paranoid-schizoid refusing the complexities and shades of grey inherent in the depressive position (Klein, 1997, p.61-93). Circus, in this case, is arrested in an infantile mentality, one that has not grasped the complexity of the other.

4. Conclusion: The Act qua the Dream as Holding Environment

Here the research proposes that the circus act evokes the dream world because it is indeed closer to primary than secondary processes. When Freud says that Dreams are quite incapable of expressing the alternative either-or; it is their

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custom to take both members of this alternative into the same context, he is pointing to his assertions elsewhere that there are no opposites in the unconscious, as well as no time, the unconscious is timeless (Freud, in Skelton in Wetherill, 1999, p.150). It operates by its own specific rules, which do no find correlates with our everyday, utilitarian experience. To put it in the terms of Wilfred Bion, the dream is not solely a part of our psychic resistance to unconscious wishes, it is also a necessary attempt to assimilate an emotional experience and integrate it with our (preconceived) view of the world. (Ibid., , p.156) In the surgery this is to find where the idea/dream and personal narrative overlap or from which place in his/her history the subject is dreaming from. I posit that circus is just such a process of digesting an intense emotional experience. The circus act, as a transformative aesthetic moment is an evocative resurrection of an early ego condition, but the environment it creates for the spectator sponsors a psycho-somatic memory of the holding environment. It is a preverbal, essentially pre-representational registration of the mother's presence. (Bollas, 1987, p.39). It is a space that can safely hold the spectator's fears and dreams and for this the circus subject must take responsibility. The surgery is a fore-runner of that space, the circotherapist trying to preempt misunderstanding or unconscious transferences. Circoanalysis is interested then in whether or not circus can move beyond this dream-like world of infantile fantasy. In order to do this I will explore now the psychoanalytic theory of psychic trauma/fantasies of mastery and the material situations of trauma/mastery that are re-visited, re-staged and represented daily in circus practice, to introduce into the technical knowledge of the circus soma, the repressed knowledge of the circus psyche.

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Chapter 3: Anxiety
1. Introduction: Circoanalytic Interviews
In this stage of the first phase of research I invited four professional circus artists over the age of thirty seven to talk to me about their experiences in circus. The subjects were chosen because of their proven ability to articulate questions about their craft within the U.K. circus milieu. I had had a professional history with them and so we approached each other as equals, sharing a common goal to find out what drove the circus in us. As equals these were conversational rather than analytic, yet there was a complete avowal that my research method was psychoanalytic and that it would be towards psychic fantasy and desire that I would drive the interviews. As experienced professionals they could talk about this one enabling condition that seemed like unexplored territory for the student, the Other, and this I hoped would allow me to formulate the tools to guide a student towards allowing me to take the place of that audience/other in the circotherapeutic set-up. There was an eagerness from the professionals to be interviewed, something that I interpreted as being to do with something unfinished in their discourse on circus. Either they had not had a chance to word their experience adequately, having remained in the physical materiality of the experience of performing circus, or, since some had retired and moved onto other mediums of expression, there was something they felt they had not had time to do in circus. The interviews assisted in broadening the knowledge base of the psychic contents of circus. For example a common thread in their discourse concerned anxiety. I hoped that this would allow me to detect the symptoms of anxiety in students or artists in circotherapy early on and be able to facilitate a full expression of it in the clinical situation. In Chapter Four when I employed a circotherapeutic technique, it was important what I said and when I said it to keep the associative chain of signifiers

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moving. This is to show how I, as circotherapist, tried to manoeuvre into the space of the Other. However here, in conversation, the emphasis was on the information they provided, information that would help me achieve that positioning. Here I was positioned as an equal, an other with small o, a retired circus artist who had found other interests beyond the circus act because I had reflected, as they had, on what that had meant to me while I was passionately engaged with it. The participants all shared with me a certain distance to that passionate engagement of the body with the Other. I was not therefore positioned as the Other, with capital O, in this research regarded as Circus as such, inclusive of its spectator, the Other that circoanalysands in Chapter Four had questions for, had issues with. They had worked through a certain relation to the Other by doing the Act, something which previous participants in education were still figuring out, often by acting-out rather than remembering the reason why they were there, in the school, in the first place. The participants were Matilda Leyser who had made a shift towards writing, Matt Costain who was at the time still performing circus but predominantly within the context of theatre, as a physical actor, Michelle Weaver who had become a circus director/choreographer and James Holmes, a non-professional circus performer who, at the time of writing was a Psychodynamic Consultant in Conflict Resolution. As I was focusing on the experience of anxiety in circus the research here privileged Lacan as a theorist. The rich material provided by the participants inform later chapters that deal with the practice of developing the methodology of circotherapeutic technique with regards to the experience of anxiety in both the circus performance and the consulting room. With this interest in Lacans writings becoming more insistent, I started psychoanalytic sessions with a Lacanian analyst starting with one session a week for the first month, two sessions a week for the next eighteen months and then, during the period of circotherapy with students, discussed in Chapter Four, attending three times a week for the last four months.

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The outcomes of the interviews in this chapter are organised thematically, since all four participants revealed aspects of repetition versus remembering, anxiety and the imaginary nature of the circus act. The last section 2.4 of this chapter revolves exclusively around the case of Holmes, who explicitly describes in his discourse how sexuality can be seen to be a latent component of the previous concepts.

2.1 Leyser and Weaver Repeating/Remembering

In the last chapter I brought together the symptom, dream and act(ing out) under the signifier of repetition to describe the circus act, thus giving it a sense of compulsion because of a repressed idea that cannot be remembered. This is how Freud explains the difference between remembering and repeating:
The patient does not remember anything at all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without of course being aware of the fact that he is repeating it. (Freud, 2003, p.36)

Conversely a memory may be recounted or remembered in analysis but unless the subject re-experiences the affect associated with that memory, it has no therapeutic value. Fabrizio, in the surgery, re-experienced the affect with the memory. Bollas rephrases the formulation; why has the (dream) act chosen to handle the subject in this way? Why has it placed the ego in this scenario, with this script? And why does the dream, as the director of the scene (one with whom you cant argue unless you are adept at lucid dreaming) dictate the subject to act in this way? (Bollas, 1987, p.70-71). Weaver elucidated this in asking Why was I doing something where I could potentially die...Why would you repeatedly put yourself in that situation?....I've no idea what that was about. No idea why anyone let me. (306-308)

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In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud recounts watching a little boy play with a cotton reel on a piece of string. He throws it away with a sound that Freud interprets to be fort (the German for there), he drags it back accompanied by da (here). What he is doing is interpreted by Freud as staging a loss, making a game of the fact that his mother comes and goes over which he has no control. It is a game based on her absence followed by her presence. Freud describes the game as an endeavour that could be attributed to an instinctive urge to assert control in which the experience the child was subjected to was acted out in the form of a game in which he was now the master (Freud, 2003, p.52-54). This game could be seen to be an early form of symbolisation of the trauma of loss. This shares some territory with the frightful dreams of the World War One soldiers he discusses in the same essay; retroactive attempts to assert control over the shocking experience for which they were completely unprepared. Above all what these formations dream, symptom, game, circus act do, is provide some form of satisfaction. From a Kleinian perspective this game symbolizes a desire but from a Lacanian perspective it causes desire. The cotton reel is not a replacement for the mother, the little boy does not suddenly desire the cotton reel, but prior to the reel he did not desire his mother, he needed her (Kripps, 1999, p.22). This transition sets into motion desire as such, the desire which wants merely itself, which merely needs to persist. How does this pertain to the circus? If Weaver still did not know why she repeatedly placed herself in such a dangerous situation, why she spent eight years risking my life for nothing better than eighty quid...or some polite applause (1507-1508), she could be said to have been acting out. On a pragmatic level she needed to make a living by repeating this, but on a psychic level she may have been in the grip of a repetition compulsion; for years and years and years and years you willingly did something that you knew was about to really fucking hurt and then you'd do it again. (1845-1846). The unconscious drew her to the same place, time after time, offering a place for the interplay of self and Other. (Bollas, 1987, p.68)

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This implies that in some way the unconscious is other than us, that, as Butler says, it is not something we can own, it does not belong to us, because from the start we are dispossessed through the other from the start. (Butler, 2005, p.54). This chimes too with how the other appears in dreams, in that dreams not only reflect our own thoughts and desires but also those of others, via transference and transmission thus rendering us even at an unconscious level beset by the other. (Ibid., p.75, emphasis mine.). If we do not have the unconscious, we, as subjects, are also not synonymous with our egos, as Lacan makes clear in the interpretation of the dream where the main thing is to recognise where the ego of the subject is. (Lacan, 1991, p.167). Leyser understands this dilemma when, after the performance she has to enter back into what's meant to be a normal state of consciousness and that's difficult. I have to meet myself. As in the self that's got to get me home and eat something and into bed, at the other end of it and that's sometimes difficult. (517-519). This is reminiscent of the two poles of fantasy and reality in Fabrizios act, here is mundanity, myself and there is fantasy. If the Other is the unconscious, it is important here to bring in Lacan's other formulation of the unconscious, that it is the discourse of the Other. In analysis, the analyst must assume the place of the Other, to facilitate the subject's acknowledgment of his/her problems with it. In circus, this Other could be defined as the audience/Circus itself, with a capital C denoting both the bank of skills involved and the audience that will judge or authenticate the artist from the perspective of a circus audience. Even without an audience or the skills that denote circus as materially present, Circus, or the Circus can still be virtually present, as a form of ideal-ego, the ideal image that one lives up to, measures oneself against. (Lacan, 1962-1963, p.34) The infant sees itself in the mirror and is in a state of jubilation but then turns around to the parent that holds her, who is representative of the big Other, to ratify the value of this image Is this really me? In this way the ego is established as imaginary, as a specular image but the subject is constituted in the locus of the Other. (Ibid., p.26). What constitutes the unconscious is the Other in so far as I do not reach it. (Ibid., p.22)

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The mirror stage denotes the moment the child sees his/her reflection in a mirror (or another's face). It describes the formation of the ego via identification with the specular image. The image appears whole in contrast to the infant's uncoordinated body thus giving an illusion of mastery that is provided by the image. This vision of mastery appears as a threat to the unwhole, fragmented real body giving rise to an aggressive tension between the infant and the image. There is a rivalry between the infant and its image. This aggressivity is overcome by identifying with the image, forming the ego. The jubilation of seeing a whole image is at odds with the actual uncoordinated reality of the infant's body and therefore this identification that produces the ego is based on a misrecognition providing the basis for what Lacan calls the alienation of the subject. The ego is an imaginary entity. Lacan describes the unconscious, in connection with the dream, as a different scene of action, implying that it is staged, in accordance with the signifier (Ibid, p.27). The back and forth motion of the cotton reel corresponds to the motion of the cloud-swing, Weaver and Leyser's discipline, wherein they stand or sit on a loop of rope attached to the ceiling by two points and push it into a swing. At either end of the swing they experience the dead point so described because they experience a sensation of weightlessness. It is here, at the dead point where tricks are performed, such as the throw out, whereby when the swing is almost parallel to the ground, the performer, her feet wrapped around the rope, throws herself out into the void, describes a one hundred and eighty degree arc hanging from her feet, and returns, standing upright, her hands back on the rope at the back of the swing. Leyser said:
The piece I made on the swing was called Dead Point because I was so delighted when I discovered that the point at the end where you feel most alive is called the dead point. I mean how brilliant is that.you're weightless....given that my fearfulness was around this sense of falling up and weightlessness....the dead point was a sort of.the thing that makes me feel most alive which is my weightedness to the ground was taken away from me for a moment. (347-357, emphasis mine.)

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For Lacan, discussing the fort/da game, this possibility of absence, is what gives presence its security. (1962-1963, p.46) When teaching this move Weaver warned her students It's going to feel like somebody's taken a baseball bat to your shins. Off you go. (1911-1912). From this perspective the pain involved may well give non-pain its security, its stability. The corde lisse (French for smooth rope) artist must climb the rope in order to perform stunts down the rope and so choreographies are most often structured around a shuttling back and forth up and down the rope, a similar dynamic to the Chinese pole. The corde lisse offers more possibilities than, for example, juggling, for shifting the performer's attention and they typically make reference to the ground and the ceiling as a dialectic that they seem never to resolve; there is no way of permanently existing in the middle, making the act a sort of Sisyphean exercise in futility. Being non-linguistic it is often up to the spectators to designate for themselves what those poles of here/there designate, but one possible interpretation is that here where the performer starts, on the ground is safety, there is no physical risk, whereas there ten metres in the air lies danger, risk, the possibility of death. However once hanging from ten metres, whether by hand or foot or hip, the artist is in control and therefore here becomes a place of safety and it is there ten metres to the ground where lies the danger. The game of here and there then has some very clear stakes: over there lies danger and here is safety, over there lies the possibility of absence (the mother's absence) but once he/she arrives, it is there where he/she came from that the danger now lies. If the artist wins, he/she will remain here/present/alive, if the artist loses he/she will be there/absent/dead. Therefore, based on this paradigm of the mother's presence, the two terms of the game can be given any number of significations: presence/absence, success/failure, safety/danger. Leyser speaks of the that life/death edge (371), this living on that life/death edge because even if you're not literally risking your life when you step on stage, you are psychically. (489-491) The idea of repetition is theatricalised most clearly in the rituals of the obsessive neurotic. I watched a juggler once training a particular combination of throw and catches. The game of here/there was clearly in evidence; the ball is

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here in my hand, I throw it away it is there, absent from the hand, it is "up in the air", and then it returns here to the hand, to safety. The point of the exercise seemed to be to get the combination right without dropping, but in this instance the juggler punished himself after each unsuccessful attempt by performing ten press-ups. After each set of press-ups he was in less of an optimal physical state to complete his avowed task, forcing him to perform more press-ups to the amusement of the others training in the space. It is well known that the rituals of the obsessive are simultaneously self-imposed punishments for the thinking of an unsuitable idea or inappropriate desire and also postponements of the thing they really wish for. Both the punishment and the postponement are forms of organising pleasure. As Elias was quoted as saying in the first chapter, training in some way cleanses you of juggling. At the end of this jugglers game of punishment and postponement he no longer had the strength to juggle, preferring the game to the result. The game then seemed to facilitate something. Winnicott extended the theory of playing beyond it being supplementary to the concept of the sublimation of instinct. whereby the game is simply a more appropriate way to satisfy a socially unacceptable instinct (2005, p.53). He reminds us of the preoccupation and concentration of the activity of playing regardless of its content. Concentration and preoccupation are necessary for many activities apart from playing, yet the important difference here is that the content does not matter, whereas the content of, for example, the concentrated activity of writing this thesis, or fixing a car is. I use the word content here to denote conscious intent, or clear goal. He makes it clear that play is neither merely in the child's inner psychic reality nor in the external world of consensual reality:
.the child gathers objects or phenomena from external reality and uses these in the service of some sample derived from inner or personal reality. Without hallucinating the child puts out a sample of dream potential and lives with this sample in a chosen setting of fragments of external reality...the child manipulates external phenomena in the service of the dream and invests chosen external phenomena with dream meaning and feeling.playing involves the

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body; (i) because of the manipulation of objects; (ii) because certain types of intense interest are associated with certain aspects of bodily excitement....playing is inherently exciting and precarious. This characteristic derives not from instinctual arousal but from the precariousness that belongs to the interplay in the child's mind of that which is subjective (near-hallucination) and that which is objectively perceived (actual, or shared reality). (Ibid, p.69-70)

This precariousness is not only visible in the obsessives juggling training, where the objects he plays with are balls but also in the wire-walker. The wirewalker also goes from here to there and back again as does the German wheel artist and acrobat who go back and forth, and then back to the beginning to start the game again. Matters are complicated in the case of the wire-walker, because they not only walk, run, dance from here to there, they must be adept at understanding that balance is never static for no matter how imperceptibly, balance is a continuous shifting from left to right in order to stay standing in the middle. It recalls children throwing their toys from the pram, the fork from the table. They are not just testing their parents' patience, they are reality-testing, testing whether or not the fork will really return, testing the rules of coming and going, testing how dependable their care-givers are. The sooner they understand the rules the sooner they will master their anxiety of abandonment, of loss and take responsibility over the coming back of the toy, the fork. The juggler is playing the same game, except this time he is in control. Play, as symbolisation, is an early form of theatre for the self wherein anxiety is mastered. As I will show in the next section anxiety arises not merely via the threat of abandonment, but also via the threat of physical annihilation or an experience of being overwhelmed.

2.2. Leyser and Weaver with Costain - Anxiety

I would like to propose that in many, if not all cases, what is being played out in this theatre of the self, that does not require an extrinsic script, is anxiety.

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Playing out carries with it several connotations; that of playing something out towards someone else and that of playing something out of oneself until it is no longer inside, as in the cleansing we saw with Elias. It is true that in order to accomplish the difficult demands of circus, whether in a high-speed release of fast-twitch muscular energy in acrobats or in the serenity required for hand-standing, wire-walking and juggling, the physical symptoms of anxiety need to be completely absent. It appears, from the focus group, that artists put themselves in contact with potentially persecutory forces, in order to be tested by them, to prove them wrong and in mastering them turn them into good objects. The key here is the potentiality of trauma, that they place themselves in situations in which trauma is a possibility and that this is a cause for anxiety, but in order to succeed that anxiety needs to worked through before going onstage. It is backstage where many performers feel real anxiety, even panic prior to the performance. Anxiety is an affect whose cause is a potentiality, of what may happen. It is not the same as the fright when facing a traumatic object/situation as discussed earlier, it is in fact the affect that prepares one for the encounter. Fear has an object, anxiety does not seems like a good enough way to make a distinction, yet Lacan will complicate matters by stating that anxiety is not without an object. (Ronen, 2009, p.77) Adrenaline is a key effect here, preparing the body for fight or flight. (Costain, 535). In this scenario flight would mean leaving the theatre or club or circus and thus the possibility of performing altogether and fight would mean entering the arena. Ironically many aerialists can be seen to do the latter with the illusion of the former, in that they fight gravity while giving the illusion of flight. Following my analogy of circus act as symptom, its relation to anxiety would be oxymoronic, for if anxiety is thought of as the cause of the symptom, while the symptom itself is formed in order to relieve anxiety. (Ronen, 2009, p.79) then anxiety in some way creates the need for the act (as a repetition) while the act itself needs to be enacted in order to relieve anxiety. This is the difference between anxiety as a cause, and anxiety as symptomatology.... The

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anxiety state is a symptom that relieves anxiety as a signal of danger. (Ibid, p.79). Since there is an approximation of this anxiety in the spectator, contained in a safe and caring way, the artist must work through his/her anxiety in order for the act to succeed. Anxiety will make the wire-walker fall, the trapeze artist to smash his teeth against the metal bar (Costain, 675) and the juggler to drop his balls. Circoanalysis as a symptomatology would grant anxiety the status of a privileged tool in its task of speaking of the human condition viewed psychoanalytically. By speaking of itself, of its own enabling, material conditions, it speaks of affects and desires far more universal than are to be found in the depiction of a cleaner or a postman. This is due to the fact, that as symptom, the circus act is already a metaphor for something that cannot be stated directly and exposing it to the work of theatre furthers us one more metaphorical step from something psychoanalysis deems universal; by making the act personal, i.e. singular, the circus making could approach Badiou's situated universal and the artist could become the clinician that Deleuze celebrates in The Logic of Sense rather than a mere sublimator of instinct:
.authors, if they are great, are more like doctors than patients. We mean that they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists....artists are clinicians, not with respect to their own case, nor even a case in general; rather they are clinicians of civilisation. (2004, p.273)

If the patient inspires pathos, the doctor promotes self-understanding. This is the speculative thrust of circoanalysis, the shift from artist-patient to artistdoctor. This would be to say that circus is a specific sort of clinic. If Proust is a symptomatologist of love and memory, then circoanalysis would, for example, see circus as a clinic of anxiety, seduction and fantasy. There is nothing new in stating that performers are anxious about failing onstage, feeling anxiety of either the failure of the task, or the more visceral failure of the human organism in its effort to maintain life as such. As Leyser said, the fear of death is somehow psychic, since the risks involved are both measured, controlled and mastered but also feigned to a certain extent for the

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spectator's entertainment. This psychic emphasis is what constitutes the affect as anxiety, rather than fear, for fear has an object and anxiety only possibility. Other sources of anxiety spoke of different situations that also pointed to universal concerns. Weaver admitted that I don't think I was aware of how scary it was. Because.I was so phenomenally scared of performing that that scared me a lot more.than the thought of falling off.Being in front of people. (189-190). She goes on to say that actually I didn't care.the idea of dying didn't bother me particularly (329) but that before going onstage she was beset with the most unbearable panic. (367). In everyday life she identified this same feeling when somebody turned and talked to me really directly in a pub or at a party because it would set off .a panic attack because I wouldn't know how to behave and then I would not know what to do with my body. (375-379, emphasis mine). The panic, the fright was occasioned by the possibility of being humiliated, by not being able to conjure up the appropriate response and fright is something that one is unprepared for. I can't imagine what else I would have been worried about, it had to be humiliation. (488) a signifier that appears several times in Holmes' discourse. (432, 433, 793, 833) There was no anxiety in falling to her death, this would have counted as a fear, but there was an overwhelming panic involved in the thought of potentially being humiliated. This is not to say that Weaver had no concern for her physical well-being, for her somatic life, but it is to say that her psychic life took precedence here. After all, falling off the swing to her death or even worse being crippled for life (330) would constitute the same humiliation, albeit writ large and without metaphor. She did not describe what form this humiliation might take, it was not something she could imagine, it was only a possibility. Weaver stated very clearly that her cloud-swing act was not consciously a personal statement. However, now, in her role of director she can create what she really wants to see; a little bit of the real person (1011). From her perspective what she presented as a performer at the height of her technical mastery was not a personal statement because I presented the opposite, the diametric opposite of what I was feeling back stage, where she was absolute-

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ly terrified, I'd be vomiting, weeing constantly before I went onstage. (10481050) These symptoms of anxiety disappeared when she was swinging onstage because she realized that if she made a mistake they didn't notice much. People's understanding of what you were doing was so basic that you could get away with murder. (554). This however did not stop the panic arising from the thought of encountering the Other before every performance. This therefore was not realistic anxiety, such as being in a jungle and hearing a lion roar close by, but a neurotic anxiety. Realistic anxiety is triggered and motivated by an externally known danger, while anxiety neurosis arises from an instinctual source. (Ronen, 2009, p.92). Again psychic, internal reality takes precedence over the objective reality of a group of spectators. This is not about the facticity of the other as spectator but concerns more a past other transferred onto the actual spectator time after time regardless of the specificity of that spectator Anxiety occurs as a repetition of prior moments of danger with no evidence of the prior moment being economically locatable at all. (Ibid., p.90) This is the other that Helen D. wrote about in the questionnaire. She thought she was performing to one that viewed her as chum, which constitutes the bits of meat and blood that are thrown in water to beckon sharks; bait. In its usage in the United Kingdom Chum can mean the brand name of a popular dog food, or in a more colloquial usage friend. (93) There is certainly something of being devoured in the idea of anxiety, and Holmes confirmed this by likening the performance space to a lion's den (423). The desire of the Other is what turns back, ungovernable, toward the subject, thus arousing anxiety. A dimension of devouring is thus manifested and lurks behind anxiety. (Ronen, 2009 p.88) If one can imagine the applause occurring after the previous act before one enters the stage, the friendly atmosphere, the fact that the previous act exits the stage alive, then this anxiety can seem as that which appears in the subject as what cannot be attributed sense, but whose presence is certain. (Ibid., p.88)

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We have already seen this aspect of the spectator intimated in Layla's description of the crowd as A void of potential revolution, ungovernable, keen to overthrow. .to the known real danger an unknown instinctual one is attached so that anxiety originates from the drives. So the unknown instinctual danger signaled by anxiety is translated by the subject as involving an external danger despite the internal source of anxiety. (Ibid., p.83, quoting Freud's Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety.) This external danger in the case of Weaver is the spectator, the other who will provoke a panic attack in a pub if they turn to engage with her unanticipated. In the scenario of the act she can anticipate, go through, play out a state of anxiety back stage in order to swing in front of the other in a non-anxious state, precisely because the act demands that she not be anxious, because that would result in the humiliation she is anxious about. The most terrifying moment for her was walking onstage, which she described as a tunnel of awareness (516). She would calm the moment she touched the rope, the object, and began to climb up to her swing. For Weaver it was only the swing that would assuage the anxiety of being on stage. Even if she performed movement on the loop of rope while it was static she would feel the anxiety of not knowing what she was trying to do. Both the walk onstage and any pre-swing moments on the equipment would be like that big open yawning....lacking. (583) To re-iterate the most basic thesis of anxiety, its foundational construction as it were, (because one can't ask a baby how it feels when it is pushed from the womb or when it feels the absence of the breast in hunger) is to return to Freud's association of it with the traumatic situation of separation...modeled on the event of birth...Later situations of danger reproduce the prototypic one and are those of loss of the object of love, castration. (Ronen, 2009, p.78). Leyser touches upon this open yawning with her assertion that her fantasy, her creation myth or origin myth behind circus is absolutely not about

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flight, or being weightless but its opposite (293). Her practice is predicated on her weight, the constant feeling of it. She describes circus training as a working out of her relationship to gravity rather than a list of tricks she had to achieve. Therefore her fantasy was falling, this is what she practiced in training, not flying, since her worst fear, her nightmare was that gravity would stop working and she would float up into the void and lose the earth, the ground, or, as stated previously with regard to the signifier, become unmoored. This is why she felt more at home on a (corde lisse) rope (than on the swing) because you're weighted the whole time. And that given that my fearfulness was around this sense of falling up and weightlessness. (302-357). On the swing she places herself in direct contact with what she fears most, weightlessness, the prospect of floating up into the void, there and disconnecting with earth, signifying a perhaps traumatic situation of separation. Later in the interview she clarifies that her core fear is not death, (642) even though, unlike Weaver she never stopped being afraid of death, rather her anxiety stems from loss....I don't just mean loss of self...it's a fear of absence, of emptiness. (647-648). She goes on to say I just found out recently that the word human comes from 'we're only human because of burying our dead in the ground.' I quite like that., followed quickly by telling me that she had watched a film the previous night on childbirth, as she was pregnant at the time of the interview. At the point of showing the footage of the moment of birth I went 'I recognise that'.
Apparently in birth both the baby and the mother are pumped full of the same hormones..The baby comes out on its cord and all the women who'd been through these home births, they all describe this point where you just hit this sort of pain threshold basically and go 'I'm gonna have to give in to this. I just have to give in to it, because either I stay at this threshold forever, which is fucking horrible or I have to release into it and then the baby comes out...And it is a kind of ecstasy. So I went Yeah I know about that. That's alright. I can do that. (365-378)

She can do that because she can trace similar intense experiences in her circus practice, linking it with .a sense of the pain not being masochistic,

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but sort of a spiritual practice.That is what my rope piece was about. I don't think that's any coincidence. (404-412) Her relationship to trauma and pain is ambivalent, saying that there is both a very creative relationship and a very destructive relationshipbeing an aerialist was part of trying to negotiate those. Understanding, and making the link with her anorexia highlighted the two aspects, psychic and physical, of pain and how circus was an attempt to make myself immune to pain. which recalls the idea of how repetition compulsion seeks to retroactively master a past trauma and that there is a certain satisfaction therefore found in repeating unpleasant activities. Her anxiety before going onstage however had a different place in her psychic constellation than Weaver's. Her anxiety at going onstage was experienced as a relief that, at last, my constant sense of anxiety is appropriate. (475), it gave a place for the level of adrenalin that she felt in her life generally, (488) caused by the fact that If you're alive you're going to die and you don't know when that will happen and that is an anxiety that I'm very conscious of playing out every day. which makes her circus act a rehearsal for death (543-545). You train in dying. (552), which seems to her a more creative form of it than anorexia, OCD's, the other kinds of psychological manifestations of it that I've gone through. (557-558)

2.3. Costain and The Imaginary.

Costain felt an anticipation, nerves....a feeling of flippiness in the tummy, and anxiety (67-68) before he went onstage but it was not due to a possibility that he might fail. And not the fear of is this any good because I know its good. Is it going to be okay? Are we going to like it, is it going to be. Are they going to love me? Are they going to love me enough? (563-565). This seems to suggest that he knew they would love him, but to ask would they love him enough, was to ask what enough meant to him. He described the feedback from the audience in several ways, of all which pointed to some form of celebration, communion and togetherness. He did not

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fear them, he was confident that he was good and that he would be able to repeat past successes, but what he feared perhaps was that it would not be good enough. We are one, we are doing this together. Im on the trapeze but you are cheering and Im taking your cheers and its making me go faster and me going faster is making you cheer louder. (91-94) Eagleton, in his discussion of the Lacanian Imaginary, calls upon the eighteenth century philosophers of sentiment to explore this cyclical nature of affect, found most famously in Wordsworths meditations on Nature:
This revolving circuit of affections displays the cyclical time of the imaginary rather than the linear evolution of the symbolic order. It is the kind of deepening mutuality one finds in the imaginary dimension of Wordsworths relation to Nature, in which, in a potentially infinite feedback, the poets love for the natural objects around him is enriched by the sensations he has invested in them in the past, and those sensations are in turn transformed by the long perspective of the present. (Eagleton, 2009, p.48.)

For Hume, this sympathy is a kind of magnetic principle animating the whole of animal creation (Ibid., p.48) yet what makes us distinctly human is, for Lacan and before him Kojve and Hegel, desire, which is firmly based in the symbolic order, in an order defined, like language, by lack and displacement. It is the word, in fact, which carves up this prelapsarian domain, in which knowledge is as swift and sure as a sensation. (Ibid., p.3, emphasis mine) into the pieces of difference called identities. This is the sensational knowledge the artist works with; the measuring, remembering, processing of sensation, a vocabulary of burns, impacts and torsions, of grippings, frictions and slidings, the sensation of air measured to gauge velocity, knowing the difference between weight and suspension. The transmission of this knowledge goes by the way of transitivism, a peculiarly graphic instance of sympathetic mimicry (Ibid., p.11) that may make a spectator jump from her seat or put his hands over his eyes.

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When Costain remarked that I think probably Im thinking this more than I thought then at the time, (91), he is bringing into the symbolic that which was imaginary. From the very start of the research, my artists intuition, my gambit was that circus was an attempt to describe jouissance. In the transition from the imaginary realm of affects, mutuality and empathy to the symbolic order of language, difference, status, meaning and desire something must be given up. In separating from the mother and understanding difference, i.e. experiencing the mother as other and not the same, jouissance must be sacrificed in the Nameof-the-Father (le nom-du-pere, sometimes written by Lacan as le non-du pere, the No! of the father). This symbolic name/function does not have to be a real biological father, or even someone of male gender. It stands for the prohibition of incest, that which comes in to separate m(O)ther and child in order for the child to assume her/his place in the social network the Other. The normal, neurotic subject accedes to the castration threat of the name-of-the-father, gives up jouissance and moves on to find suitable substitutes for that original wholeness, but can only find it in scraps, so desire keeps moving, from one object to another in a metonymical movement. Castration here, and this is where we must see all these psychoanalytic concepts as metaphors, means the removal of pleasure, and involves the threat of removal by the Law (name-of-thefather).
.feel like your brain or consciousness or whatever expand in a big circle and I could almost also be in the audience. Not be in the audience seeing me but being in the audience feeling like being in the audience. (152-154).I think it feels empowering for myself and as if Im somehow doing something empowering for the audience and for the night, for the event. Im attracted to this idea of the event, the thing that it is that were all doing together. (163-166). I see myself being in the audience, I dont imagine myself being in the audience looking at me. Its not quite that level of narcissism, but I do imagine being in the audience and being excited by something that Id join in with. (171-173).I think those times are when I experience the stuff that Im describing to you about the communion or the stuff Im explaining to you about the euphoria. (231-232).

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.sucking up the experience and drawing it in (238-239).Yeah I think it is definitely an intense point of life. Im not going to say to myself, I just sort of orgasmed then. I don't know if thats an appropriate comparison. (251-252).the space that I create with the audience (299).they are fellow inhabitants of my world. And I invite them to look at this character and feel what he is feeling for a bit. (341-342).Its grief and loss but again theres something euphoric about it as well. (345)

It is hard to ignore the themes of communion, togetherness, wholeness and completion running through his discourse that describe the Lacanian Imaginary. If Costain is a normal neurotic in everyday life, one who has conceded to castration and accepts his symbolic place, then in the circus space, which he creates for his public, he provides an intense, orgasmic, oceanic experience where identify is blurred and a dramatic physical empathy provokes euphoria. Is this jouissance that he provides? Or is he reminding us of the mirror stage where what we once saw in the mirror was a masterful, coordinated image which provided us with jubilation? Even if he were to make a mistake, the audience would not notice, they would still see something whole and complete as we saw with Weaver getting away with murder. He seemed to be at the opposite end of the spectrum to Weaver, Leyser and Day with their thematics of void, psychic death and being annihilated or eaten by the Other, yet his immersion in the Other suggested a different kind of egoic death or consumption. The will I be good enough which gave him anxiety asked whether he would be able to be fully absorbed into the crowd and lose his difference. In Freudian terms this is the primitive oceanic feeling prior to the creation of the ego, where there is no sense of distinct self yet. Costain's use of the word communion has echoes with Freud's hypotheses about religion in Civilization and it's Discontents (2002a) and fantasies of narcissistic omnipotence. Following this line of interpretation it is interesting to note how he described pain, which partly chimes with Leyser who, using the real pain of circus to immunize herself against psychic pain, saw in her circus practice ....a sense of the pain not being masochistic, but sort of a spiritual practice.

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.theres something about going through a painful process in order to get to a point where you do something beautiful and euphoric. That enables you to think....something to do with embracing the pain, I know it sounds so....Obviously masochistic about it. But about if youre going to feel lost and tie yourself about a knot, tie yourself up in the most implausible, demanding ringing knot possible that you might get to the end of it.... Or inhabit it so fully that its done and you can go.....And you can revel in and go I am hurting and thats it, I can hurt more its big. (356-357)

Leyser and Costain may have had different conceptions of what masochism meant to them, but there was a similarity in their conception of pain and its uses. More than most interviewees, students and circoanalysands in subsequent chapters, Costain's discourse was full of references about the audience (Other) and what he enjoyed about them and how he enjoyed being with them. Linking this with his descriptions of pain, one could propose that he went through this pain for the Other, or that he sacrificed something in order to serve the Other. He was not in some hallucinatory fantasy world, or in some direct psychotic immersion with the real, he really did have half a brain on not getting my pants caught and half a brain on not getting the timing wrong, (233-234), in other words he was working hard to achieve this immersive state with them. Lacan develops Freud's theory of anxiety beyond its purpose as a signalreaction to the loss of an object (the uterine milieu, mother as object, penis, object-love or love of the super-ego). There is something more to anxiety than annihilation anxiety, expressed by Klein and Winnicott as the absence of the mother, castration anxiety and the anxiety of not matching up to the ideals of the super-ego. These are all signals of a potential lack and the game fort/da is an example of a game designed to fend off anxiety. Lacan's development is that there can also be anxiety when one is close to something that is not lacking, when the support of lack is absent, which Costain highlights very clearly. That is to say the possibility of absence supports the security of presence and if

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this possibility were absent, that is to say if absence were absent then this would provoke the greatest anxiety:
What is most anxiety-provoking in a child, is that precisely this relation of lack on which he establishes himself, which makes him desire, this relation is all the more disturbed when there is no possibility of lack. (Lacan, 1962-1963 p.46)

It is not a nostalgia for the womb which engenders anxiety but its imminence, the fact that the circus space can be like a womb sometimes. Costain may well have felt anxious because there was nothing lacking in this space he created for his audience, this flippiness in the stomach he felt, this anticipation he felt similar to a drug based experience (67). This points to the annihilation of difference, of separation, a closing down of the space between subject and Other and the intense jouissance this provokes. The lack that desire is based on has been removed. I propose that in acts such as Costain's, the aim is this primal jouissance, the jouissance of the Other, a too-much. Jouissance is what we sacrifice to enter the symbolic universe of meaning, identity and culture, yet it is what we yearn for, what we repeat in our symptoms and anxiety occurs when desire and jouissance get too close to each other. We mourn our lost jouissance; Its grief and loss but again theres something euphoric about it as well. (345)
.so beforehand if my tummy was knotty and flighty and nervous, now its light and full of breath. Gasping big breathes of sweet air, it all feels sweet afterwards as if, like a horse drinking gulps and gallons of water after a long run, that kind of. Done it, tasting it now. Heightened senses, smelling stuff, going back to that room, going back, did they all hear the cheer over the tanoy, dont even care, probably not but maybe they do, maybe I walk in and everyone walks in and goes wow, youre the trapeze guy! Yeah. Fast heart beat obviously from the exertion but carried on by the excitement. (582-588)

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Costain's trapeze act could have been a way for him to deal with this loss of jouissance by creating this womb-like space for us to join him in euphoria, in an intense moment of life. Taken together with Weaver's discourse on death and humiliation and Leyser's choice to talk about childbirth I found rich material here to bring into the practice of circotherapy. Costain's act mirrored Leyser's more creative form of her symptom. If artists could talk through their motivations, delineate some form of genealogy of their circus earlier in their careers, admit to these anxiety provoking relations to the Other before they retired, would this shift the production of circus arts to something less infantile, something less symptomal?

2.4. Holmes - Seduction

Holmes agreed that the experience of being a rabbit in headlights when he gave a paper was similar to the experience of being on a trapeze in front of an audience, an experience that had to do with failure and mastery and humiliation and excitement....about being good enough (793-794) and with his first memories of it being like walking into a lion's den (423). In the act, the timing of his movements to the music and the adrenalin he felt gradually increased his confidence and he could master the situation. However, being a rabbit the the headlights evoked, for me, an image of a car hurtling towards an animal frozen in fear. It could have been interpreted as the Other encroaching at full speed into the subject's space. Circus was a safe place for Holmes where he showed a confidence lacking in other areas of childhood. And when I see pictures of myself on the trapeze Im very.as a kid Im very confident, I look very confident and assured which I wasnt as a child. And it was kind of my escape and its quite hard to articulate.(154-156). Holmes chose an instance of sexual abuse by a teacher that was not handled well by either school or family to describe what circus practice allowed him it provided a huge kind of sense of stability and a

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place and a mental space. (195-201). The teacher was allowed to continue to be his form teacher for another whole year. His father had rigged a trapeze and rope for him in the back garden after they had seen a touring circus, when Holmes had had pneumonia and so was very feverish and slightly delirious (42). He is not sure whether it was a semi- conscious experience rather than conscious one of how incredibly sexual it all felt. (89-90) and how his
.father was heterosexual and very sort of straight down the line, unequivocal about that. But he was very fascinated by the flying trapeze artists who are probably the most sexual, most beefy, most muscular of the men there. And I was interested in them and in a funny way I think there was a kind of a connecting or point of overlap that was quite interesting. But the other really important bit was there was a static trapeze artist called Arthur Duff who I remember who was both very sexy and very slinky and wore bright sparkly red tights and no top and the very kind of hairy chest. And he kind of did trapeze contortioning and I remember he hung by one foot and I guess effectively did the splits upside down and had his other leg over his head and I remember trying to copy it. (105-113)

There is an emphasis here on male identification, on constituents of an idealego, an image he tries to copy, and he understands the overlap between his father's fascination and his desire to imitate that object. He describes his mother in different ways, she is neurotic so that he tried to shift away from her anxiety over the dangerous things he was doing in the garden, guarding against being flooded with her anxiety. And I wonder whether some of it was about a case where I was confident or where I knew I wouldnt fall off where maybe a way of managing her anxiety in some way. (168-172) Laplanche writes about the intrusion of adult sexuality into the infant as a trauma whereby the tenderness of physical care administered by the parent is infused with adult sexuality for which the infant is unprepared and so remains as a repressed content of the unconscious, or in actuality establishing the unconscious, representing a break-in of sexuality. (Laplanche, 1976, p.44-48). This echoes Lacan's notion of there being no absence, no lack in the Other. The

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image of the car speeding towards the frightened rabbit captures the catastrophe of sexual abuse, the collapsing of space between subject and Other in the realm of sexuality. At forty years old Holmes returns to trapeze training after the break up of a relationship and an affair with a trapeze artist. His circus discourse is imbued with sexuality and identification, with a defense against anxiety and a possibly retroactive mastery of that trauma. He confesses that around the age of six or seven he used to have orgasms climbing the rope in the garden when he played with other children (574-577). What Costain describes symbolically and then distances himself from modifying it as an inappropriate comparison (251-252), Holmes admits to in the real. Holmes's discourse, briefly noted here and speculatively analysed, shows an important aspect that is missing from most of circoanalysands' discourses, sexuality. In a craft that is noted for its eroticism it seems pertinent that this is absent. I have a sense that it is disavowed. Holmes, perhaps because of his experience in long-term analysis and professional experience of psycho-dynamics in conflict resolution, can reach this aspect and see its relevance in his circus practice.

3. Conclusion: The Desire of the Artist

The spectator completes the act, the spectator is the act's destination, it's object, to use the language of the drive with it's aim, object and pressure. (Freud, 2003a, p.202). Even when the artist feels that their act has been incomplete, due to a mistake, or a less than perfect performance, the spectator still sees something whole, complete (Ronen, p.28). This is given to the artist via the spectator's attention but cannot be concretely assigned to the Other, since it is probably impossible to know of what the Other comprises which individuals, what they think, what their tastes are. The position of the Other, occupied by all the spectators as a whole, is hypothetical, but is given positive consistency on the reception of applause. One could reframe the circus act as a form of testing,

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time and time again Will I be good enough? Will I succeed with this new audience? Will this trick get applause? It could be said that the act returns to the same place again and again, to prove to itself a theory against all doubt. In this conception it is nearer scientific testing than artistic improvisation will they react the same as they did last night? The circus act is a question mark up until the point it is in front of the audience. In training, in production, in conceptualising it is still incomplete. This imagined aptitude of the Other, to see the artist as whole, is what the artist lacks. Lack funds desire and anxiety emerges when desire is too close to a situation where the possibility of lack is absent. This lack constitutes the desire of the artist. There is something missing that prevents absolute satisfaction, this lack is the cause of desire. The artist may presume this missing thing (that would provide access to total enjoyment or jouissance) to be in the hands of the Other, the enjoying Other, an Other enjoying what the subject cannot enjoy and it is only because the subject has been deprived of absolute enjoyment that the Other can enjoy, or is presumed to enjoy. Somewhere a sacrifice has been made for the sake of the Other, the symbolic order of language, the site of the unconscious. This sacrifice is jouissance absolute satisfaction, the accession to the Symbolic order. The artist cannot be in both places at the same time; in the position of subject and in the place of the Other. The act seems to hark backwards, wordlessly towards jouissance, to being both here and there simultaneously, striving to collapse the difference between the two. When the car finally hits the rabbit here and there are in the same place, absence is no longer absent. Another way of pointing to what constitutes the artist's desire, as lack, is the discrepancy between the never perfect act and the specular image of unification, completion, wholeness and mastery that is thrown back from the Other. This discrepancy or remainder marks a moment of radical lack in the Other which is necessary for the consistency of the subject's act. This discrepancy cannot be symbolized, made into an image, but it can be partially substituted by tangible objects for the partial satisfaction of desire.

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The unified image that the Other sees minus the decomposed/incomplete self the subject sees themselves as equals the object of desire. (Ronen, p.29) Seen as a remainder, a left-over, it is the object a, the Lacanian formulation for the object cause of desire. Object a is the unexhibited object of the demand for love...that cannot be captured in the image. but which nonetheless sponsors the performance. It cannot be represented but its presence stimulates the spectator's desire and attraction to the act. (Ibid., p.29) The artist could be seen to present the mirror-stage relation, this constitution of desire, this demand to the Other for completion which could be phrased as What is in me that you love that is more than my image? What is my secret, that you hold? This is the demand that completes the circus act, its enabling condition. Demand is of the Imaginary, which I will demonstrate in the next chapter. The call and response of circus exists within the imaginary. Dealing with imaginary demands is the first stage of analysis, before these demands give way to the desire of the subject which belongs to the symbolic. The aim of a circotherapy then would be to get the circoanalysand through her/his demands and get desire moving, metonymically, in the symbolic, in language, placing the spectator in the position of the symbolic Other in the act. The interviews provided a rich source of knowledge about the psychic contents of circus making, a map within which to orient a practice of circotherapy. This practice would aim at uncovering these inner desires and is positioned as a compliment to the technical demands of training, so that these desires can properly inform the production of circus, rather than the production being conditioned and constrained by the demands of a big Circus Other. So that, if the aim of Lacanian psychoanalytic treatment is to give the subject the opportunity to release itself from the imagined demands of the Other in order to get unconscious desire in motion, then the aim of a circotherapy is to allow the desire of the circus artist to come into play. In this way, circus production may move away from the classical or new circus demand for characters and narratives that are applied over the raw act in order to give it some form of meaning and move

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towards to a circus production that deals with the very issues and questions that drive it.

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Chapter 4: Circotherapy
1. Introduction 1. 1. A Lacanian Immersion
Lacans edited and transcripted seminars, as well as his written texts are notoriously difficult and complex and at the first reading arcane. He seems to forever throw you off the scent. Once it seems that you have a grasp of a concept, he, in the next paragraph, page or seminar tells you the opposite of what you thought you wanted to hear. Despite the frisson I, artist as researcher, got from reading him, the pedagogue in me found the concepts too difficult to be of use and impossible to transmit to students efficiently. Then I realised that his seminars were mostly for the training of analysts and that it was not the content I should be focusing on but the process of selfunderstanding the texts invited me to; a Lacanian analyst should always defer a definitive meaning, or knowledge, in favour of keeping the analysand working thus the use of the gerund in analysand the analysand does most of the work. It is an attempt to deflect the demand to know, be cured and be certain of some knowledge or answer, in order to keep desire from stagnating, to keep desire moving; to dialecticise desire. (Fink 1999, p.26) Consequently, as seminars for the training of analysts they defer final definitions so that the reader must always be prepared to keep her/his desire for knowledge moving. This was made clearer to me by being in a Lacanian analysis. I always knew my research involved Lacan somewhere crucial, that the strongest transference I had was not with Freud, Klein or Winnicott, and that with all transferences (of affect, because transference does not involve ideas) there is ambivalence, in my case satisfaction and frustration; Why are you so fucking difficult to read!? Something I may well have wanted to say to my

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father. Only by going into a Lacanian analysis did I finally hear why he was trying to say what he needed in the way he said it. Suddenly page upon page of obscurity was illuminated by my own unconscious knowledge rising to the surface through his words knowledge I did not know I knew. Passages and concepts that I had read over and over again suddenly made complete sense. Theory was illuminated through the practice of being in analysis, becoming, via the praxis of the clinic more than just an ideological or theoretical exercise. iek describes a certain point that is made of the use of psychoanalysis in cultural studies, that cultural studies lack the real of clinical experience while the clinic lacks the broader critico-historical perspective (say, of the historic specificity of the categories of psychoanalysis, Oedipal complex, castration, or paternal authority) (iek in Clemens and Grigg, 2006, p.108). He goes on to say that a theory that cannot account for the real of clinical experience is not such a good theory after all, and a clinic that detaches itself from its historical context is just a bad clinic. I needed to go into analysis so that my circus clinic would not be bad and that my theory could stand up to the context-specific evidence that my circus clinic would provide. By going into analysis, for a period of two years, I effected an immersion in the practice of being in Lacanian analysis and an engagement with the theory by focussing on the seminars themselves in order to take the methodology of circoanalysis to a more rigourously conceptual level and to develop the practice of circotherapy. I saw in my own analysis themes that I had read into the discourses of the professionals I interviewed and some I could only suspect were latently there. I found no new knowledge of the circus in my analysis, but I understood the difference in my position to it, as a researcher, as an artist potentially cured, the cure being only management, not eradication. If there is symptom relief derived from a particular understanding of the way one organises ones enjoyment, it is only because one now has a choice in reference to it rather than a compulsion.

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1.2. The offer

The principle aim was to broaden and deepen knowledge of the subject of circus as opposed to its artefact. This was done by broadening and deepening circus subjects own knowledge of themselves in circus. This was an extended engagement that drew upon the experience, successes and failures of the Surgery at Circus Space London. The subjects of this phase of research were graduating students on the Diploma Course at Circomedia, Bristol, 2012, engaging in a circotherapeutic process in the four months leading up to the production of their Final Major Project (FMP) which consisted of a series of experimental presentations that culminated in one final, polished production. Previous to this I had always introduced the idea of this process within disclaiming quotation marks circotherapy. Due to the fact that the research had, at this point been ongoing for three years, there was already knowledge of the research in the circus milieu in the U.K. There was now a desire coming from students and artists to enter into circotherapy, without quotation marks, with whatever idea they had of it. Therefore there was already a transference in signing up for circotherapy. A student had made a choice what to do with that free hour for example more training or circotherapy. I chose my analyst because she described the process of analysis like a detective story, a whodunit and because she was a Lacanian who offered the option of brief therapy. The student chose circotherapy, in a transferential moment, knowing that I was a circus artist/director/teacher and now a researching circotherapist. I introduced the idea of this researching circotherapist via a focus group with the students. They had already worked with me on their devised circus pieces the previous year and they trusted my abilities as a mature circus practitioner/director who listened to them rather than commanding them. In their eyes I was famous. The material for the focus group was the same as I had delivered to Circus Space students in London, concentrating on their decisions to do circus and their fantasies and dreams for what they wanted to produce for the audience. Each student's contribution was discussed by the group and paral-

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lels or divergences were highlighted. I made it clear that by doing this we were creating a base of knowledge about circus arts in this particular moment and context and that by sharing our affects, aspirations and impasses we would all contribute to the resources of knowledge available for future aspiring artists. The lecture component involved the concepts of dream, symptom and game as I had applied them to the circus act. I also introduced the ideas of voyeurism, exhibitionism, masochism and the Other, using their statements as starting points or examples. Having established the way psychoanalysis could be used as a lens through which to see circus I raised the possibility that a therapeutic form of pedagogy based on psychoanalysis could assist some students in realising those dreams and fantasies discussed. I made it clear to them that what we had just been engaged in during the focus group was research and that not all research into circus needed to be of a physical nature. With this in mind I offered the opportunity to continue that research with me on a personal basis using the methodology I called circotherapy, which I was developing as part of a PhD thesis. My usual gambit was to say I don't need to hear about your mother or whether you wet the bed when you were a kid, this is about circus so as to allay fears that the process would somehow force them to speak about personal issues they did not want to share. However I emphasised my opinion that they as individuals (singularities) were far more interesting and made for far more potent circus makings than adopting the theatrical trope of character. Therefore I warned them that it was very likely that personal material would form a large part of the process, because the process would be about the who, person, artist who spoke rather than the technician who did. The combined results of the individual researches would then be used, anonymously, in my thesis, to discuss whether the method had worked, was useful or whether it did not work and was not useful. With these parameters set out, we then spoke about what the process would entail. Circotherapy was made available to these students for the four months leading up to their Final Major Project. They were to register their interest before the four month period began. On average they could depend on receiving one

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forty five minute session every other Friday, or every Friday depending on demand. There would be a secretary appointed from the pool of those interested to organise the schedule for each Friday and this secretary would change every two weeks. They were to show up to sessions they had requested and booked and non-attendance or lateness would be considered significant. They could have as many or as few sessions as they felt they needed. What was spoken in session would remain within that room, would not be shared with other teachers or students but could eventually be used anonymously in the PhD thesis to enrich the knowledge resource of circus arts. The emphasis of the sessions would be their current projects leading up to their Final Major Project with an ongoing focus on that final project and how their various makings might go towards that. They were made aware that they could bring anything to the session that was related to circus but that they did not have to stick to the point, be concise, correct or try and prove anything. A judgement-free space was being provided where the only criteria was that they turn up and speak.

1.3. Circotherapy as opposed to Circotherapy

The development of my own research question was What happens when you call it Circotherapy? What kinds of engagements might this provoke that were not experienced before? It had become a concrete method in their minds, placing me in the position of subject supposed to know the place where the new analysand places the analyst. The students thought that I knew something that they did not. The aim of the sessions was to bring forth unconscious knowledge that which they did not know they already knew. Puzzled at first by this, they nonetheless accepted that there were things they did not know about their own practice. One way of clarifying this to them was the question What kind of knowledge is circus? For myself the question remained What kind of therapy does a circus student seek out? and Will they bring that searching to thera-

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py? It was made clear to them that this was an experimental practice-based research to which they were contributing. Between sessions there was a commitment to reflective writing. This was less like a journal for the self than a continuation of the session, in that it was written as an act of communication to the analyst, who would respond in writing with starting points for the next session. This was devised so as to prolong, during the week, the engagement with the unconscious as it was produced in relation to the other (analyst) in session. The unconscious is not produced alone, it is produced via the transference and although there can be transference without psychoanalysis, the opposite is not true, therefore there can be a transference in writing as well as speaking (Feldstein, Fink, Jaanus, 1995, p.102103). These reflective texts provided a way of recording elements of the analysis apart from my own observations during session and notes taken after. Therefore the ordering of my findings in this phase of research are organised thematically but also by measure of the length of the therapy. There is a certain order that can be observed in the process of analysis. Early stages involve diagnosis so that the analyst can position her/himself correctly one deals with neurosis, perversion and psychosis in different ways. There is the stage where imaginary identifications need to be worked through so that the analysis stops being like a conversation with a friend or a teacher just as in the professional interviews and starts dealing properly with the symbolic. Here the analyst tries to assume the position of a symbolic other, and this is where some form of transference can establish itself. Here the analysand works out her/his issues with that symbolic other which allows desire and its dissatisfaction a voice in order for a stage in which the analyst can manoeuvre into the position of objet a, the object cause of the analysand's desire. (Fink, 1999, p.223) This is brief therapy with a maximum of twenty sessions and it deals with the circus aspect of the analysand's psyche, understood that this aspect cannot be neatly withdrawn from the entire psychic economy for discrete analysis. Considering that my proposition is that circus is a transformative practice, the act itself in its initial concept, in its working out and re-working, its re-

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writing, its transformation, and in its confrontation with an audience becomes the site of the transference rather than the consulting room. Circotherapy then is not interminable in this context, since it is constrained within the timeframe of their circus creations. As such I use the material produced in these sessions to discuss key points of Lacanian theory as it is used in the practice of circotherapy. Leroy, Marc and Rosie came to two sessions. Christina and Emma came to three. Jack, Liz and Elena attended the full course of twenty sessions.

2. The Case Studies 2.1.1. The Demand Leroy, Marc

Lacan differentiates between need and demand by focussing on the symbolic nature of an infant's screams. The scream is an articulation of a need (hunger for example) the infant cannot satisfy itself, so this vocal form becomes a demand to the mother or another to fulfil it. When the need is satisfied and the demand has been answered it serves another function: as proof of the Other's love. The demand becomes forever wrapped up in this double signification, the articulation of a need and a demand for love, as evidenced with Costain's Will they love me enough? (564-565)
And just as the symbolic function of the object as a proof of love overshadows its real function as that which satisfies a need, so too the symbolic dimension of demand (as a demand for love) eclipses its real function (as an articulation of need). It is this double function which gives birth to desire, since while the needs which demand articulates may be satisfied, the craving for love is unconditional and insatiable, and hence persists as a leftover even after the needs have been satisfied; this leftover constitutes desire. (Evans, 1996, p.36)

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This demand is a call for the presence of the Other and this is how it comes to be bound with the notion of love, yet the Other cannot provide the unconditional love the subject craves and it is this leftover that is desire, a surplus. Need has an object which can sate it and it therefore stops motivating the subject until another need arises, whereas desire cannot be fulfilled, its mission is to reproduce itself. (Ibid., p.38) Marc and Leroy came to two sessions. The thing that united them thematically was that they did not want a crisis in their enjoyment; they did not really want to change. They came to session with a variety of demands that I did not respond to, demands which I could paraphrase as tell me who I am, how can I make my act better, solve this problem for me. I gathered these demands from their discourse, they did not directly voice this. This felt like a continuation of the relation with the trainer to whom similar demands can legitimately be posed help me make this trick better, or help me achieve the correct form, what am I doing wrong? Give me answers. The demand is the first thing to deal with in analysis; the demand is what stifles desire. Therefore analysis is about getting the analysand to stop demanding things and to start asking questions of themselves, to doubt what they think they know. Desire is a question because it involves a lack (of answer) not a demand (Fink, 1999, p.25). If there are conflicts, then these can provide a certain enjoyment to want something and not be allowed it, or not know how to get it for example and it is this combination of pleasure and pain, or enjoyment and the price to be paid for it, that Lacan calls jouissance (Ibid., p.21). Marcs idea for his act revolved around notions of sadness, homesickness and a girlfriend that he missed in Belgium. He wanted to use 3 silks in different parts of the stage; one representing sadness, one happiness and the third which he was confused about. He was torn between the freedom he felt in circus and the bonds of love he felt back in Belgium, feeling he would be freer without a girlfriend. Torn between these places we found that this third place where he was confused was indeed his own body, the site, perhaps that contained the best of both worlds.

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What was crucial here was not the content of his discourse, or even what was absent from his discourse, but the way he described things. He was only really comfortable in technical/factual/objective description. Feelings he may have been experiencing during the session were attributed to me he said that I thought he was sad when he was not, whereas I had merely been repeating back to him the affective aspects of his discourse in order to veer him away from technical descriptions of circus. He had talked at length of his sadness and yet he attributed it to a projection of mine. There are two subjects dealt with in Lacanian analysis the subject of the signifier and the subject of jouissance. This duality is a version of Freud's separation of representation and affect. If Marc talked about sadness yet did not feel sad the representation had become detached from the affect which was then free to be displaced elsewhere. This detachment is most evident in the symptom, where the ideational representative of the drive is repressed leaving the affect free to be displaced in order achieve satisfaction (Evans, 1996, p.168). In this case he displaced it onto me. Representation without affect is sterile. meaning that it is of no use in the analytic situation (Fink, 2004, p.142). Therefore, even if reflecting on memories by oneself will generate stories, the affect is only produced in the transference of talking about dreams, fantasies and desires with someone else. This made him think of being open, since here, he only talked of external things and not his internal world. He considered himself to be very open, easy going, not neurotic, nice to be around but he wondered if he was being open here in session or onstage because he felt he ought to be and that it was all just fake, that he played at being open, like in those faux sincere performances with pretty music and sad gestures. This, for him, was about expectation, this ought and how he felt stuck with aerial because he would snap into a default aerial mode, which was built up of the tricks and figures that aerial expected. This feeling of constraint within aerial work, this demand that seemed to be present also made itself heard in Elena's discourse when she wrote,

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I feel that there is a certain structure inherent in vertical aerial performance that is demanded by its practitioners more so, perhaps than by the audience. There are certain things (drops, contortions, strength moves) which must happen at certain points lest a piece be boring. But we never ask the audience this question, not really. (42-44.)

He wanted to present something the audience had never seen before, something he had never shown before, something different. This was significant in that it was clear he wanted to reach beyond those imagined demands and create something he had never shown before, something ultimately different for him. This was a signal of a lack, a question and showed therefore that desire was present and operating in the situation. I offered a question, as a way to close the session, that invited him to think before he saw me the following week; what did he think the audience was projecting onto him when he performed as this seemed to be a concern of his that I seemed to be projecting onto him? How would he frame the audience in that case? Who were they to him? He did not return but it was instructive to see when he left, at the point when desire was just starting to move. I may have moved too quickly into an area that provoked anxiety (the desire of the Other), my questions may have been too blunt and not open ended enough.
Hence it is not a question, for Lacan, of fitting the analysands discourse into a preconceived interpretative matrix or theory (as in the decoding method), but of disrupting all such theories. Far from offering the analysand a new message, the interpretation should serve merely to enable the analysand to hear the message he is unconsciously addressing to himself. The analysands speech always has other meanings apart from that which he consciously intends to convey. The analyst plays on the ambiguity of the analysands speech, bringing out its multiple meanings. Often the most effective way for the interpretation to achieve this is for it too to be ambiguous. (Evans, 1996, p.90)

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Often one word of the analysand's repeated back to them gives them an opportunity to wonder why this one word should be significant. This disrupts the ego's confidence in its own narrative, it disrupts the specular self-assurance of its own image reflected back to the I; it induces doubt. Analysis is meant to hystericize, to put into question something that seemed set, constant (Fink, 1999, p.133). It is meant to get desire moving since someone comes to analysis because something (desire) is blocked, stuck. Marc said he felt stuck with aerial, which meant that something about his particular way of enjoying (circus aerial performance and training) was no longer working. However the fact that he did not return, just as he reached a point in his story where desire disrupted the stable meaning of his ego-identity, pointed to a common psychoanalytic fact that analysands often come to analysis to restore a previous mode of enjoyment that has stopped working, rather than to discover new modes, new objects. Marc reached the point of admitting that he wanted something different and it could have been this, his yearning for originality and, I would speculate, authenticity, that prevented him, or frightened him from coming back. I was not there to solve his crisis, I did not have the answers he presumed I would. This is the crisis of jouissance that we got to in session via his confession that he felt fake, that his emotion was faux, or that it was a projection of mine. Ultimately the question of the Other, what the Other projected (audience) or what the Other expected (aerial), was where we left the session and it was this question that I saw at the heart of conflicts in circus students; their relation to the Other/Circus/Spectator (as spectator of circus). Rather than an agreement with or an assent to the analysand's ego-identity which is imaginary, the interpretation in the form of questions about the other is meant to produce symbolic effects, not necessarily meant to bolster the ego, or correspond to reality, but to allow the analysand to continue talking and thinking when the flow of associations has been blocked. (Evans, 1999, p.90) Christina, whom I discuss later, put it eloquently when she described the audience/Other as a geography that she had ignored. (17)

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This was the question they seemed never to have thought about, the one that shocked them when asked. I saw them go blank and the session plunged into silence. This is the unconscious closing up, where speech hits a wall, the lights go out, words dry up and they have nothing to say. Something was being repressed, something unpalatable to conscious identity (ego), that threatened the stability of the narrative of the ego. Resistance to remembering springs up and pushes it back down. The analyst operates at the level of the utterance, while the analysand operates at the level of a narration of self-identity. It is this same narration of self-identity that prevents the analysand from gaining access to unconscious knowledge. (Quinn in Biggs and Karlsson, 2010, p.245). Mardy Ireland describes the word as a diaphragm of jouissance in analysis, one that closes intermittently in neurosis, is fixed and immutable in perversion and is destroyed or non-existent in psychosis (Kirshner, 2011, Chapter Four). Jouissance is in the register of the real, the real of the drives, this is what lies behind the symbolic manifestations of the symptom and it is via the word, as symbol, that analysis can get to the real. This is to say that the symptom is comprised of a symbolic dimension repressed psychic representations of the real drives. These constitute the formal envelope of the symptom; they are what give symbolic form to the real of the drive. The act, which is symbolic in so far as it uses character or theatrics, is using the symbolic to get to the real. Therefore the symptom could be seen as a symbolic construction formed around a real kernel of jouissance. It is only through the elaboration of the symbolic constellation that the real of the drive appears, i.e. talking it through and with this the analysand can decide what to do with it, how to consciously manage her/his enjoyment. The blank wall, the silence is the shutting down of the access to the unconscious. Marc at least ended his sessions with a question, meaning that desire was moving; there was lack, in other words. In contrast, Leroy never got past the level of demand. His discourse was comprised of a series of wants, of technical demands upon himself, wherein he described himself technically, like an object to be made faster, more fluid, that could perform tricks seamlessly, softly. This he had in common with Marc. He could not connect these ideas to any-

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thing more personal than citing James Thierree as an inspiration and his prime intention towards the audience being that he could convince them of the reality of the magical world he wanted to create onstage (22). This intention belonged to the Imaginary. To be in a studio space working with Leroy would be an instance of him trying to convince me. At this stage of his development I thought that this would have been more useful for him than circotherapy. Many circus students and artists profess the intention of bringing the audience into their world, or giving them an experience similar to theirs. Rosie, whom I discuss later, said she wanted them to feel what she was feeling. For Leroy there was an emphasis on having fun and this is where he grabbed his own body, clutched at his heart. (24) There is a loop of affect in the circus performance whereby a trick will cause a gasp or applause which spurs the artist on to initiate the next trick gasp/applause circuit. This is done primarily with the body and its technique (handstand, acrobatics) or object (rope, trapeze, juggling ball), the body being the site of affect, drive and jouissance. If circus communicates then it does so with the body not with the narrative powers of the word. This was evidenced when, several times Leroy made a physical gesture when he could not think of the word (15, 24). This reminded me of Helen C. who wrote that if she could describe the act she would no longer need to do it. This was the body speaking, deciding, enjoying here. Leroy was the subject of jouissance, not the subject of the signifier (Fink, 2004, p. 144). The affect was clear and effective, I had a reaction, my body reacted, my body understood him. It was a demand for understanding and love, for agreement and a mirror-relation. It was not of the symbolic. I was the protoaudience, with whom he was establishing an imaginary, mirror-relation. Here both Marc and Leroy withdrew from an analytic alliance with me because they felt the threat of that enjoyment being removed. This threat is called castration in psychoanalysis. The pervert disavows it, pretending it never happened and for the psychotic, this name-of-the-father, this threat of separation from the source of jouissance never actually happened, it is foreclosed. For the neurotic it is always a question, a persistent, painful

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difficulty and is therefore repressed. These denote three ways in which the subject is situated towards the Other the symbolic universe in which we share common meanings and live meaningful lives. In Lacan, these are the structures, the only three, within which we develop.

2.1.2 Conclusion.
In early focus groups I showed that activities cut short by parents because they were dangerous or inappropriate, re-surfaced in the discourse of students discussing the potential genealogy of their choice to do circus. Something the body found enjoyment in is something it will not forget and it will find ways of re-asserting itself. This enjoyment they found, for example in climbing high walls, was bound up with the reactions they provoked in parents and the prohibition it met with. The threat of prohibition can be enjoyable also, one might enjoy, for example, testing a parent. I propose that in some forms circus is a way of breaking the rules or defying the law in a legitimatised setting with the added bonus of the complete approval of the other (Holmes, 159). Jouissance is not a clean pleasure, theres something naughty, dirty, kinky or transgressive about it, it is what the neurotic defends against, what the pervert tries to generate and what the psychotic is flooded with. Anxiety presents itself when the possibility of jouissance is too close and here I find the link to the specific kind of pleasure that the circus generates, both for its artists and for its spectators (Nasio, 1988, p.35). It is in reference to jouissance and the Other and to the understanding that psychoanalysis is the treatment of the real by the symbolic that the methodology of this phase attempted to work with (Kirshner, 2011, Chapter Four). If I were to have worked within the studio space, with the dynamics of body and equipment, under the technical demands of circus I would have still been in thrall to the order of the imaginary, to be affected by the body without hearing from it in the symbolic. This is what Leroy brought to the situation, the body and its ability to produce an affect.

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Despite a desire to help them as a director and to give in to those demands to give them the answers I had to stay true to another desire, the circoanalysts desire, for them to (re)find what they did not know that they knew in order for the act to be less symptomal and more of a symptomatology, less of a transformative therapy for themselves and more a clinic for the spectators jouissance. (Fink, 1999, p.16)

2.2 Neurosis: Hysteria and Obsession Rosie, Emma, Christina

Here I use excerpts from Jack's discourse 2.4 in this chapter to highlight the difference between hysteria and perversion. He was the only subject I suspected of operating within a perverse structure as opposed to three subjects Rosie, Emma and Elena who spoke, it seemed, from a hysterical perspective. Since this process revolved around the semantics of desire, desire as symbolic, rather than desire in the real (in this case the performance), it was important to quickly establish the main signifiers around which the circoanalysand spun the account they gave of themselves. Rosie provided, in two sessions, the clearest example of how a variety of concerns and conflicts could revolve around one signifier that kept returning, or repeated itself it is by means of the repetition of a certain signifier that we have access to jouissance (Zupani in Clemens, J., Grigg, R. 2006, p.158). She herself disavowed that this repetition had any significance by not responding to it when I repeated the word back to her after she had used it several times something is there, yet it serves no purpose. What it does, on the other hand, is necessitate repetition (Ibid.). Either she was not conscious of having used the word or she was actively defending against having used it. Lacan says Knowledge that speaks all by itself thats the unconscious (Lacan, 2007, p.70) it doesnt bullshit (p.91). Previously I stated that transference had happened already in the choice to come to circotherapy. Depending on this, two sessions could lead to a wealth of important unconscious material just as twenty sessions could amount to cir-

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cling the same issues with no progress. This can be due to the analysts inability to get the analysands desire moving, an inability to swiftly diagnose or to the intractability of the analysand's defence mechanisms. If the content of the discourse is hard to work with then it is to the defence mechanism that one looks to for answers. Jack, over the course of twenty sessions, produced very little material that could spark off associative chains of meaning. I could have remarked that he was not particularly articulate or that his vocabulary was impoverished, but there was an insistence throughout his discourse on certain signifiers feeling, quality, mood (34, 95, 79, 179-180) that made me feel that he was trying to say what he assumed I wanted to hear. As a circotherapist I was more interested in what he was trying to say with the words than the words themselves. In the twenty sessions he never gave substance to the feeling or quality he was trying to express or generate in the audience. These signifiers, in other words, did not connect to others, there was no movement, no chain. In a sense the words were imaginary, specular, reflecting back to me what he thought I wanted him to say. His descriptions felt empty. The lack of specifics gave a sense that everything he said was generic feelings, quality, interesting, relevant, clean, sincere (277-278). It felt that they were without reference, or learned as opposed to felt, rehearsed as opposed to spontaneous. He did not produce signifieds with his words, there did not seem to be any conceptual entity tied to the signifier that I could find. The words seemed robbed of their affective charge. With Rosie, Emma and Christina on the other hand, two to three sessions either produced material that generated more questions or, in Emmas case, actually provided symptom relief and the generation of a new position. Following psychoanalytic protocols I refrained from writing too much in a session in favour of listening and taking notes after the session of germane points.

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2.2.1. Rosie: Hysteria and the Law

Rosie said something in the first few moments as she sat down that we both reacted to together and shared a joke about. I cannot remember what it was that she said, it was something so directly sexual that we had both laughed, as if to say We havent even said hello and this very direct sexual, Freudian thing comes out. I was too shocked to write it down, or I did not want her to see me write it down. She did the same thing at the beginning of the second session which I will explore later. The session was thus immediately sexualised. I remember it had something to do with a bad recent sexual relationship with a fellow student. I do not remember correctly, but he was definitely present in the discourse and much of what she said could have been related back to him. This uncertainty on my part was due either to inexperience, or to the fact that there was already a strong erotic transference which took me by surprise. The opening of each first session was What would you like to do for your FMP? or Tell me about your FMP. Her first response was no idea and then 2 images of her and then interactions. Interesting image to be interacting with yourself. To prove myself: after frustration in the course: tried to please other and not worked. Want to please myself and prove myself. (1-4) The proximity of please myself and prove myself answered the question I posed while listening prove yourself to whom? Who is this Other you must prove yourself to and is it the same as the one you want to please? She could either have been talking of the ideal-ego which is an image to live up to, or the ego-ideal which is a place from which to be loved and recognised or the Other, which in this case was circus or the spectator of circus.
Anger at the moment. It is about my therapy. Anger at school, at myself, where I am.I often worked with a calm, fluid presence.Struggle to step out of the containment/restraint of the trapeze to develop something outside of what I know on it.Audience? I want to scream/cry and stillness looking at them. You want them to feel what youre feeling and make it connect to their feelings anger. Generally: I feel adored, appreciated. I need to

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project this anger in this space, this side of me. Havent got much kindness to give.altruism is broken and people react. (5-11)

She was speaking about performance, the environment she was in at the school with class mates and teachers and the circus itself. She stated clearly that she was using her circus as a therapy for her anger. After one of her presentations there was a feedback session with the whole class. The director of the school gave some feedback with which she did not agree. The feedback was echoed in various ways by other male members of the faculty. She made a response to them that was then labelled Facetious.(14). Then discussion moved onto other things. She felt that she had not been allowed a voice, an opinion, that authority thundered in and shut her up. There had been no dialogue for her, no even playing field; she had been confronted with authoritys right to give her a definition of herself. What immediately occurred to me was the strong transference that was happening as she was telling me the story and I was aware that I should take great care to listen how her discourse continued. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan says that the transference is the enactment of the reality of the unconscious. (1991c, p.149) and that the transference is what manifests in experience the enacting of the reality of the unconscious, in so far as that reality is sexuality. and very succinctly The reality of the unconscious is sexual reality an untenable truth. (Ibid., p. 174,150). It is perhaps because it is so untenable that he repeats himself as he does on the issue. This refers back to my use of Laplanche in the last chapter where sexual trauma, the intrusion of adult sexuality into the infants world is something that has to be repressed, thus founding the unconscious. For Laplanche, this is how and why the unconscious is formed in the first place. Transference is a process of producing the unconscious in the analytic relationship or there is no such thing as the unconscious without transference. (Feldstein, Fink, Jaanus, 1995, p.102-103). Here I was aware that whatever I offered her she rephrased and said back to me, as if to, at first negate the interpretation, to refute it and then to rephrase it

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in her own words so that it felt that the knowledge had come from her, which of course it had. However it had a hint of you dont know me, you dont get to talk about me like you know me better than I do, and perhaps was also an admission that the interpretation somehow did hit the mark. There was a clear echo here with what had happened with the Director of the school and the male members of the faculty; were they (was I) somehow enjoying at her expense? i.e. enjoying giving interpretation, feedback, generating knowledge about her. This was the opposite of Jack who wanted to be told what to think or do. Unable to position the audience he asked me What are they to you? (256257). He also wrote in a reflective text that having complete freedom to do what he wanted hindered him in actually making work (16-18). This again suggested that he wanted to be told what to do, feel or think. He wanted the demand of the Other to be clear, he wanted an authority to come into being that would relieve him of the responsibility of choice. This particular school (which contained him) insisted on risk taking and experimentation, so these imaginary demands were largely absent and authority was not enforced in the same way as it would have been in a classical, didactic circus training. Describing his final project performance he wrote:
I wanted to perform it more than once. I found that after i had performed, so many question i had where answered and so many more new questions where raised,most importantly though i found the act gained a whole new level of significance to me. (30-32)

This was somewhat typical of his discourse. In a way he told me what he thought I wanted to hear, that he was questioning, discovering questions were being answered and generating more questions, there was significance, in other words meaning but the nature of these questions, answers or significance were never filled in, their content was not revealed, they felt like empty, free floating signifiers that did not attach to signifieds, as if they were merely repeated, reflected, learned, mimicked. There did not seem to be a reference point binding them in the symbolic.

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Rosie however did have a reference point, a point de capiton or nodal point (iek, 2006 p.96) which was her principled feminist stance that was based around the idea that one does not have to use ones power (13). This was her thesis the objection of conscience based on the grand narrative of the master and his appropriation of knowledge and power the fact that he dictates what it is, and who can use it (Zupani, 2006, p.163). This had an echo in Elena's discourse when she described herself as having power but not wanting to use it (33). The transference, which was made evident in her rephrasing of my interpretations put me in the place of the master and her attitude towards him. She had managed to place the little other (John-Paul) in the position of the big Other and this was the beginning of a symbolic relationship with the circotherapist. So, if indeed the transference was happening it would have meant that the unconscious was being produced, there was truth being spoken, (not objective knowledge, as was the case with Leroy) in the way she related to me, not merely in the content of the communication. This above all was what I saw most likely to be circus asking itself the wrong question; not what is circus about but how does circus relate to its public or to whom is it addressed? Above all what was being manifested was a relation to authority, signified here by men. By focusing on this (how she positioned me, or where I needed to be placed for her to experience satisfaction) I may have helped her clarify her position with respect to the audience. More than this being a pretend analysis, or an as if situation, this was about being a proto-spectator. This was interesting compared with Jack. Again, it was not in the content of his words where the transference was produced but, I would suggest, in the game he played with me unconsciously, how he was trying to manoeuvre me into a position that would give him jouissance, satisfaction. He wanted me to be in the position of the master, not to prove me wrong, but so that he could prove me right. The counter transference with Jack was aggressive, I got angry sitting there listening to him say the same things again or serenely staring into the distance while my frustration mounted. It felt inappropriate that I should want to strike such a calm, pleasant and affable person, I felt guilt, I felt the

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super-ego. I will return to this and explain in more depth how I theorised this and how I tried to maintain the analyst's desire over the persistent desire to scold him or strike him with words, but I mention it here to highlight the different positions taken up with regards the master. If I return to Badious idea of a thinking as a non-dialectical unity of a theory and a practice, then I propose this making present of the unconscious via the transference happens at the site of the act as acting out because it was not the content of their discourse that demonstrated the transference to me, but from where it was enunciated. In this case then, for Rosie, the audience would become the master to be disdained and in the case of Jack, the audience would become a sadistic master. An injustice is being done to the subject, is one of the fundamental theses of the hysteric (Ibid., p.164). Rosie felt that she had been done an injustice in her feedback, authority had been used to stifle her voice and the dialogue she wanted to have had turned into an unsatisfactory proclamation. The signifier always fails to account for the truth, (Zupani, 2006, p.164) [T]he hysteric likes to point out that the emperor is naked. (Ibid., p.165) thus meriting the response of her comments being facetious. The Hysterics Discourse is addressed to the Master in this case the male teachers and head of the school and how they own knowledge. Lacan points out that the hysterics discourse is the only discourse that actually produces knowledge. (Ibid., p.164) and so, for her the Master is incompetent. The director, who represents the law, did not know what he was talking about and so the law, as the dominant feature of the Masters discourse, appeared at the level of the hysterics discourse.in the form of a symptom. It is around this symptom that the hysterics discourse is situated and ordered. (Lacan, 2007, p.43) Far from being an exercise in diagnosis that might prove my cleverness as a diagnosing circotherapist, this was a hypothesis about Rosies relation to the Other, one which proved appropriate when she performed her piece after the second session. It is important to get to a hypothesis as this will direct the course of the next session. Neurotic (hysteric, obsessional, phobic), perverse

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and psychotically organised subjects must be approached differently for each have different relations with the Law. Jack on the other hand properly wanted the Master to have this knowledge, to be competent and commanding, he wanted to believe, despite all evidence that the Master (Other) was not lacking.

2.2.2. Emma: The Hysterical Symptom

I talk about three ideas that had been rumbling in my head but of which I was convinced of none and as I talked about them I felt a bit like a fake talking about something I wasnt totally convinced about, I felt really nervous, I started by saying I dont want it to be about me! as if I couldnt get the words out quickly enough, JP highlighted this statement by repeating it back to me and mentioning that it was interesting that I worded it like that.. it got me thinking....why did I not want it to be about me? Was I ashamed? (31-35)

Emma described the three possible ideas for her FMP and in doing so offered up comparable issues regarding the law (1-24). The first saw her performing with her father onstage playing the viola, the second was a satirical portrayal of God as grotesque and washed out and the third showed her enjoyment with another female performer as eighteenth century whores in their backstage time, waiting for the men who they complain about and satirise, while they perform on a rope. This showed she was already in a position to symbolise her relations with male figures. In the case of the whores it was to show humour being used to cope with their hard reality. Rosie did not have such a female ally, she spoke of feminism in the abstract and seemed isolated from other women in her discourse. She did not mention them and her first idea was to interact with herself. What she chose to share may not have been the same as the ego narrative she wished to share, the unconscious may have been revealing itself in her choice not to speak about other women as Emma did.

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Darian Leader notes that in the hysteric's relation with a man, there is always a third (Fink, 2004, p.21-23). The rope became many things in her discourse the outside of the whore's reality, where everything was possible, the rope being the hope for a better life, where they would not have to put on a brave face against their hard reality. Lastly the rope was non-existence. After a long pause it then became the highs where the whores were just women together, with their gentleness to be opposed to the hard reality of the gentlemen clients in contrast to the brave face the whores put on when grounded, in our reality where they were rugged and strong. In reality we mask what's going on with humour we get sucked up the rope, where it's the reality of our emotions unmasked. (1-24) In her reflective text on the session she mentioned the desire for a lover:
I have been feeling a bit lonely and like maybe Im a bit too particular for someone to fall in love with these days, I dont even know if I want to be loved by a man or a woman, I feel like I dont really know how to relate to a man in that way at the moment and that what I really desire is the tenderness of female companionship but with enough independence to not suffocate each other. (36-39)

It was clear that there was doubt here about the position of the man. It did not seem to have anything to do with circus, yet she chose to write about it and therefore it had to be taken into consideration. The reason for its inclusion only became elucidated later on in her discourse. Although she had clearer ideas than Rosie this was not what was of interest in the circotherapeutic situation. What was pertinent was that she was thinking as if for the first time as she tried to explain her choices. The triptych that involved three positions to men her father providing the music for her movements, God as a decrepit, useless object of satire and men as clients satirised as a way of coping illuminated a potential position she was taking towards the Other, here signified, like Rosie, as a man. The man in Emma's discourse helped to illuminate various hysteric themes that Rosie's discourse contained the father as the one who provides the structure one must follow, God as cas-

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trated master, washed-out and laughable and the male clients who enjoy at the expense of the woman. The I don't want it to be about me! that is so forceful emphasised her use of the word mask and the fact that she was unconvinced by what she told me, fake. One should not take the words of an analysand at face value. A lie, or a denial, especially in the case of hysteria, is more likely to tell the truth than a fact. The opposite is the case of the obsessive who is more likely to give a stream of objective facts precisely in order not to tell the truth. Emma, in her reflective text after the first session, described a
mini breakdown about not feeling good enough in many aspects of life and not managing to keep up with the combined workload of school and getting Strumpets (the piece about the whores) ready for the season ahead, but for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I allowed myself to vent this whilst laughing at myself for how ridiculous I am, I ranted and scribbled my thoughts and drank and cried....and then....felt sooo much better. Yes I do want to do a piece as Emma I know all about this subject. (48-52)

This showed me that she was fully engaged in a process of trying to find what she wanted, that she was at a point where the analysis could indeed cause a mini-breakdown in other words an experience of extreme doubt a hysterical moment. The success of the breakdown however was that she ended up using the best tool against the super-ego possible; she laughed at herself, instead of lacerating herself. (Critchley, 2008, p.77-82) One very clear aim of circotherapy had been to allow the subject to make circus precisely about this subject they know all about. A lengthy analysis would then aim at facilitating knowledge production about this subject, to produce the knowledge that they did not know they already knew. Rosie and Jack were at the stage of playing out the symptom in the therapy, casting me in the role of symbolic Other that they had issues with; Rosie had an issue with the Other as an authority whom she would have liked to discredit while Jack was trying to make this authoritative Other come into being. This is an important stage and it shows that they had, in relation to circus, gone be-

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yond the imaginary demand that prevented the transference with Marc and Leroy. Rosie expressed this in content and behaviour and Jack only in his behaviour since he said very little comparatively over twenty sessions. Emma was one step ahead, she used me, in the analytic sense, as object a, the object that causes desire. I would propose conversely, that for Rosie, I was the object of desire, the male she sought to provoke or prove wrong, a relation that is a source of jouissance. This explained to me why there was no erotic transference with Emma but there was with Rosie. From Imaginary to Symbolic to Real these are the chronological positions the analyst can hope to take for the analysand. It may seem ridiculous to say that Emma and Rosie had achieved this understanding in only one session when psychoanalysis can be interminable and last for many years before the shift to the symbolic or real positioning of the analyst takes place. However it is not so far fetched if one is reminded that they have been in the therapy of circus for many years prior to this as Rosie says It is about my therapy. (5) and that circotherapy is maybe all it takes to elucidate the therapeutic action that has been happening all along. Rosie missed one session that she had booked and then did not reply to emails and text messages asking her if she wanted to attend anymore or if there was a reason why she did not attend and if she was okay. She finally apologised and booked a second session which she realised she had double booked so that it overlapped with a technical rehearsal. This provoked an angry counter-transference in me, where I felt disrespected and unworthy. However I was aware that I should note it and not let it interfere with the desire that she continue having sessions with me. Understanding that arriving late, not turning papers in on time, double booking things, cancelling sessions are all neurotic objects and thus satisfying in some ambiguous way (the jouissance of the symptom) I sought instead to understand this as part of the way she organised her satisfaction. Relating this to the position of the hysteric it was a demand that the Master actually prove his power and so it was something I could not react to. I made this explicit in the introductory focus group on circotherapy. This feeling dissipated quickly but I was aware of being caught in a game. This

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same aggressive counter transference remained and did not dissipate for much of my work with Jack, as it felt as if my hand had been forced to sign a masochistic contract which I could not renege on, in which he could use me for his needs (continuation of a masochistic form of enjoyment) whilst avoiding the real matter of the analysis. Emma's second session did anything but avoid the issues at hand. She wrote - I walk in and explain that actually I am no closer to knowing what I would like to do for my FMP however a process has begun. (53-54) She talked directly about her symptoms, inherited from her father and younger brother tenseness, holding her breath, bodily shakes which she put down to her hysterical, manic mother (56-58). She mentioned these symptoms because since the first session she had become aware of the fact that she had been finding coping mechanisms for them and consequently they had begun to abate. I get nervous and hold a lot of tension in my body, like armour, so I am trying to concentrate on relaxing it when I feel it tense up, which is probably on average every ten seconds, and that I must remember to breathe and as a result my shakes seem to be diminishing for the first time ever, miracle. (80-82) I suggested to her that hysteria could be seen as a form of theatre, addressed to an audience, that the symptom is addressed to an other, a particular form of this being histrionics. I said to her that symptoms could be seen as a way of organising enjoyment. She seemed to be in a place where she could accept these theoretical fragments in such a way as to use them for herself, to find what they meant to her, rather than merely accepting them as given, didactic, unassailable knowledge. She acknowledged that she had symptoms but she did not act them out in session, preferring to remember why she had them in the first place. Rosie, on the other hand, by missing a session that she had booked was defiantly acting out something that she did not yet want to remember.
One thing that JP says to me is that I am not rambling, I am taking pauses to consider what I want to say or to consider how I feel about certain things, this is really important, it soothes my usual world of panic its like a gentle reassuring hand on the head and allows me to relax and feel more free to express how I really feel

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about things without worrying about having to hide parts of me. The things I describe bring up the word Histrionic, I wasnt sure how I felt about it, now I accept it within its context, Jp made sure to tell me that I'm not histrionic, however I can see elements, I know Im a bit mad and I think that I have constructed a way to deal with myself which is ok. We talked about symptoms like for example my shakes, and why we have symptoms, who are they for? Upon consideration they dont rear their head when I am comfortably nestled in somebodys arms, do I want to be in too many places at one time I must remind myself to slow down and be more present in the things I do, I think this is why when I do presentations my movements never are fully full! We talked about the idea that I seem to have ways of organising my enjoyment, I like this. (83-92)

Here the transference and how she positioned me is expressed clearly. I am not the father playing the music she must follow, the God to satirise because he is a castrated Master, nor the hard male clients that the whores must please. I was rather a gentle and reassuring hand on the head. I did not sense any erotic transference, as I did with Rosie, but I did hear something about love coming through her words. Was I to be contrasted with these three figures, others she did not feel relaxed around, unable to express herself to, for whom she should hide, be a fake or use a mask or wear her armour for? Onstage, in her circus act, was she un-relaxed, unexpressive, hidden (masked)? Was she then positioning me as the audience she wanted in order for her to fully express herself and flow, rather than the audience (Other) for whom she was tense, shaking, not being able to breathe? I was reminded of the headlights of an approaching car on the one hand, and someone soothing, relaxing, uninhibiting on the other. Something in the therapy had allowed her to position me in such a place so as to get her desire moving. In other words, she used me as the thing that would cause her desire to help her name her desire and not be ashamed of it. She did not desire me, she used me to facilitate a process. She then came up with a series of statements that she would take as starting points to inspire movement improvisation which I could then work from. (92-93). She made a programme of activity to bring her findings in session into the real:

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I have created my partner within myself Wanting to be held, and my hair to be stroked Feel my heart getting bigger softer, warmer Relax dont panic everything is ok, take your time Forgive myself Wanting to feel calm and warmth in silence with mum Hysteria Laughter is my knight in shining armour Contorted my body armour If you like me I get scared you wont understand me, and leave Disabled by fear and worry What are the silences filled with? Not a block. Melted by love. (92-106)

I include here Emma's final reflective text. She had injured herself with whiplash (60), a sort of paralysis that chimed with her symptoms. This injury seemed like a concretisation of her symptoms and, when faced with the director of the school, whom she admired, the following happened, a sparking off of an associative chain of meanings and memories that brought into play the various strands of her discourse into one narrative:
When I injured myself I burst into tears in front of (the Director) which surprised me and it was met with an awkward reaction on his part wanting to help but unsure how to so he left abruptly. This bought to light that perhaps I don't know how to ask for the things I feel I need, and that by putting up barriers I am giving the wrong signals to people as if rejecting something before I have even dared to ask for it. This rings very true if I am to take a step back and look at myself, I have been doing this for years, out of fear that I am hindrance, or not good enough,or weird. .We looked a bit deeper to find that there is a reoccurring pattern: As a child, Dad would leave for months at a time, I would miss him so terribly that upon his return I would then ignore him for days and avert my eyes, it would fill me with sadness and a massive lump in my throat until we would talk and start spending time together again. I wonder whether this was a natural reaction or whether it was a result of my mothers frustration at him. As I grew older I took to running away from home quite a lot, then waiting for him to come and find me, we would then spend hours in the pub talking just the two of us and calm would be restored. For another few months. Mostly I was run-

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ning away from my mother who was severely depressive and would threaten to commit suicide every couple of months blaming it in me, because dad was unable to love her due to her erratic mental state, she was quite destructive when she would have a turn. I believe it was for this reason that I dismissed my femininity for years, wanting to be more like Dad, reliable and like able but my biggest fear was that I would turn out like my mother and be mad. (128-144) Another early occurrence that would have influenced me, was my early deflowering in which I learned abruptly that my voice did not always hold strength, when I really wanted it to! as a consequence I had kept it a secret for 14 years in fear that I would not have been believed, this made me feel a bit different to other kids, now I know that it happens to a much higher percentage of people then one would think, any time I have spoken to somebody with a similar experience has helped. (146-150)

This brought to mind several things: the denial of voice, or saying no and the rabbit in the headlights that I was reminded of when she spoke about a person she admired and to whom she was unable to say hello. She re-constructed a history with the present in mind, she made sense of her past with reference to the symptoms of the present. She made a direct link between the director and her father and the abruptness of their leaving. It perhaps took a circotherapist who would not leave, or buy into the game of awkwardness to allow her to posit a figure who would not leave. The traumatic early deflowering which remained silent for so long, a silence echoed in her inability to say hello provoked her to make a piece of work about this in which saying hello to the audience was the prime motivation (123). It delineated a relation to the Other that she had worked through and that now informed her creative productions in circus. God, her father or the whores were no longer present in her discourse, but they had led her here, to a position where she knew what she should confront.
So where does this bring my performing self and my everyday self? In the session we discussed considering This is what I do, not this is something that happens to me! with regards to my internal monologue. How do I make people feel when I contort with awkward-

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ness? Its neither for my benefit nor theirs. Is this why I cook? So I can have a purpose to be in peoples lives? Yes. And perform? So I can be many people and express more easily? Yes. How can I join my everyday self with my performing self? Bring more honest feeling to my performance and more courage to me. Is one buffering the other? Yes, I believe without one the other would fade. I actually wake up content to be here these days. Am I asking, telling or demanding of the audience? In this instance I am telling a story. Why don't I want to inconvenience people when I know I would like to be inconvenienced by them? Because sometimes I don't believe in myself enough, and this manifests in my strength also, so now I am consciously trying to believe more and noting quite a visible difference, I must be consistent with this. (151- 160)

There was clear evidence of symptom relief here. For some students, circotherapy, the giving-voice-to-circus, may be the very thing to compliment their rigourous physical training in order for them to express something other than the technical demands of Circus.
After the session I felt like I needed to walk by myself and cry a lot, not in a bad way but as a release, I didn't cry, I wrote. Since this session I am noticing some changes in me, which I must be honest has surprised me to be happening so soon but I am embracing it. I don't seem to be feeling quite so lonely, I am approaching people more openly and noticing a warm welcome so I have been walking around with a tingling feeling inside my tummy and a feeling of warmth and strangely acceptance for myself, I am enjoying devising my piece. I'm feeling more calm and allowing myself to concentrate on one thing at a time..I know that things are ever changing but I really hope that I keep this feeling with me because it is both productive for me and for my work. Thankyou. (169-175)

2.2.3. Rosie: Castration

The first thing she said as she entered was that she had a technical rehearsal that would cut into her session with me and that the male technician will castrate me if Im late. (18). As in the first session her first words were sexually

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explosive. Because she was in a hurry she would have to cut the session short. She complained about not having enough solid time to devote to making these pieces required of her because in school time is cut up all the time. (19). She talked of the even playing field of home education and her liberal upbringing and contrasted it to the real world full of people cutting each other up. (49-50). It was this previous world of her childhood that she wanted to explore for her FMP; how to get the freedom of the child back. Later that day she performed a trapeze act that was framed by taking place after she showed a lover leaving her bed, a lover that had raped her, wherein her white underpants displayed a strip of red traversing her genitals. There were two levels to the session, one at the level of the cut and another at the level of the gaze. She had, since the last session, performed the anger she expressed in the previous session which made her feel heavy on the trapeze where normally I feel light. (43-44). So the piece she was about to do, the rape, was a sad anger, a story about anger, where she re-found her lightness, and where none of the real anger was there anymore (45-46). She had replaced a real anger with a symbolic one, returning me to the idea that circus and analysis may have similar goals to heal the real via the symbolic. She felt like she had come full circle. So, I suggested, that in coming full circle back to the same point, albeit after a journey where some transformation took place, she was circling something. I asked what was in the circle that, in her words she she could not go to directly. (43). My feeling was that this thing was her anger at authority, something that had been given a different twist in her use of the word castration by the male technician and the theme of rape a theme that actually alleviated her heaviness and therefore provided symptom relief in the act. The question of authority or law, who does the enjoying and who does not, who prohibits satisfaction and who takes it away were still there, but now under the sign of the cut. I wonder if the director, in the position of the law, who did not allow her to speak cut her off? Had the law, as symbolised by the signifier of man, cut her, cut something off, her childhood? Was this what offended her so, made her feel so much disdain?

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Rosie had not yet managed to incorporate her circus act into her history, like Emma or developed such a nuanced relationship with the law as with Christina, whom I discuss next. All I could hear was castration over and over again be that i) the desire to be castrated I will scold you for not turning up/cutting the session short thus taking away your pleasure in manipulating the master. ii) the desire to return to a time (of the imaginary) before the cut, before the entrance into the symbolic via the prohibiting gesture/intrusion of the law under the sign of castration, the Name-Of-the-Father, iii) the law/school directly intervening in her pleasure of creating a piece by cutting up time. iv) by castrating me or my presumed enjoyment by cutting the session short. v) the restraint of the trapeze which contained her previously calm, fluid presence she achieved on it before. (5) In session I brought her back to the audience. I was interested in how, portraying or representing the feelings around rape, she saw the people to whom she performed this. She proceeded to speak about being observed:
Easier to engage when people are watching. Self-conscious when not performing i.e. when rehearsing in a crowded room. Less self-conscious when being watched. However she doesnt engage with i.e. look at the audience. But when people might be watching Im self-conscious. They may see my vulnerability. Shes very clear about the 3 levels, however onstage she looks at the floor whereas as a person in everyday life she is far from shy about eye contact. (20-27)

I made a suggestion that she may have been open to voyeurism when she did not know she was being watched and that this was something she was not in control of; how she was being seen. This lack of control in how she was perceived could have been similar to the feeling of being given an edict by the director, something she was not allowed to respond to. She left the session having opened up an area of enquiry regarding the Other and the position she was taking to it.

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I then made a methodological error. I went to see her presentation. In a way it was a form of proof for myself but it also confirmed to me that, should we have had another session, my ability to listen just to her words would have been radically altered, loaded with the imaginary sensations and empathy that I experienced watching her perform. In other words I experienced an inescapable counter-transference, something I would not have been able to put behind me. As such it was fortuitous that we did not have another session. It did however allow me to come to some conclusions, to close the case. I noted that I should be stronger in the future, to not be lured into the space where students affirmed themselves in the imaginary, in the mirror stage of the performance and that I should adhere to the strictly symbolic order of analysis. The purpose of brief analysis is to get to a point as quickly as possible. The moment something is said that is loaded with affect, that is a question of doubt, or a defence springs up, the analyst should make all efforts to bring the analysand back to it and work it through, even if that is a slip of the tongue which they may attribute to being tired, sloppy or unfocussed. In this case what is tired is the egos censoring function/defence mechanisms. Its focus should be on the unconscious fantasy structuring the way the subject desires. In cases such as Liz, whom I discuss later, Lacanian circoanalysis gave way to a more therapeutic Winnicottian model of holding the space so that dangerous fantasies could be safely contained and explored. The castration theme could now be thought of in two different ways; via the popular jargon of how the hysteric undermines and attacks the masters, pointing at their weaknesses and how this is said to be castrating or via her complaint that they are not castrated enough. If they were castrated enough they would coincide with how they are really just human beings, full of flaws and faults, and this discrepancy irritates the hysteric. They really are not as powerful as their symbolic position dictates, as in Emmas God as grotesque and washed-out. Rosie missing sessions, cutting them short and not replying to e-mails about her attendance was a form of asking me to prove my authority. It was a demand. In this sense, the hysteric is much more revolted by the weakness of power than by power itself.the master is not master enough.

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(Zupani, in Clemens, Grigg, 2006, p.165). There was a strong countertransference here, my feeling let down, disrespected and wanting to scold her. I had to keep strong the desire of the analyst that I continue to not give in to her demand in order to ask her if she wanted to return to session. The worst feeling, in the case of the hysteric is that the master is enjoying at her expense. (Ibid., p.165). I should not be able to own the pleasure of giving an interpretation, she must rephrase it as if she had said it herself, or knew it all along. Her resistance to this was highlighted elsewhere in her disavowal of the importance of her use of the word cut the signifier always fails to account for the truth, there is a mistrust of the symbolic as a medium for truth. She was perhaps healing a wound concerned with her relation to power and its ties to masculinity through the circus act that depicted the aftermath of a rape by a lover. Her white underwear, clearly on show during the trapeze act, displayed a line of red, representing blood, traversing her genitals. On the trapeze, after the initial set-up that told us what may have happened, she expressed pain and sorrow. I felt discomfort, the too-much of jouissance that often coincides with the not-enough/ thats not it! and that this discomfort was anxiety, when jouissance (a too-much) gets too close to desire (that's not it). A not enough always meets its too much (Ibid., p.167). She wants a master, she wants the other to be a master, to know many things. But she does not want him to know enough not to believe that she is the supreme prize of all his knowledge. (Ragland, ibid., p85) My conclusions following her presentation were: She wanted us to feel her anger she was not working towards representing a rape scene, or the ensuing affects, she wanted to share it, she looked straight at us and confessed it. This showed a marked difference in her relation with the audience, she was no longer looking at the floor. Three aspects of her discourse seemed linked in here: the restraint of the trapeze which made her feel heavy; the loss of satisfaction in aerial training/performance; that it did not do what she asked of it Rape showed that there was pain in something that should afford pleasure (sex with a man), someone else (the man) had enjoyed pleasure at her ex-

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pense, she proceeded through painful, dissatisfying procedures for the others pleasure on the trapeze meaning that she was forced to do so, the audience forced her to go through these dissatisfying procedures The audience observed the discomfort that they forced her to perform.

One might say that this was perverse, but then one would be reminded of the psychoanalytic theory that the hysteric only fantasises what the pervert actually does. .the symptom should not be confused with the structure, the 'perverse' practice should not be identified with the structure (Hyldgaard, 2004, line 2930). This made me conclude that, in this instance Circus was a space of perverse fantasy for the hysteric.

2.2.4. Christina and the Law: Obsession

Christina gave a clear example of being in a different, more nuanced relationship with the law. Her ideas for her FMP revolved around chaos and beauty, mess and order (38, 69-71). When asked who the audience was to her there was a characteristically long silence. She then responded to the question by saying that she was creative by being messy, that there could be beauty in mess and disorder which she wanted to share with the audience. However there was a clear sense of "what should be" and what should not in her discourse. For example, in delivering this beautiful mess, or this beauty-in-mess to the audience, she said she wanted to bring them back to when they were wrong. Then she said that the audience was a "geography" that she had "ignored." There was more silence (17). The silence reminded me of the anxiety felt when faced with the void of the Other's desire, an object-less anxiety, since the audience is anonymous, no-one (person), Lacan's formulation being that anxiety is "not without an object". With other circoanalysands this Other had had some connection with the law, an authority or some unspoken set of rules, the origins of which they could not be entirely certain of. Emma said that she was painful-

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ly shy towards people she admired, that there was something written somewhere, some rules that one should know in order to be able to perform in these situations that she did not know and that prevented her from going into social interactions (71-72). It reminded me of the panic Weaver felt when confronted with social situations for which she was unprepared. When Emma encountered someone she admired she found it difficult to say hello, which suggested a similar silence, a similar anxiety. (61) I allowed Christina her silence which was particularly long, because I felt something happening. I cannot explain what this feeling was but I knew her unconscious was at work. I hung on the silence because it felt pregnant. It was a very positive feeling I had towards her, a positive counter-transference. Transference is a question of transmission which is why it is so important to circotherapy what is transmitted in session may well be what is transmitted to the audience. A transference can draw us in or it can push us away. Jack's incredibly long and frequent silences, which he spent calmly looking ahead of him inspired a counter-transference that made me furious because nothing seemed to be going on, as if he had shut down, blocked off the unconscious. It felt as if I had been erased, as if I was not even there in the room with him, and it generated an anxiety that quickly gave way to an anxiety relieving mechanism, rage. In my mind there was suddenly a shouting voice "But what the fuck are doing here if you can't speak about this circus thing you do everyday!" and with this shouting voice, the calm, listening, impartial face of the analyst had to prevail. It was as if I had a raging super-ego inside of me that I did not recognise. Reminded of this anxiety I asked her if she ever had anxiety dreams. She was quick to bring up a situation from her past where she had been a teacher where there was always one boy who was out of control in the class. The recurring anxiety dream re-visited (re-staged) this event. In my mind's eye I saw very clearly a geography of performer and audience they were a class of school children with one disruptive element that provoked anxiety in her. In that anonymous sea of faces, the Other, was there one potentially dis-

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ruptive, uncontrollable element that would make her fail, bring her skills into question? The environment of the classroom had come up earlier with direct reference to the juxtaposition of rules and creativity,
I was teaching in a kindergarten over Christmas and I remember two boys playing Lego that got bored, so they invented their own game- throwing Lego through the hole of a chair. I thought it was brilliant, but the school rule (as other children told me) has it that it is not allowed playing Lego like that. There are thousands of examples like this in school, work and social situations and maybe this isnt about chaos any more now but about personal freedom and expression. (59-63)

She described juggling as the journey of an object, just like the inappropriate journey the Lego brick took, and how it was a challenge to get this object through the most difficult journeys. This immediately made me think of the obsessive's postponement of pleasure, making the path to jouissance as circuitous as possible as Freud describes in Notes Upon a case of Obsessional Neurosis (2001d). It reminded me also of Costains difficult knot (366). She then wrote that it was like being God, this was her universe, she had made it, which confirmed that, at the level of the work, she conformed to the urgent need for control typical of the obsessive personality. Order, control, geometry, beauty and work on the one side and mess, chaos, wrongness, beauty, play on the other. Beauty seemed to be the master signifier or nodal point from which both opposing chains of signifiers stemmed.
When I used to have these dreams, it was always the same boy being loud or naughty or not paying attention and me as a teacher trying helplessly to get the class under control (129-130) .Juggling has a bit of controlling the objects, they need to behave as well, but it is my precision and if it goes wrong or out of control, its my own fault (134-135) .so, maybe the dream is also about the failure of being that high status, trying to command space, being in charge I want all you kids-audience?- to hang on my lips and think I am fantastic, even if Im not absolutely engaging or giving a lot but just waiting for you to be ready (143-146).The boy: What was it

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about him? Other children didnt behave either, but I think he was the most rebellious. They were all about ten years old, and some children still had a childlike thing of really liking me and what I came up with while others sort of started getting into a teenage rebellion, finding things boring or stupid. That boy maybe was most like that and back then I really wanted him to like me more. (158162)

She then said that he was "clever, good, creative, lots of freedom in him and I had to put him down because I was the system." (41). Here Christina was in the position of authority, she was the castrating teacher who had to rob the children of their pleasure, their play, their creativity, their chaos, whether she wanted to or not. This dream for control was at odds with the creativity and play and chaos that she wanted to achieve. The dream was significant in that it posited a situation with the same topography as the performance space so that now she could include the audience as part of the geography of the act. She did not say how she instituted the law in the classroom but it showed her ambivalence towards it. Her anxiety perhaps then was that the audience would find her boring and stupid and would rebel which echoes similar concerns brought up in Chapter Two.
The other thing maybe is being blamed for something I did or represented but didnt really want to represent. It was a job I liked and didnt like and there are a lot of things I wasnt really happy about but had to do or didnt have the courage or time do change or be different. I suppose thats one reason why I like being an artist/performer so much, because its legitimate to do it, finding own new ways, being provocative and inappropriate too. (164-168)

Perhaps now she would have the courage and take the time to change the things she did not like, to be illegitimate, inappropriate and provocative. This signaled a distance from the Other, a rebellious independence from the demands of the Other, of Circus, because, I propose, she was the naughty boy in the classroom, finally, in her circus act. To state it bluntly, Christina's universe was that of the obsessive trying to get control, and whether or not she was actually an obses-

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sive neurotic is unclear and indeed irrelevant. However she had a clarity about the universe that she wanted the audience to be a geographical part of and it may well be that the audience had become the obsessive, anal other wanting clarity, precision and things done correctly against whom her performance wanted to rebel. With this in mind she could not have been an obsessive neurotic, because she did not seek to destroy the Other with her concern with her objects/rituals. The therapy got her to a point of considering the Other to be part of the geography of the act. She perhaps had overcome the obsessive symptom of juggling itself which is to ignore the audience because of the concentration required on the repetitive ritual of the objects to go into territory that actually went against the grain, the law of juggling; chaos. With this in mind it was no surprise that when I asked her if she wanted anymore sessions she replied, No thanks, I'm fine.

2.3.1. Jack Perversion

In our first session, Jack had no difficulty in answering the question of the audience with the reply that they could both be a savage beast and someone who wants to see you. (348). This was not the first time I had heard the audience described this way. On the third session his issue was how to incorporate his voice into his next presentation with a monologue. It was causing him distress, since it seemed to him as if there was an expectation from the school that he should do this, since theatre formed a large part of the curriculum and his class contained many confident physical theatre actors. He broke down crying and we tried to figure out whether or not he really needed to use his voice and if so what it was that he was trying to say. If previous sessions had found me doing most of the talking, here I was giving him directorial advice about his presentation. It was only after the session that I realised that I had again given into his demands and that

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no real therapeutic work had occurred, although there had been symptom relief in his tears. Circus training is rote and involves mimicry, obedience or the ability to follow precise instruction repetitively. It is imaginary in that it involves the physical image, which is tied to the ego. Often the trainer or circus itself can take the place of the super-ego berating an ego that cannot live up to its demands, a super-ego that, just as in the infant's incorporation of the parental voice of authority and prohibition, can become internalised in the student, as is evidenced by Elena's understanding of the requisites of aerial performance. The working through in analysis of the imaginary conflicts and alliances that mask the subject's symbolic relation to the Other, Law, prohibition, authority and ultimately castration allows the subject to clear up conflicts in that symbolic order of desire. This paths the way for the analyst to get to the real, to slide into a position that is neither imaginary nor symbolic, but of the object a, the object cause of desire.
When i realised that a monologue wasnt going to add any more artistic integrity and clarity to my piece i felt an immediate release of tension. It was quite literally a weight off my shoulders.( along with the tears ) Im glad that you helped me realise this thought, i think it will be really important to my future work. (245-248)

I here think that his jouissance revolved around the word, the word itself, the spoken signifier. Issues surrounding the voice often have to do with the invocatory drive which is associated with the super-ego, which is often described as a ruthless, relentless, lacerating and sadistic voice that is impossible to please or appease. (Eagleton, 1990, p.269-272)
I have also been thinking alot about what the audience is to me, and to again be honest, i would have to say that im not sure. Part of me believes the audience to be these people who are like my gods that i must entertain regardless of my unhappiness in the method.

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The other believes the audience to be an important part of the performance itself, and if it wasn't for the audience the show just wouldnt be what it is. But i still dont really know what the Audience is to me What are they to you? (252-257)

He wanted me to tell him what to think, this was his demand. By so directly asking what I now think might have been latent in the previous sessions, so close to describing the audience as "gods" he must "please" despite his "unhappiness" within an act containing a "monologue", I was finally able to hypothesise something that could knit these various strands of his discourse together into something useful that might allow me to position myself in such a way as to provide an efficacious therapy that produced some self-understanding. This revolved around the notions of super-ego, the voice as object a (object cause of desire) and masochism. He wanted me to be this voice and so projected the super-ego into me, so that I could take responsibility for it. It is also important to note the aggressive counter-transference I experienced on reading the question "What are they to you?" and I immediately found it interesting that he used the word what and not who which from the start of my research I have used to differentiate between an object and a subject. My counter-transference was experienced as the question invading me, intruding, shattering all possibility of assuming a symbolic position, lodging me in the imaginary realm of friendship. I wanted to shout at him. "Are you stupid or something?! Don't you know the rules!" His act started with the question Have you ever? and ended with Well, how did it feel?. He said that he had seen them observing him having an emotional experience but in their feedback afterwards they had told him that they had not themselves experienced an emotional state. The performance had gone well despite a few mistakes and nothing disastrous happened. (188-190) The "most simplest and articulate" signifier he could muster at the beginning led nowhere, it was a half question "have you ever?" and the last thing, Well, how did it feel? was something that repeated itself in session where he

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asked me for my opinion on what he should think or feel. However I hoped that having transferred the situation to the performance space he would progress to some self-understanding. He made his position clear here with his half finished enunciation and his question to the Other. I would say that not only did he not know what to say to them, he also did not know what he was asking. The fact that they observed him having an emotional state but had none themselves meant that they barely existed as subjects for him. It implied that he had failed to ignite a feeling in them, which had been his original intention. It may well have been that this was not his unconscious intention, which could have been to use them for his own enjoyment, to see them see him enjoying:
Masochism....is the fascinated observation of oneself as an object, thereby excluding the experience of the concrete Other and the Other's lack. In the standard example of the masochist who pays a woman to whip him, he is treating her as an instrument and therefore puts himself in a position of transcendence in relation to her. In other words, the masochist is the subject treating the other as an object. The masochist's goal is not to fascinate the concrete Other by means of his objectivity the procedure of seduction but to cause himself to be fascinated by his own objectivity-for-others. The experience of Otherness, the desire of the concrete other, is radically excluded. (Hyldgaard, 2004, line 193-199)

The fact that he was struggling to make the other exist, to bring it into being was crucial to his position, yet it did not concern him - a problematic associated specifically with perversion (Fink, 1999, p.153, 204). This echoed my previous statement that he was trying to make the Other exist. In the first session he recalled a scene which had a feeling attached to it which he wanted to explore in his first piece. He said he genuinely wanted to connect with the audience, to allow them to reflect, to ignite something in them. (344). He was a young boy all alone in his parents' bedroom. It was very hot, tropical, the kind of heat in which it is hard to do anything. He was lying on the edge of their bed. The feeling was "like" loneliness (345-356). I asked him to talk about it more and he repeated the scenario using slightly different words, none of which seemed to offer potential for opening up signifying chains or for me to give an interpreta-

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tion that could help him free associate. The words he used were free from affective coloration. However, it was important to note that the Other in this scenario did not exist. So pertaining to our previous conversation about the Audience....When i look out into the Audience i see one large entity, a unified being. (264-266). This was tantamount to admitting that it was one person, an actual person, so there must have been a transference here of sorts, yet he did not know whom that person was was it a god, a savage beast or a person that wanted to see him? If those were combined, what sort of person would that be? Had there been someone in his life that had been a savage beast, a god and also someone who wanted to see him? I could have hazarded many guesses, a father, mother, sibling, teacher, childhood friend, uncle etc. etc. Unlike Christina, Emma and Rosie he had not provided any clues as to who this might have been, he only presented absences, the absence of family in that room for example. However, if i was to stare straight into that entity i would find individual faces, individual people, with there own stories and reason for being here (the show). (266-268). It could have been that this person the audience stood for was never differentiated, in the way for example, that the Kleinian infant differentiates the first object, in the depressive position, by understanding the mother to be both good and bad breast rather than either one or the other (Klein, 1997). He described them in this speculative mode as having their own stories and reasons as individuals rather than as one unified being. The unified being could have been the m(O)ther, the primal Other, before the Name-of-theFather intrudes to introduce difference. The immersion of mother-son is imaginary, as in it depicts a dyadic relationship, whereas the symbolic order is based on triadic relations - i.e. me - you - the law (big Other) or language. A properly symbolic relation, taking into account it's triadic structure could be written as follows; Jack - audience - Circus. The audience here would be the m(O)ther and circus the Name of the Father, the law, the prohibition. Triadic, symbolic relations cannot exist without the acceptance of castration, i.e. that which demands one give up jouissance of the other (being immersed or unified with the mother). It is the Freudian prohibition of incest.

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Two diagnoses are possible here if the subject rejects castration. One is that the Name of the Father was never instituted, meaning that castration, or giving up the mother was foreclosed, never happened, resulting in a psychotic organisation of the psyche. The other is that castration happened but was never admitted, it was disavowed, meaning that the subject still seeks the possibility of that immersion, seeking to still be the object of the m(O)ther's jouissance. This second mechanism, disavowal denotes a perverse structure.
Oddly enough i have never assumed my audience had any emotions - they would either like something or not, and that is all i could do please them or not. I have never thought of them as more than a "audience" when im backstage. (268-270)

This oddly enough is significant because it denoted a question in him, a reflection upon himself, but its tone was detached, there was no affect attached to it. To write that the audience had never been assumed to have emotions reminded me that at times I did not feel at all present in the room despite the fact that he claimed to admire me. (231) If I focus on the transference and my reaction to it and use this with the words he wrote, I find several theses of perverse relationality to be consonant with what was going on in the circotherapeutic set-up, something that previously I was reluctant to consider as a structural possibility. Many students and artists display what could be considered masochistic tendencies or symptoms but these should not be confused with structure. Since I had been unable to open up Jack's desire as a question and get language moving in associative, metonymic ways I considered that In order to raise desire, the possibility of raising the question of what he or she desires must be present. (Hyldgaard, 2004, line 62-63). Just as his parents in the scena-rio of the bedroom, the Other was absent somehow, the unconscious was blocked, language was not moving, it was fixed, immutable, i.e. it said the same thing over and over again. As desire is desire of the Other in that it takes the Other's desire into consideration the following thesis of perversion seemed apt:

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In perversion the other's desire does not raise a question, or to be more precise, the other's desire must not force such a question. Rather, the other is a puppet in that scenery which is an imperative necessity for the perverse subject's fulfilment of satisfaction. (Ibid., line 71-73)

Studying the case material so far I am reminded of the game in which I may have been just such a puppet. Rosie brought me into a game concerning the Master and his propensity to proclaim the law which she sought to question by challenging that authority. Where the hysteric may find satisfaction in receiving a slap (Badiou, 2005, p. 2) in order to prolong the question of who is really the one who makes meaning valid, the masochist enforces a contract whereby the other is pressured into assuming an unquestionable position of authority in order that she/he deliver punishment from this position. The hysteric questions the law, the pervert asks for the law to be incontrovertibly established. The hysteric wants the possibility of satisfaction, with regards the law, endlessly deferred, whereas the masochist wants to invoke the law in order to put limits on satisfaction.
The masochist's climax is reached when he can prompt the other to think that it is her desire to kick, beat up and humiliate him; when he can make her think that she is not a puppet on a string, but a true sovereign, and act accordingly. (Ibid., p. 90-92)

The masochist projects a disavowed superego onto the other, becoming the object (ego) of its disdain and ruthless, implacable demands. In this case, it was a projection of the voice as superego. The pervert enjoys being the object of desire, not the desiring subject. The other is the subject and the masochist becomes the object (ego) (Ibid., line 171172). However this is too simplistic a reading. It only seems that the other is the subject controlling the object-masochist, the reality is that the power game being played out makes the other believe that they are in control whereas it is

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really the masochistic subject who holds the strings of the puppet he makes of the other. In the next session he came with a recurring dream.
I always enjoyed having this dream, at times it feels a little chaotic and scary, but mostly its quite exciting - i dont know about you but when i dream, the emotions that arise rarely seem to correlate to the action thats happening. I dont think that the minor role my family play in the dream is significant. My family have always moved around alot, and we are pretty unaffectionate with each other ( but still knowing we love each other ), and we dont see alot of each other, so the dreams seem quite normal.The thing that seems most odd is riding on top of the aircraft when it crashes...I would surmise that it means i feel in control of a dangerous/ unpredictable situation of significance/ which i guess are situations around the time i have those dreams... i cant imagine what situation this was about recently... (209-221)

As with the scene in the parent's bedroom, it was not really possible to work with the dream because, when asked to go over the dream again he repeated the same sequence of actions, with the same words so there was little to ignite an associative chain. I use the word "ignite" here because it was the word that struck me as significant in our first session he wanted to "ignite" a feeling in the audience. Here he was riding a crashing plane, that he has only a moment ago been inside but which he was now on top of and it contained his family. Had he ignited the plane? Would it ignite once it crashed? Was this the feeling he wanted to ride with the audience, or did he want to ride on the audience? He rode calmly on the top of the crashing plane in a similar way as he rode the silences of those sessions where I felt the anxiety of being inside a plane that may crash. In those silences I felt something disastrous about to happen perhaps even to my own practice as circotherapist. He rode calmly over the top of a dangerous/unpredictable situation of significance and it was clear from his words how unpredictable and possibly dangerous an audience could be. What I was now seeing as rage, via the crashing plane and demise of his parents, was distorted into a figure of him atop the plane enjoying the dream.

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Again, the other in the dream was of little consequence to him. The parents played a minor role which was not significant. He was not able to elaborate on them in the dream, in a sense he ignored them, in much the same way as he did not assume the audience to have feelings or the way they were absent in the bedroom scene or the way he made me feel absent sometimes when in session. The important point is that when I felt present, I felt present in all my imaginary relation to him aggression this was how he made me present. After his Final Major Presentation, I asked him to conclude our time together by writing one last reflective document.
I found the FMP process quiet difficult. It seemed the pressure of it being my last presentation and the choice of being able to do whatever i wanted hindered me from being able to focus on the important part...actually making something ! (16-18)

This highlighted that he wanted to be told what to do, feel, think, he wanted the demand of the Other to be clear, he wanted an authority to come into being that would relieve him of the responsibility of choice. In Lacanian terms, and following the aetiology of perversion, it would seem that Jack wanted the school to have the phallus knowing full well that the school did not have this (Lacanian) ultimate guarantee of meaning. He disavowed the lack in the Other. He knew that I did not have the phallus either, that the school and I were equally castrated, and yet he chose to pretend that this was not the case, he disavowed the fact that the school, as a maternal container, was castrated. As a defence mechanism this can be seen as disavowal, as opposed to the repression constitutive of neurosis and the foreclosure indicative of psychosis.
.the desire of the Other is disavowed. Masochism, sadism and perversion in general exclude the possibility of love because of its disavowal of the lack of the Other and thereby the lack of the subject. In perversion, the otherness of the concrete other is disavowed. (Hyldgaard, 2004, line 206-208)

This concreteness Hyldgaard writes about is the concrete, specific quality his words lack when describing the feeling, quality he wanted to generate, the non-

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specific quality of the audience he was describing. My anxiety at hearing him say the same words again each session kept me from opening the question of his desire, what he really wanted, he kept me suspended; This is the reason why the provocation of the other's anxiety is characteristic of a perverse practice as anxiety testifies to the fact that the other does not know what the perverse subject wants. The other is kept in suspense. (Ibid., line 391-393) The pervert can be seen as never putting the concrete, particular other in the position of the Other (Ibid., line 215-216). If I could not open the question of his desire, it was because the desire of the Other had been disavowed and therefore I was mistaken in thinking that I had assumed this privileged place. This place was abstract or at best non-human, a place of the savage beast, of the gods:
The other is immediately replaceable or something that the perverse subject can do without altogether, as in some variations on the theme of fetishism. The Other, however, is an abstract being that demands submission or is summoned to be a witness to the subject's practice. The pervert needs a witness. The perverse subject is forced to act according to the Other's demands; not the particular other's demands. It is like a God's voice calling to prayer. (Ibid., line 218222)

This is instructive in that it answers a main question regarding perversion; they do not usually come to analysis, because they know how to enjoy, they have their object. According to analysts the pervert is usually not inclined to start an analysis, as a minimal precondition for this is lack, lack of knowledge as far as desire is concerned. (444-445) unless of course it is because the analytic setting is to be perverted. (449-450). This does not impart malign intent to Jack if this was the case, only that this would be yet another scene of enjoyment for him. Its funny, in a way because in the end i did something quiet similar to what i imagined in the beginning. (21-22) He described it as funny that there had not been any progression, that he had come full circle back to the imagined demand of the Other, having not brought his own desire into play. This denied my place in his journey, that I had not really been there at all or effected any change from his original idea.

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This funny sounds similar to the oddly enough he used to describe the fact that he had not assumed the audience to have any emotions. The pervert knows what he wants, has his object, his game, the way of setting limits to his jouissance, the last thing he wants therefore is choice, or for his desire to be dialectisized. Something simple and to the point, no unessential frills around the edges. I had forgotten that the audience where going to be there, and i was basically just making something for myself. (22-23). It is as if he could not bring the Other into being, or that it was so anxiety provoking that he pushed the thought of it to one side he disavowed it, just as he did in session, as if he had forgotten that I was there. If the obsessive tries to eradicate the Other by focusing on repetitive rituals which he addresses to himself, like the juggler that has to watch his own juggling in order to catch the balls, the pervert is the one who cannot make the Other exist. In this case Jack had forgotten that there was an audience to perform to. I found it difficult, even still, in the moment of writing the dissertation to work on this analysand's material. I felt infected by a certain rage. The counter-transference was still at work in my written discourse because I felt that there was no resolution to his sessions and so that I had failed him and myself. But this could have been a case of a very particular kind of defence mechanism I wrote of in Chapter 2, projective identification. Writing up the case study I felt myself cast in a role that I did not like, that did not fit with my self-image as pedagogue, or circotherapist. I was instead the cruel teacher who assigned negative signification to every detail of his discourse; nothing was good enough, I was relentless super-ego, everything pointing to me diagnosing him as either a pervert or a psychotic and far from these being value-free denominations, descriptions of structure, they became pejorative. Perversion is simply a structure, not an insult, but here I wanted to attack him with a diagnosis. On the surface the transference was positive; Jack liked me, admired me, came back to sessions, required more sessions, was always on time, helped organise the timetable of sessions, was friendly and personable. But the countertransference was aggressive. In the common room I overheard a theatre teacher

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commenting that it seemed that Jack had put his anger in a box and buried it somewhere. Then I realised that it was me he was burying it into. This was how he used the analyst, proto-audience member, this was the transference of affect, this was the unconscious, what lay behind his circus productions; rage at himself. If self-rage is unacceptable it needs somewhere to go so the super-ego is projected into, not just onto the analyst. Heinemann puts it well when she describes the patient hiring out a portion of the analyst's psyche, like renting out a room in the analyst's head for their unwanted, unsymbolizable conflicts to live, with the preconscious intention that the analyst will clean them, and then return them to the patient manageable again (Green, 2005, p.53). I felt like a furious super-ego intent on punishing him. The analyst's desire then must prove stronger than this passionate reaction, to not give in to his demand that I punish him. But this counter-transference was highly suggestive of a masochistic relation at play. He was not questioning authority like the hysteric does when she demands a slap, he was trying to bring authority into being (again). He had a certain relation to the voice (invocatory drive as that which propels masochism) which resonated with superego as symbolic, as spoken. He broke down crying when it was an issue of whether or not he should speak in one of his presentations. This "should" was an imagined demand from the other of the school, and his peers. My compulsion to shout at him stemmed from this, he wanted me to loose my temper with him. The audience as his gods or as savage beasts, presumably ready to tear him apart also resonated with masochistic fantasy. The aggressive nature of the counter-transference was an imaginary effect of a symbolic relationship transference is not just about the affect it is also about a symbolic positioning. This imaginary aspect of the transference is a resistance to an acceptance or discovering of the symbolic positioning from both parties trapped in imaginary rivalry.

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Time did not permit us to continue the therapy after school had finished, but this was an example of someone needing much longer to get to a situation with the circoanalyst, a dangerous/unpredictable situation of significance that no longer required defence mechanisms to be brought into play. I speculate that longer work with a circoanalysand such as Jack would result in a performance based around rage, a rage that was somehow pure. Presently rage manifested itself in the masochistic contract which forced the other into an anxious position of compliance and suspension. Circotherapy aims to provide the circoanalysand with a shift in understanding their symptoms so that, in this case, the audience would experience a clear representation of masochism rather than being its victims circus making as revelatory, in the imaginary. the audience would be forced to sign the masochistic contract but all the while being made aware of how a masochist manipulates circus making as metaphorical, implicating the audience as an enabling condition, as willing victims, in the symbolic. the audience would see a rage that had been divested of its symptomal coffin, its symbolic envelope, approximating a form of real drive, thus allowing for a form of transference that could not be predicted, producing the unconscious of the audience, artist becoming the object a, cause of desire rather than object of desire.

These aims were most clearly achieved, in session at least, with Elena, whom I discuss next.

2.3.2. Conclusion
Despite any symptoms subjects manifested during the circotherapy, the key findings here were about structure. What structural position did they take with the circotherapist? Did this structural position repeat itself in the circus act?

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Would a working through of an issue with the symbolic Other in therapy produce new knowledge that would inform future circus productions? What what be preferable? Being caught in the hysteric's game, being the puppet of the masochist, being erased by the obsessional? Or, as spectator being shown something about how the hysteric, pervert or obsessive works and how the other becomes an unwitting accomplice in that game? Here the act would resonate, I hope, with each spectator's everyday neurosis, moments of perversion and issues with authority. This would mark the difference between a symptomal circus act and a circus act as a symptomatology. Recalling the chronology of relational positions that the analyst may take, imaginary, symbolic, real, how does one get a circoanalysand from a) the imaginary relation of the little other, with its rivalry, aggressivity, mutual admiration in the mirror stage to b) the positioning of the audience as Other where desire takes place, where the object of desire is either the spectator or the artist to c) the site of the real where the spectator or artist takes the place of cause of desire? The relation between artist, spectator and Circus is the triad in circoanalysis that replaces the Mommy-Daddy-Me of classical psychoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000, p.53). The last case studies I discuss below have a particular emphasis on the word. They show how the word circles a kernel of jouissance that can never be captured by it, a remnant of something in the body that seeks expression and how circoanalysis gets to the real via the symbolic. The studies focus on this element of the real, the final part of the research into the methodology of circotherapy. The writing tasks in between session reflect what was learned in session and what was provoked into motion. With Jack it could be observed how difficult he found it to make discoveries. Elena and Liz also attended the full twenty sessions and produced much writing. It is not possible here to go into detail on every aspect of their discourse because it is far-reaching and beyond the scope of this study.

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Both Elena and Liz were highly articulate in contrast to Jack, yet there were significant differences in how they used their literacy to effect change. Elena's engagement with the symbolic and its linguistic devices effected a pronounced change in the material reality of her problems with circus. They show how much work her unconscious was doing during session and how she left the room eager to work with that material. Liz used it as a place wherein she could express a fury or indignation that social codes prevented her from doing face to face with me in session, or elsewhere in her life.

2.4. Elena and Liz Melancholia and Psychosis 2.4.1. Elena and the Symbolic Other
Elena's problems or questions revolved around not being good enough, being simultaneously demoralised and inspired by pretty circus that made difficult things look easy (5-6). This was rivalry, the battle for prestige and the ideal ego she aspired to become and therefore imaginary. However, she described a car crash that she was in as a very young child where she broke everything. Living in a state of abject terror, generally, which is reminiscent of Leyser's perpetual state of anxiety and Emma's unbearable panic, she described the swinging trapeze as a place where the odds are good. To not train and perform on the swinging trapeze would have been like wasting what I've won from surviving the accident. (10-12). The swinging trapeze was also a place where she was in a constant state of terror, a wierd emotionless void, where one day she almost threw up her soul, a place of voluntary torture where the world (is) falling apart, gravity changing its mind.(28-30) Circoanalysis is comprised of a circotherapy and also a broadening of the knowledge of circus' psychic contents. The two are not exclusive. A therapy asks a subject to produce unconscious knowledge in order to name unconscious desire and each new circus unconscious contributes to the knowledge of the

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field of the circus-psyche. Elena accepted this task with relish, approaching circotherapy as an artist, ready to use its methods to create/discover at the same time, a researcher/maker simultaneously. On requisite elements in aerial performances:
I feel that there is a certain structure inherent in vertical aerial performance that is demanded by its practitioners more so, perhaps than by the audience. There are certain things (drops, contortions, strength moves) which must happen at certain points lest a piece be boring. But we never ask the audience this question, not really. Did you want me to fall at least ten feet at some point during my performance? Were you disappointed that my foot made no contact with my head at any point? It must be a kind pluralistic ignorance that Ive just followed along with for the entirety of my aerial experience. (39-47)

Elena here directly stated the concept of Circus as big Other. This was the demand of the Other made more by practitioners than by audience. She stated the rules as she saw/imagined them. She then questioned those rules in a clear, direct manner. She did not play a game as the hysteric would, there was no master to be played with here, neither did she project blame for something having deceived her or having forced her to act in a certain way. The responsibility was clearly her own, due to her own ignorance. She had gone along with the rules, blindly accepting them and now, after the first three sessions, she was ready to admit that they were contingent, that, in fact, the Other lacked another Other to validate it. This Other was not the audience, it was Circus itself. The question Why? Why do you have to do that? had made an impact and it had started a process of questioning. This meant that desire had been set in motion. I put this to the fact that she was allowed a voice in circotherapy that may have been stifled through the physical demands of circus training. Her consequent literary inventiveness could be seen as a way of staying balanced and sane in the face of such demands. Her demeanour in session suggested that she had been yearning for this type of interaction, for which there had been no space or provision previously. I could not tell whether this process yielded a

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more articulate physicality onstage but it did facilitate a more adventurous and conceptually rigorous programme of work that originated from the subject of circus as opposed to the object/artefact. It seemed that she was re-finding inspiration by going back to the word having been brought to a place of dissatisfaction in an intense physical training where her voice or her words did not have a place. Her relation to the word here is to be contrasted with Jack for whom the word was an avatar of the super-ego. This highlighted the imaginary nature of the training environment with its emphasis on rivalry and prestige and the imagined and stifling demands of the Other of Circus, rather than the desire of the symbolic Other. Although we seemed to be on an equal footing, which could be said of all the circoanalysands, her deliberate enunciation of the audience, circus and her trainers/peers suggested that I was very quickly placed in the position of the symbolic Other, since she was clearly dissatisfied with the imaginary relations she had. She was prepared to change her mind about things because, I felt, there was a very powerful need for healing which had not come from her associations, alliances and rivalries within the circus environment. The trauma of her accident, inscribed in her body but perhaps not available yet to symbolisation drove her research, to not waste what she had achieved by managing to survive. It would become clearer, later on, that although she never mentioned this accident again, it was another loss, of a loved one, that formed the occasion, the excuse, the vehicle for her work. Her use of the word ignorance was significant. The knowledge that is there all along, which one does not know one knew, can be obfuscated for various reasons, one of which is disavowal, the main category of defence that iek says is typical of contemporary ideology (2006). When she used the word ignorance in this context it was as if she were saying that this knowledge is apparent, but that we choose not to think of it, since working within an ideology that gives us purpose is somehow easier than questioning. She had come to the point here of questioning, of desire over demand.

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To this end, following such a structure because the people I perceive as better than me do it, had put me in a place where the fun is gone and there is only pain because Ive been trying to be them and not me. Its all well and good to allow pain into a rope piece because it fucking hurts. There may be room for it somewhere. As far as re-wiring my concept of requisite and bringing the lightness and magic back into my routine, Ive rewritten it to make it easier. There is more flow, at least in this mental draft as of now. I can rest. I dont have to cram every new thing that scares me into this piece. I. Can. Do. Less. Its allowed. (49-55)

Here was the imaginary rivalry, prestige, the ideal ego, the demand that hurt, the robbing of pleasure that defines castration. Here also was the jouissance of pain which she wanted no more of. She wanted the ideal of flow, she wanted to be rid of the imaginary identifications that forced her to be like them not me. Her re-wiring was a creative act. It could be seen that she was rewiring the hard-drive of the Circus that produced this requisite or that she was modifying her own, internal other, working on the demands of the ideal ego. In her work with language to re-write the rules, she effectively took charge of the symbolic and its resources to effect a change in the real of her craft. In her abstract for Righting The Self: An Aerial Autobiography, Leyser wrote;
I ran away to join the circus. I became a trapeze artist, specializing in aerial rope skills, an attempt to tie my self to the real, knot signifier, signified and referent tight together. My debut artistic mission statement as a rope-artist read: I want to explore circus skills as they literalize or physicalize many of the metaphors through which we describe our daily dramas: the flying and falling, the balancing and supporting, the juggling of our lives. My aim was not to climb above or transcend the linguistic but rather to make it more intensely visceral, to dramatize not only life but also how we describe it. I wanted to bolt metaphor in its place, strap images onto my physical form to keep me safe, to become a figure of speech. I was not trying to defy gravity but rather to disprove levity and the unbearable lightness of being. I created a piece enti-

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tled Lifeline, nonverbal Life-Writing written along the length of my rope. (2006. 17-31)

Elena had discovered the lack in the Other, the Other which could be described here as the language all artists must refer to, to be legitimised, to communicate themselves as circus artists, the rubric that binds all the ropes, trapezes, aesthetics etc. etc. into Circus. She used the sessions to demystify the ideological power of Circus, especially it's authority to prescribe her desire, yet at the same time used the resources that this Circus made available to her. This I hoped would allow her to develop a singular and innovative relationship with this symbolic Circus Other, to transform and transcend its ideals and aesthetics, in order to creatively contribute to the resource of meanings, relationships and narratives that constitute Circus. Lacan's project intimates that a major component of becoming a person is the capacity to act in conformity with one's desire rather than capitulate in the face of the (always fantasied) desire of the collective Other. This would be to point out the lack in the big Other, that although we as little others constantly refer to the big Other for legitimacy or consistency, the big Other itself has no Other to be its final arbitrator or judge. (Ruti, 2009, p.104-105) Elena properly merited the title circoanalysand since she was doing most of the analysing. In order to continue running with the anorexic dreamland idea, of the ultimate weightlessness encountered in the moments that make each painful ascension worth it, Ive begun an aesthetic posture search. Ive been looking a photoshoots and blogs and finding the postures that accentuate bones. How must one twist to hide pounds? How can I learn to drop the wall in my eyes and let the numbers stream past? I want to find a way to show that disappointment when I dont float away in the weightless moment or a kind of manic joy in the consistent repetitive measures of my music, the relief of perceived for once as weightless, as something better than I actually see myself. (57-62)

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Here, the audience became a stream of numbers. This was the stream of numbers on the scales heading towards zero, towards weightlessness and consequently towards death. This audience was the ideal ego, who perceived her as being weightless, something better than she actually saw herself as. Far from needing to come up with a diagnostic for her, a position she was taking, it seemed more relevant to allow her to explore this link to death, whether it was a form of melancholia, masochism or repetitive compulsion, in her literary fictions.
Im not sure that any of this makes sense. I want to make this routine and the process to be inspiring again, but I seem to be finding inspiration in dark places. Is that okay? Can I take my own cultivation of emptiness as something worth making art out of? Or am I just reducing myself, degrading my own worth with such a teen angst evoking stereotype? I often feel like all my ideas are stupid and anyone that supports me is just patting me on the head so Ill go away and stop speaking since they have better things to do. Like I cant take inspiration from those places because Im clearly too large to have ever been there? Maybe I take inspiration from that. A need to prove, to hurt more. If I let that buoy me up the rope, drive my inversions, every fall an expression of disbelief, every struggle evocative of one for control You said you werent going to judge. Im holding you to that. This is all I can conjure at the moment. (64-73)

She articulated how circus could indeed kill inspiration and desire with its demands and judgements. She was struggling here against a perceived prohibition against finding inspiration in dark places. Her recurring doubt about herself may have been more than a general statement about her personality and more of an indication that in the circus environment she had been immersed in for the last two years, her ideas, words and voice were treated as stupid. Here she stated her position with regards to the Other in a transference with me. This was the shift from the circotherapist being the little other of the imaginary to the big Other of the symbolic. After a few days of taking her discoveries into the rehearsal space she wrote This is going to work. I can dance with this new

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plan. Its working. Hu fucking zzah. (79-80). Symptom relief had occurred quickly because she was perhaps ready for the change. It seemed as though this talking and questioning therapy was what she had been missing from her experience at circus school, in direct contrast to Leroy and Marc who had not been ready for this kind of subjectivising or dialectisising of their experience, preferring to remain satisfied with being technical objects.

2.4.2. Liz: The Imaginary Other

Against the impression that circus does not have a narrative and therefore needs one, Liz stood as an example that there are indeed rich latent narratives in the subject who chooses to make circus, if they can be brought to light on their own terms. After the first few sessions where Liz was not sure about the usefulness of this exercise she began to trust that I could help her. (6-8) The scenario she came up with was that she was being followed to the theatre by a group of people who kept their distance. They entered backstage with her, ignoring her but with a menacing attitude. This prologue to entering the stage was shown as a video projection. Once she entered the stage it was like a city made of cardboard sky scrapers, one -dimensional. She was on a roof top. She performed some trapeze, then was joined by another female performer. The other exited the stage and she was left alone juggling a staff. Then the people backstage rushed on, took her staff, tied her up, gagged her and left her alone onstage. Liz wanted the lights to come up and to stay gagged and bound onstage until someone from the audience would understand that they had to help her. She found it useful to go over the same scenario again and again, wherein I would repeat words back to her that I thought would spark off chains of free association. This technique, which did not work with Jack, worked very well with Liz and she was able to connect the themes of the scenario with more general psychic concerns. This enabled her, in session, and in reflective writing to

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re-associate the affect with the signifier, as I felt that the affect had become displaced as was my very strong intuition with Jack. Liz was both articulate and demonstrated an acute intelligent. In the first few sessions and in the imaginary domain of rivalry, it felt like she was in competition with me, that she took it as a form of intellectual sparring. Everything I said at first was taken to be obvious or banal. I took note of this, along with her disdain at the process. It felt like I had to prove my interpretative credentials if she was going to return. Elements of her discourse, fragments only, coalesced in my mind to form a picture of a secret head quarters on the rooftop, the cave where Batman observes the city, with all his gadgets (circus objects), hatching plans and can being himself without his mask, an identity which he hides from society as a whole.
Also JPZ said a lot of words that connected to other things in my brain, and that was super useful. He saw things in what I was talking about that I wouldn't have noticed for a while I think, if at all. semantically, I think choice of words is very important... Like using the word society instead of state or government. That's a big difference I think. I didn't think of it until I was explaining it again and again to JPZ... like the holocaust was committed my the government, but I've very definite that it's society that's against me, not the state or the government. and this idea of disguise, secret identity. It punched me in the face with it's brutal obviousness in relation to my predicament. Is circus my secret H.Q.? My lair where I hide out and chillax? (51-56)

Here she mentioned predicament; I had no idea what this predicament was, she had not mentioned a predicament in session. However, with regards to technique what was most telling was her phrase It punched me in the face with it's brutal obviousness for it made me wonder whether indeed I had punched her in the face with my suggestion. It did not seem so at this moment for she continued to say, It's a bit like having an English lit teacher that's actually helpful. I say my story, and jpz tells me if it means what I think it means. (58) however further on in the process I had to wonder whether this had indeed been too blunt, too early, as I will demonstrate.

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Here was the anxiety of presenting oneself in front of the Other, here circus was the mask. The Other, as in Elena's discourse had been brought up very soon, in this case the state, society, the government who were against her. Her second piece of writing after more sessions showed how her ideas had been developing on both the imaginary and symbolic levels.
Of the things I wrote down out of the session (thou I felt a bit naughty doing so) was that desires are terrifying. That really interested me, in it's connection to this idea that the state of unbeing, nirvana is restful / peaceful mainly because there is no more desire. Desire and need and want are maybe not terrifying but ever present fueling us, wearing us out, and burning us up, using us until we break down. Pushing and pulling us around at their whim. Desire I guess sometimes you feel like you don't have any control of it. You can consciously watch yourself being its puppet and intellectually understand that you're being an idiot but that doesn't change how you feel or what you do. You do it anyway. (72-78)

She was directly engaging with psychoanalytic ideas by contributing her own version of them as she saw them operating in her life. It was good that she was not reading Freud or Lacan between sessions and that she took a word used in session, desire and spun a world around it. In fact, both Elena and Liz had nothing but disdain for Freud. Why had she liked the idea that desires are terrifying? This was something we spoke of when I mentioned that we do not always want what we desire, that an unconscious desire may be unacceptable to the social standards the ego identifies with. As with Elena, the Other had appeared very quickly and in my methodology I was using the idea that the audience was always in the place of the Other, since the relation cannot be with individuals but a group combined into One entity as Jack described them. Was the audience then, the Other who was against her, the government? Later on in her discourse this Other, this audience became more clearly judgemental, authoritative and finally totalitarian operating as part of a paranoid fantasy of persecution and annihilation. It became the Imaginary Other. (Nasio 2010, p.83)

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However, at this stage she wrote,

I like the idea of the audience being part of the ID, of the sub sub conscious but I don't really know how to utilise it. I kinda see the ID as the seas behind the Antarctic, giant 60ft waves just rolling around back there and nobody knows about them or see them. Black dark seas with monstrous creatures swimming just below the surface, unseen and unknown. (80-82)

This was how she described the audience and coming at this stage in the research process it felt like a succinct metaphor for the anxiety that is not without an object. That she described it as the ID pertained to the unconscious. The Other is the site of the unconscious and it is in the transference with the audience that it is produced. Here, as proto-audience to her spoken and written words, the unconscious was being produced. The ideas for her piece had also developed. Once she enters the stage the projection of the people in black fades down like a bad dream. and becomes just a white board one might find in an H.Q., reminiscent of an empty billboard, then I could just click my fingers, or pull a lever and the board would be whisked off stage, like this is a world I can control. (95-99). Her trapeze partner is now taken away from her by the people in black who have been a menacing threat backstage and who are now all men. This initiates the dismantling and removal of her one-dimensional set, her secret H.Q., lair, her disguise, her secret identity, the site or world as she would have made it; less drab, colourful, like an island....like when you're kids and you should'nt be there. (89-90, 67-78). Alone, she dances with her staff, an object to be likened with her trapeze partner, an object that she flows with, has fun with, a circus object. They strip her of this also. She tries then to do a handstand (another circus object) but one of them pushes her down and puts his whole weight on her as others join in until she collapses into the floor until a pile of black bodies (101109). Her fantasy world is stripped from her and she is effaced from the scene. In a previous session she had mentioned dream logic that seems to revolve around one plot item that's constant, and everything can change around that,

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location, people, time, but there's that thing unseen and offstage to anchor it (13-14, emphasis mine) The men in black begin offstage, here representing society/government. The audience/Other is also offstage or at least not on stage, unseen, like the monsters in the dark sea. The darkness, it seems, creeps into her colourful, circus, less drab world and overwhelms her. Onstage was a place of safety, inside her constructed fantasy and offstage is her projected, paranoid, persecutory fear. Fantasy frames desire, objects of desire are those that can be inserted into that fantasy, circus here is an object of desire trapeze partner, staff, handstand which is taken from her so that her fantasy collapses and she is annihilated as a subject of desire. Her persecutory fantasy is that society does not allow her the space for her desire. These people in black become now something out of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, wherein no-one knows who is authentically themselves and who have become hosts for the parasitic, controlling alien entity that effaces subjectivity and autonomy (91). My place in society is stolen I guess, I'm easily replaced. (104). Her comment on this, what she wanted to get across to an audience was that
I am basically invisible. I'm not there for most people, I'm not on anybodies radar. I guess that's how I feel. Anybody I'm interested in, they don't even see me, and the people that find me attractive are the wrong people. I feel like I'm a hologram, I can't be seen correctly and however I turn myself about, nobody gets the right image of me. Damn that was a bit of a weird metaphor to pop out there. (106109)

That this metaphor popped out was a sign that she was doing analytic work, it was not a premeditated metaphor and it proved productive in later writings and sessions because it crystallised the way she felt she was (not) seen by the Other. It was not a particular group of people who did not see her, it was everyone, it was anybody, it was the Other. She felt invisible to the Other. In session I asked her to think about the audience's gaze and what this might mean to her.

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She ended with the words having something to hide. Everybody can relate to that. Dexter (the tv show) taught me that. Fear, foreboding, oppression, helplessness, escapism (Brazil), being trapped (118-119). This having something to hide perhaps pointed to her predicament. In hindsight I could have asked her what her predicament was, but I did not notice it as a crucial message to me until the end of the sessions and my examination of the whole case material. Things may have turned out very differently if I had. The mention of the TV series Dexter and the films Brazil and Invasion of the Body Snatchers disturbed me. As did this appearance of the trope men in black. Dexter is a television series wherein a sociopath has found ways to fight and manage his drive to kill people, by only killing murderers of innocent people who escape the justice system. He is forever on the cusp of being identified, his real identity discovered, his mask of normality taken from him, which he expends a great deal of energy maintaining against his terrifying desire. The notion of escapism in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil refers to the end of the film where, in an extended action sequence the hero and heroine, both rebels against a bureaucratically totalitarian social system, escape into a paradise of love. The last moments of the film however show this to be the coping fantasy of the hero who has been captured and is being tortured to the point of catatonia. The reference to men in black reminded me of the Men in Black films, where those men work for a secret CIA agency that keeps aliens a secret and destroys those aliens that make their identity known to the ignorant general public. With this in mind I immediately corrected my position. I decided to no longer provoke new questions or get more associative chains moving. I decided instead to guide her through her own particular escapist fantasy and to slowly work through each component in purely technical terms; in other words to bring the sessions back to the actual components of the presentation and frame it in purely imaginary, visual terms. For example when does this object appear, what is the precise order of events and how does this work dramaturgically? Are you sure the people in black are all men? Describe again the activity you will project onto the screen of the action backstage? This was to support her in the construction of her metaphor.

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My diagnosis at this moment was that her scenario depicted a paranoid fantasy which she was using as a delusional metaphor to cope with her predicament. At the level of delusional metaphor, it felt appropriate to not deconstruct the components any further. I felt that I may be listening to someone with a psychotic structure and one must do what one can to help someone like this maintain a relationship with reality, with the Other, this consensual network of meanings and significations that allow us to co-exist in the same reality. Subjects with psychotic psychic structure may never experience a psychotic break with reality, but misdiagnosis, such as treating a psychotic as a neurotic, may well result in just that. As a circotherapist therefore, I retreated, and I became a support instead, at the level of the imaginary, I became a friend. As with Jack, I shifted to a more Winnicottian approach. The best one can hope for, working with a psychotic patient, is that they express the symptom in paranoia, not a complete break with reality. Paranoia, in this instance is the most helpful tool for remaining connected to reality.

2.4.3. Elena: Being okay with not being okay

Liz mentioned the dream, the bad dream that faded, that she could make disappear at the flick a of switch, only momentarily, for it managed to seep back onto the stage to overwhelm her. However with Elena it was more like a waking dream that she saw happening onstage. Talking of the repetition of arriving at the same place again and again, in front of her rope which is the nature of the act she said I'm impelled...Seems more like a repetitive dream than O.C.D (24-25). This place, the place of performance, was also a place in her mind where her image matches to her ideal. To see it for herself. (26). She used the third person in her early reflective texts and only later did this third person meld with the second and the first, signifying, I thought, some form of integration, negotiation between different psychic agencies, such as the ego, super-ego or id. This dream-state was not the one achieved in sleep, it was the one

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achieved in the state of being anorexic, for her, a state where mind and body were at odds,
I think some ways away from the stage, she has stopped walking, but in her mind she continues. This happens on the hard days, when all of her joints hurt, when she feels bruised from the midsleep tangle of bones and bedsprings. Sometimes she falls, sometimes she doesnt. Some forms of epilepsy look like this. Fixated, zoned out. Time leaps forward upon waking....It is the steps she continues taking in her mind that start the performance. (86-91)

This signified fantasy, the steps she continues taking in her mind before time leaps forward upon waking. She wrote that It must bad out there if shes in here (96-97), the out there perhaps meaning a reality where things were terrible, bad and the here meaning a place where she could cope via a fantasy, a dream scenario where She knows that she flies and watches the numbers plummet. (96). For Liz, as for Elena, circus was this very place of fantasy that made reality bearable, a reality which was bad. Elena was using literary devices to create a third person fictional character I want it to be like fiction another part of me (7) whereas Liz was properly in the first person with no distance, no separation from her construction. However, just because she was aware of metaphor this was not to underestimate the seriousness of Elena's project. Although Liz may have been in danger of literalising the literary, Elena's literary project allowed her to go deep into her own issues without fear of being burnt when she wrote that Here she takes death in her hands. Runs fingers through her hair and death leaves her scalp in clumps. And so for a moment, she flies. (98-99) The fantasy, of the numbers plummeting, the numbers on the scales, of a retreat from gravity's clutches where she sparkles and the artifice of her waking self falling away like her clumps of hair presented an ideal self for the Other, that embraced the pain she inflicts for excellence. Here, The judgemental voices stop., here the super ego is silenced in a sort of anorexic drunkenness. However she is aware that the fantasy will end and she will have to return to wakeful life.

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The judgmental voices stop. On the last descent, she does not see the ground approaching, or at least she doesnt recognise the threat, the return to wakeful life. But then the dance is over. And doubting the reality of what has happened, she sees the hair on the ground, and in her hands, and doesnt know whether to laugh or cry as the lights go down, signalling her snap back to consciousness. We dont see this onstage, but it happens. (104-107)

Offstage she returned to reality, where her joints hurt once more, where sometimes she fell, unlike Liz who asked, Do dreams really end? Do they end with the alarm clock of happily ever after? I never seem to have a dream end. (2021). They portray two very different uses of fantasy. The other part of her fantasy involved the swinging trapeze, that site where she throws up her soul. Previously, on the rope she had flown for a moment but here The lightness is real now, not an attempt to create an appearance of it via starvation. (114-115). From the portrayal of anorexia, treating the Other like a misrecognising mirror in which she could see an ideal self, asking the audience to mirror back to her an image of lightness, to ratify her image, she was Alone in a bright darkness where she flies, finally. (117). This Alone may have signified a detachment from the demands of the Other, which previously had made her want to be pretty, to make difficult things seem easy. This may have been the site of her desire. Everything is on fire. Her hands are my hands and they burn on the ropes and now we can actually let go. (117-118). Suddenly the second person collapsed into the first, two different psychic agencies reconciled and becoming one and then reverted to a we. Here, I think, the subject appeared, aware of its constitutional split and its alienation from itself, but also capable of acting in concert with other parts of itself. She falls freely, propelled by physics instead of her own sheer force of will. (118). This she understood that she was not identical with I and that there was something else (Other, physics) before which she should capitulate, now recognising the threat in its hard, real, material actuality. From the rope to the swinging trapeze there had been a progression.

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The ground is there somewhere. Maybe this is one of those dreams where she is falling, and when the ground rushes up to meet her there is no waking this time. Maybe it is the end of the death dance

if she meets the ground. (120-121) Just as with Liz's description of the audience as ID, here Elena, for me, described the enabling condition of circus, that it was a dance with death, be that organic or psychic. This initial trauma of the accident which she never mentioned again in session since our first meeting was the trauma that I had long suspected to be at the heart of circus making. Even though she never mentioned it again, she circled it with signifiers without ever touching it; constant terror, abject terror, everything burning. It was a trauma that gave Emma the shakes, gave Christina her recurring anxiety dreams, turned Holmes into a rabbit in the headlights, caused Jack to dream repeatedly of the catastrophe of the crashing plane with such placidity and produced the repetition of the signifier cut in Rosies discourse. This was Liz's predicament, something that turned about to be a trauma in the present. Lacan writes a traumatic experience may.leave something unresolved, and this may continue as long as a resolution is not found. (Lacan, 1999a, p.224)
This piece is about accepting a death that is not ones own, but the reality of said passing allowing an acceptance of mortality that is more than tacit. That step taken, there is so much life to be seized in the freefalls, those times that you can just jump and fall forever and live to talk about it. She has lost someone, but dances with their ghost up there. The one who made the leap and got all the way through the veil. And hes taught her that instead of falling, she can fly. Here in that moment, she is buoyed up by the absence, that hole in her heart is not heavy, its lighter than everything. There is joy here, where it seems inappropriate. Like crying when youre happy. (132-140)

Elena here, expressed a thought that had been an intuition throughout my research, that circus has something to mourn. In the first session she remembered her friend Dan whom she associated with her ideal feeling of being

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onstage, psychological flow, a stream of consciousness, something that could be opposed to the rigid technique that circus demanded (13, 20). She admitted to loosing someone but also that she struggled to word about this piece. (142) which I linked to her struggling to say the thing that her signifiers circled around, a kernel of the real. iek explains that the real is not symbolisable, that it cannot be worded, brought into an image, yet we see it or experience it only by its effects, in the same way that we cannot see a black hole in space, but we know it is there via the distortion of the visual space around it. (1991, p.19) The process with Elena had been about integration, not just integrating a loss, owning a loss, but an integration of her talents as a writer, thinker and image-maker with her growing skills within circus. This was reflected by her earlier integration of psychic components, the she and the I which included a lost he, someone fully incorporated, understood, a death that had become more tacit. This integration pointed to the formation of a circus subject, split, divided, at odds, yet joyful and accepting. Her performance was divided into four sections: stand-up comedy, juggling, rope and finally the swinging trapeze. I asked her to consider four spaces wherein different things had happened. For example, what happened in that bathroom to make her create her rope piece about anorexia? This was what she wrote about the swinging trapeze section that ended her performance, the one where she directly talked about this he that had emerged in her discourse, whom I assumed to be Dan:
Room 4: The rooftop She went up to the roof to bask in the sun and saw his face in the clouds. He smiled his peace down into her eyes. But she wasnt close enough now that he was here. So she walked closer, up the steep angle of the neighbors roof, arms outstretched. And took a hand she knew was there but could not see. She leapt for the sky and accepted the ground as an old friend racing up to meet her. But seconds drew long and too long and far too long and it occurred to her, perhaps shed missed. (191-196)

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As the performance date approached she expressed a worry that the tears that came when she recited her text at this moment, before going up onto the trapeze, would effect her ability to do the routine properly which recalls my discussion of anxiety needing to be dealt with backstage in order for the artist to properly execute the act. It is an anxiety that Liz would bring directly onto the stage. My main problem is that my text actually makes me shake and cry by the end. This is kind of an issue since I'll be starting my swinging piece. Do you have any strategies for controlling that kind of bodily reaction? I would love to let it all out onstage, but the physiological reaction is such that it might fuck up my swing. I mean, I know that repetition will help me habituate a little bit, but that last part, where it's all true, just in a different order, is really hard to handle. Any suggestions? (261-266)

The affect accompanied the signifier in the rehearsal of the act which she presented to her teachers and with repetition she can habituate these uncontrollable disturbances in the real, physiological body. I did not have any suggestions for her and she consequently managed to do the routine without fucking up. This was the remembering that is to be opposed to acting out, the abreaction or catharsis that happens in the symbolic but which aims at the real. The symbolic was the swinging trapeze, the real was the trauma inscribed but hitherto unsymbolised. Even though this was hinted at throughout the course of the therapy, that there had been a loss, a trauma that was circled with signifiers, the subject has to say it at the same time as remembering the affect, in the body that is real. That she did not do this in session with me did not matter. The subject needs to remember so it no longer needs to be repressed or disavowed. Elena's loss was equivalent, in the discussion of remembering, to Liz's predicament and, like Liz, she only came to say it in the final stages of the therapy. The result of this was that she doesn't jump off a roof and die, but discovers (in my case) a quite literal flight that is not an escape but an embrace. It's discovering that you can be okay about not being okay. And with that solace, she flies. (254-256). Discovering that you can be okay about not being okay

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is precisely the relationship the psychoanalytic cure has with regards to the symptom. As iek says Enjoy your symptom! (2008)

2.4.4. Liz: The Real

After the fourth session Liz wrote about her project and how we
.tried to figure out IF there was any deeper meaning to parts of it....One more issue running around in my brain and it would surely reach critical mass and start the process of real mental meltdown. (66-70)

Her emphasis on the word IF implies that she had not ascribed any deeper or personal meaning to her project. The warning she writes to me, about not wanting another issue, is something I take seriously and warrants my shift in approach. However, my fear that I had given a too hasty interpretation that circus was akin to a superhero's secret hideout, that circus was like a mask that a superhero might use was warranted in her next piece of writing. It was already too late, my offering had started something that was taking its own course. It came in the form of a polemic, addressed to the Other, in whose place I sat. The therapeutic value of a rant is undeniable. This could be seen with Emma where she ranted, crying until she started laughing and then felt lighter. Therapy gave Liz an opportunity to speak her concerns to the Other with all its demands. However, the role of circus as a cover identity had been ruptured, the role of circus as a delusional metaphor had been threatened, by an over eager desire to help, couched within a blindness to the possibility of a psychotic organisation. This brought to the fore, in unequivocal terms, her relationship to the Other, signified by Society. However there was still the possibility that she was an ordinary neurotic who, being in such an extremely doubtful position to the Other, displayed signs of paranoia and persecution anxiety. The difference between her and Rosie, for example, was that for Rosie the anxiety came from a particular group of men who came to stand for Man, as such, and that

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for Liz, the anxiety came from everyone, male or female, anyone who was not her, against whom she was opposed. I could not take the risk to treat her as either. I had be a friend to whom she could say anything and treat as anything, to whom she could direct whatever anger that had accumulated and which had not been allowed an other to listen to. This was the Winnicottian approach of creating a holding environment that was safe and supportive. (2005) After this moment of the process, her anger dissipated and we discussed, over the remaining sessions, the components, stage directions and visual, physical details of her project. I did not mention the themes and questions brought up in her polemic unless she did so first, trying instead to be a dramaturgical support to her piece. Her next communication stated the predicament clearly:
I should just come out and say right now that it's about me being in a woman's body, instead of in a man's, like I should have been. Just gettin' started with that on Monday, so meeting with you on Tuesday should be interesting. I'll get to go and see a full blown psychiatrist for the first time. (216-218)

This was what had not been said previously. This was what she had circled with signifiers hoping I would touch upon, the thing that could not be symbolised or brought into the image, the real of gender reassignment, that she hoped the subject supposed to know would guess. Finally, she did not produce the piece of work we had been discussing. She deferred her education by enrolling for the final year again, with the hope that as a man she would be able to do the activities in circus that she desired. I include an edited transcript of her text here as an example, both of what circotherapy brings up for the circoanalysand, but also as a testament to the enabling themes that often remain disavowed in circus production. If Elena's discourse brought to the fore the driving force of death, Liz's discourse highlights the idea of being abject and circus as a place in which to be acceptable for once.
Society would have me just be a faceless worker behind office walls, doing whatever task I am capable of. It could even be diffi-

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cult, challenging, intellectually interesting and require limited creativity. But ultimately, I'm supposed to work. I'm supposed to be productive and produce things,for other people, for the mechanisms of society, our culture and our country. Not for me, for some pointless mechanism of other people's desires. (131-134)

Indirectly Liz wrote about the enjoyment circus artists feel in doing something different, something that is not clearly utilitarian, that does not produce anything. In Arendtian terms, they do not labour to produce goods that are immediately consumable and so need producing again, they do not work to create lasting artefacts, since their productions do not last, they are ephemeral (Arendt, 1998). They do this circus act for its own sake, for their own pleasure and not for other people, for the mechanisms of society, and in many cases, due to this blind spot of the Other that they do not consider before entering circotherapy, the pleasure produced in the audience is a fortunate by-product only. Their use-value is therefore dubious in social terms, according to Liz, who, in circus is not doing what she is supposed to be doing, which is being productive. This is a description of jouissance, which Lacan often describes as useless, a waste, a surplus that must be used up. (Zupani, in Clemens, Grigg 2006, p.157)
Invisible to sight, nobody sees me. Even though I am on stage, nobody sees me. I bring a story with me on stage, a story of my body, my person, a bit of my history, a bit of my personality. But nobody really sees me. I'm going to get on stage and hide in front of the audience. What do I have to hide? Myself. I'm always hiding myself. How do I show that on stage? I thought I showed everything on stage, but nobody sees it. They just see what they expect to see, They don't see me. They look but they don't see. (135-139)

This me is the man she felt she was, not the woman she appeared to be, so when she appeared onstage she did so in a mask, hiding, as Emma did, behind circus. When she stated that they saw what they expected to see she was talking about both the demands of Circus what Circus demands to be seen, as an ide-

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ology, a pre-written, reified discourse and the demands of a Society that wanted her to be faceless.
Circus vs. Society Joy vs. Work Men vs. Women ? Power vs. Art Expression vs. Conformity Art vs. Work Superhuman vs. Mundane Ordinary vs. Extraordinary Life vs. Drudgery Creativity vs. Utility Individuality vs. Society One vs. Many Me vs. The World Fantasy vs. Reality Freedom vs. Control Selfish vs. Doing what you're told Governments vs. People Dreams vs. Logic White Males vs. Everyone else. (140-158)

The list of dichotomies illustrates circus' anarchic perspective on the world, illuminating themes that popularly connote circus and its relationship with the everyday world. However there is a telling discrepancy hidden in the list that describes very clearly her relationship to her gender and that gender's relationship to circus and the world. It is the positioning of the words Men, Ordinary, Governments and White Males in the column otherwise dedicated to the circus signifiers these are the same men in black who overpower her and erase her identity. It is in this column which she writes the word Me, preferring to fix Women in the other column, the Society column, typified with signifiers such as Drudgery, Utility, Conformity, Doing what you're told and notably Everyone else.

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It's not a game. I'm right there in front of them and they don't even bother to look. The audience might as well be asleep. They can fuck right off too. When they wake up, then they can have a say in what I do onstage. (172-173)

Most would say that Circus is the fantastic, a distraction, a holiday from our ordinary domestic lives, an escape. However Liz touched on the idea that it may be less fantasy than real. When we encounter an image so horrific in a dream that it wakes us up, we have encountered the real which has broken through the censorship that allows us to sleep, so that waking up into the cosy fantasy of reality is the only way to escape what is really on our minds. Reality is like a pleasant distracting fiction compared to trauma of the real.
As iek sees it, the Real for Lacan is almost the opposite of reality, reality being for Lacan just a low-grade fantasy in which we shelter from the terrors of the Real, a Soho of the psyche. The natural state of the human animal is to live a phantasmal lie. Fantasy is not the opposite of reality it plugs the void in our being so that the set of fictions we call reality is able to emerge. (Eagleton, in Wright and Wright 2001, p. 41.)

Liz's audience might as well be asleep, seeing only what they expect. Liz wanted to show the real, that which the audience never sees, she wanted to render herself visible as a (male) subject. iek, in speaking of our complicit blindness of the ideologies that motivate us while pretending that we don't mentions Lacan's re-working of Freud's analysis of the man who dreamt of his son burning. The son, dead and covered in burial wrappings lies in an adjacent room surrounded by candles. The father falls asleep, and after a few hours dreams that his son is by his bed clutching his arm saying Father, can't you see I'm burning? The father wakes abruptly to smell smoke and sees the burial wrappings around the arm of his dead son in flames. The Freudian interpretation is that the smell of smoke created the image in the dream of his son saying that he was burning, but iek's explanation of Lacans approach may help clarify Liz's idea that the audience is asleep:

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First he constructs a dream, a story which enables him to prolong his sleep to avoid awakening into reality. But the thing he encounters in the dream, the reality of his desire, the Lacanian Real in our case the reality of the child's reproach to his father, 'Can't you see that I am burning?', implying the father's fundamental guilt is more terrifying than so-called external reality itself, and that is why he awakens: to escape the Real of his desire, which announces itself in the terrifying dream. He escapes into so-called reality to be able to continue to sleep, to maintain his blindness, to elude awakening into the Real of his desire....'Reality' is a fantasy-construction which enables us to mask the Real of our desire. (2006, p.45)

Her polemic worked through the symbolic use of words. After this, she had no need of the circus act, she had rather the need to deal with the real; gender reassignment. She gave up the act and performed her act(ion) in the real. Emma followed a similar route, understanding, after circotherapy that she needed a real therapist to talk through her issues concerning love and romantic attachment. For Emma it provided a new tool. (216). For Liz it provided an understanding of why circus was a necessary phase of her self-understanding. Elena, at the moment of writing, is exploring the possibilities of a taking a Master's degree to properly develop her own form of circus, which is a form of research for her into melancholia, pain and joy. Circus, it seems, is about many more things than just impressing an audience.

2.4.5. Conclusion: Tragedy and the Sublime

If the demand one makes of psychoanalysis is happiness, all the analyst can offer is sublimation, since happiness, in the Aristotelian sense of eudaimon, having the good fortune of the gods, is unavailable to us, happiness having been reduced to the utilitarian; the service of goods to the greatest number (Lacan, 1999a, p.22-23). However the artist is already sublimating, the act is just such a passion or drive transformed. Liz opposes utility to creativity. So in what sense is circus a good? As a popular craft that provides distraction it

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serves a purpose, but as an art that reveals or transmits knowledge or illuminates an area of human experience it is not, in my view, since the psychic material, the drive, the trauma is not available to the audience, it is often screened out with various fantasmatic scenarios that aim to give it consistency, meaning, value. Liz has been sublimating all along but as she approaches the real she encounters the possibility of coming face to face with what Lacan in the seminar on ethics calls the Thing.
When, in Seminar VII: On the Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959 1960), jouissance is first fully asserted as the impossible/real foreign kernel, irreducible to the symbolic order, it appears as the horrifying abyss of the Thing which can only be approached in a suicidal heroic act of transgression, of excluding oneself from the symbolic community the Thing is the stuff tragic heroes like Oedipus and Antigone are made of, its lethal blinding intensity forever marks those who enter its event horizon. Its best figures are ghastly spectres like de Maupassants Horla, E.A. Poes abyss of the maelstrom, up to the Alien in Ridley Scotts film of the same name, and the frozen Medusas gaze is the ultimate image of the subject encountering the Thing. (iek, 2002, p.19-20)

Early on in session she mentioned how in dreams there was always a thing just beyond her grasp. Just as she approaches it, or it almost comes into view, it disappears and she must search again. She writes:
.the bit about trying to find the thing, as if the thing was super important. Is it that important? What if the finding of the thing is the thing? And what is the thing? Is it a terrifying golem running around in my subconscious? I don't think I want a golem playing silly buggers down there. (67-69)

Previously she had mentioned that

.dream logic is logic that seems to revolve around one plot item that's constant, and everything can change around that, location, people, time, but there's that thing unseen and off-stage to anchor it, and then the reality stays the same and the plot changes, and the cycle begins again. (13-15)

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This thing offstage is the audience and the people in black who will finally eviscerate her, stripping her of her fantasy. She becomes tragic here, in Lacanian terms, in an Oedipal way, as reality is laid bare, colourful fantasy stripped away and the Thing overpowers her and it is the death of her. This could be seen positively in light of Elena's redemptive dissolution by fire and light, a death to embrace so that she can move on, rather than a suicide. Liz as woman is destroyed to make way for the man she psychically feels that she is. Both portray forms of this heroic suicide. If for Klein art is sublimation then for Lacan the highest form of this is tragedy. Sublimation, in the form of tragedy can save us, different to the comic or redemptive sublimation of Winnicott. In the Ethics Lacan says that tragedy is at the root of our experience (244). Taking this to heart allows circotherapy to give, if not happiness, after all it's okay to not be okay, then some way to organise our relation to unconscious desire and the problematic of desire, which for Lacan, is pursued in relation to death. Elena deals with various forms of death loss of a loved one, wasting away, suicide - whereas Liz is dealing with a death in the symbolic, more like Lacan's Antigone, where she wipes herself out in the symbolic her place in society is stolen (Liz, 104, Lacan 1999a, p.243-287). How can a human being make sense of their finitude? Or, how can one betowards-death? For Freud these questions are reframed with the notion of the death drive, the fundamental tendency of human life to return to a state of zero excitation, causing Lacan to notice that this makes all drives death drives, since they all wish to extinguish themselves. This, I propose, is a fundamental support of circus since it presents the pushing of limits so that we are forced to engage with our finitude. Tragedy gives us some fictional distance to that final desire but also a proximity via its beautiful shimmering appearance, via its aesthetics. Lacan's figure for this is Antigone whose beauty, in the ultimate ethical act of being willing to die for a principle, lies in transgression of the law, the name of the father. Just as for Nietzsche, for whom tragedy is born from Dionysus, the womb of be-

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ing, it is impossible to have direct access to the god, it would destroy us in an ecstasy like that which takes place in the Bacchae. We need a screen the aesthetic. Whereas Liz allows the real Thing onstage, Elena keeps it at a distance with her fictions, allowing the audience a bearable relationship with it. Lacan shows in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, how a human being can have a relation to that real only by intimating it via an aesthetic experience, that simultaneously veils the trauma of the real and leads the way to it, or discloses it, in a way that we find manageable, without, in other words, becoming psychotics who have no inhibition in relation to the real. The goal of circotherapy is just this disclosure, veiled in the symbolic, in the hope that the utterance in the symbolic somehow has an effect on the real of the circoanalysand as it did with Liz and Emma. Both Elena and Liz however answer to Lacan's most urgent question Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you? (1999a, p.315). In the same seminar he expresses that the only thing one can be guilty of is of having given ground relative to one's desire. (Ibid., p.319). They both pursue this to the point of some form of death. Tragedy is an aesthetic experience of sublimation that reveals the reality, the ground of human experience and saves us from it via catharsis. Catharsis for Lacan is not merely the purging of fear and pity but a purification of desire. The work of sublimation traces the contours of something sublime, that category that resists representation. This tracing can be likened to the way that we can never access the real, never see the Thing, but for the way it warps or distorts the reality that surrounds it, the signifiers that circle it, so there is something sublime to said about the real, an experience of excess, of too-much, of jouissance. Sublimation raises the object to the dignity of the Thing. (Ibid., p.112), an excessive point beyond objectivity and representation. This is where Antigone, for Lacan, leads us and if we follow we will experience catharsis. In other words, she goes there so that we do not have to.

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Chapter 5: Conclusion
1. Psychoanalysis as Catalyst
Circus has emerged as a transformational, therapeutic practice for the subjects of this study. Circotherapy thus unfolds as a supplementary pedagogic tool to training, facilitating the production of subjective truth alongside the objective accumulation of knowledge that training provides. Its aim was to bring forth the subject as artist in a relation to an Other. This Other appeared, at first, as the circus itself as that which defined their identity as circus artists and consequently as a more universal, primary Other, the Other of the Symbolic, to whom was addressed issues, complaints and questions. In keeping with the construction of a theory of circoanalysis, it would be possible to now index a speculative taxonomy following psychoanalytic theory, from the praxis of circotherapy; a symptomatology of the subjects in this study. All three major Lacanian psychic structures, neurosis, perversion and psychosis, were interpreted in the discourses of the circoanalysands, organisations denoted as subjective positions taken with regard to the Other and consequently meriting different approaches. In this sense I find some validation for the technique and some confirmation of my original intuition that circus practice is indeed hysterical, obsessional, masochistic and at times tending towards or reminiscent of the psychotic, but no urgent need to create a list. The practice itself was never intended to fully attend to these conceptions of psychic structure as concrete realities. The ideas of a circus-ego, circus super-ego, or the various uses of Lacan's symptomatology etc. etc. were metaphoric tools, not instances of the attempt to construct a globalising theory. The aim rather was to produce a practice that would attend to the neglected voice of the circus student. I did discover analogies between the act and the dream, symptom and the psychoanalytic theory of the compromise formation. There was indeed material produced that was corroborative with the theories of hysteria or masochism for

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example. I found, because I was looking for it, the death drive, jouissance and repetition compulsion. The insistence on Lacan over the last two years narrowed the research focus to a point where I now think it needs to be opened up again. My one genuine discovery, it seems to me, was the positioning of the subject in relation to the Other, a relation I had no intuition of when I began the research. This Other, the circus, the spectator, the significant Other of the transference now appears as the concept that should be taken forward, via other theoretical perspectives for the development of circus art and the artist that is subject to it. This is to say that the Other, in whatever form it takes, is an assumption taken on behalf of the artist/student, a ground that supports and enables their work and is thus beyond thinking. This is clear in Elena's deconstruction of the requisites of circus. This is to posit that any kind of nosology of circus, any kind of neat classification of circus symptoms following a psychoanalytic theory is something I do not consider necessary or useful. The practice allowed the voice and the signifier to emerge developing into a process of critical enquiry that questioned and uncovered the reasons why the artist was there in the first place, revealing these assumptions, disclosing this ground. If the burgeoning theory of circoanalysis and its concurrent praxis of circotherapy found its primary inspirational metaphors and first practical tools in psychoanalysis, its future consists, not in a drive towards further proving the case for a psychoanalysis of circus but in exploring other critical alliances to elucidate the theme of this Other. By opening up the research, I mean it not only to explore other critical perspectives, but to broaden its scope also; from the personal relation to the Other, circoanalysis would look to its function as a social act(ion). If tragedy forms the core of what Lacanians experience in their work there is however hope to be found in Elena's It's okay not to be okay. which would seem to me to be the point of Lacanian analysis, to be opposed to an egocentred psychotherapy that seeks to produce happy subjects. Elena's maxim seems like the starting point for a new circoanalytic adventure, a more inclusive research into circus as a social not just personal experience. Having come to terms, in a joyful way, with the fact that one will forever desire, that satisfac-

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tion will always be momentary and partial, Elena seems to suggest that one can get on with the business of living in the world. Her focus on death in her sublimating act, her making sense of her finitude, her challenging of her ego-limits need not remained mired in the tragic (suicidal) romanticism of Heidegger's running-towards-death, or the experience of the abyss/void/thing but may in fact open up to the more hopeful concept of Arendt's natality, i.e. that to focus on the new, that which arrives, that which is being born in the present is a more useful construct for an ethics than death as an ontological horizon. Similarly the melancholy that pervaded much of Elena's work, even though it is a useful corrective to a mania that I see characteristic of circus, gave way to an actual grieving, which is necessary for any kind of newness to emerge. Liz, also, experienced a form of rebirth in her discourse, being annihilated as a woman, experiencing a loss of self in order to emerge as a man. The new position that Emma takes, with regard to the Other, is also only the beginning of a new phase of life and work and for this to take place, something had to be given up, her symptoms and the difficult pleasure they afforded her. This would be to suggest that the end of an analysis concerns a subject coming to terms with death or loss, signaling, in fact, the birth of a new subject, one that is capable of acting, since objects do not act, but are acted upon. Is loss then, ultimately, the thing that circus must confront and fully experience as opposed to the acting-out of its possibility?

2. Melancholia/Mania
Loss runs through the circoanalysands' discourses in this research; loss of virginity, childhood innocence, a loved one, loss of interest, sense of gender identity or place in the social world, a loss of safety or authority. In some cases these were articulated as such, in others it remained beneath the surface as an underlying disappointment or failure which circus was employed to negate or blot out with its display of mastery and total control. They were attempts at negating psychic reality, denying the existence of internal bad objects in an om-

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nipotent gesture of control, triumph and scorn. (Kristeva, 2001, p.77-78). It is here that I find mania, as the flip-side of melancholia as a form of repression. Omnipotence, denial and idealisation (Klein, 1998, p.349) are the tools that mania uses to counteract the inevitable grief that affords us a soul. (Kristeva, 2001, p.89). Mania is a denial, a coping mechanism, a temporary way-out from an unmanageable psychic pain. It is associated with speed, with the belief that one can achieve anything and everything, sometimes all at once. It is impulsive, meaning it does not take into consideration the consequences of an action and so is aligned with a pathologically high self-confidence. Mania is a high that has its corresponding and enabling low in melancholia mania doesnt mean liberation from introverted mournfulness, but rather an illusory triumph over mourning (Birnbaum, D. and Olsson, A. 2008, p.74). In her work on melancholia Black Sun, Kristeva imagines mania as it walks onstage and becomes the tool that builds a shield against loss. (Ibid., 1989, p.50). Her theatrical metaphor, that implies something being a show for others continues to describe the aesthetic exultance which,
.rising by means of ideal and artifice above ordinary constructions suitable to the standards of natural language and trivialised social code, can partake of this manic activity. (Kristeva, 1989, p. 50)

Mania is a way of managing a psychic injury by denying it, in a controlling action and the notion of control goes to the heart of what the circus does; one controls these many balls from falling to the ground, one controls the swing of the trapeze and one's own body on it, one controls the partner's body as it lands into one's arms after a brief flight. Control and failure are antithetical terms. Superman is a hero for this very reason, he controls his body in flight and when he fails (because of a proximity to kryptonite for example) he becomes mortal, fallible. Failure is refused entry into the world of the manic because he denies its possibility. It is an assertion of absolute control in an aggressive gesture turned outward towards the world in contrast to the aggressivity with which melancholia sponsors the superego in its task of berating and controlling the ego.

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In psychoanalysis this need for control asserts itself in the hysterical demand to the master, the masochist's demand to be punished, the obsessives tendency to maintain an illusion of control in repetitive rituals that fend off the appearance of the Other and the paranoiac's production of a fantasy landscape that casts the Other in an incontrovertibly persecutory position. Failure, in these instances would amount to the Other refusing this identification. In the circus then, the artist stages the possibility of failure one may fall, drop, fail to be caught yet to be circus it must not fail, unless it pretends to as a way of paving the way for greater applause when it does succeed. Here I would like to propose the link between failure and grief, to be opposed to the denial of failure in mania and the absolute investment in failure and loss that is melancholia. Only in grief does one admit to some fundamental but also enabling failure, that of life itself. Failure, as a lack of control over either an internal impulse or external environment is traumatic for an ego that wants its own way. Mourning is precisely that integrative activity that accepts this fact, slowly building failure into the life-story of the ego. Circus cannot allow itself to fail for if it did it would cease to be the circus, as such. The superhero is an idealisation, a phantasy and yet the journey that superheroes take is one riven by failures that are explicitly human. This is where the popularity of these super-heroic narratives is to be found, this is where our empathy resides and this is where circus, aspiring to the super-heroic, the omnipotent, may well fall short, forestalling its own internal narrative and consequently its own communicative potential which resides in its relationality. There can be no dialogue with the perfect. Circus it seems to me still has much left to mourn and the task of circoanalysis would be to allow the circoanalysand to mourn the loss of the Other, rather than maniacally attempt to fill-in its lack. The internal bad object, the incorporated lost object is an abject remainder, evidenced in stories of humiliation or lack of control, moments of fright, trauma and intrusive, premature seduction, persecutory moments where the ego, as an imaginary identity and precious artefact was threatened. That wounded arte-

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fact returns, in manic, denied and exultant form in the circus act. This is the heightened joy the artist feels when faced with the healing properties of the act in front of the Other. This is the empathetic joy the spectator feels when confronted with the exhilarating fantasy of absolute mastery. What then needs curing in such a win-win situation?

3. The New Subject of Circus

Students are, for the most part, young when they enter a circus training. As evidenced by the difference between the professional interviews and focus groups, it is when an artist is older, and perhaps past their physical prime, or, in other words when the body's abilities decline, that disappointment initiates a critical questioning. My proposal is that critical enquiry could happen at the very moment of entry into the circus milieu and that the development of critical faculties could be developed in tandem with technical mastery, lest the former faculties become infantilised by an environment of obedience to the imaginary, prescriptive and tradition heavy demands of circus. The artefact, in circoanalysis thus far, has been described as an imaginary object, like the ego. The act is an ego-artefact in the imaginary, a need to reiterate identity in the mirror. Here the artist is enthralled to the circus, to its own image reflected in the adoring crowd from whom it demands applause. In the symbolic, the artist has turned back to the Other to be validated in what it sees and believes. This subject refers back, questioning, critically to the circus. There is a desire here rather than demand. This desire is for something in the Other that is lacking, a need to question the apparent lack in the Other, provoking anxiety, often pleasurably. The thing that gets desire moving is hidden, already there, this possibility of, rather than being the object of the spectator's desire, being the object cause of desire (again). Circotherapy, if it has any resonance with the idea of a cure, is a cure for the circus in the subject. Freed from the circus, what could the subject do with it? Circus objects seem to me to exist somewhere between Arendt's labour and

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work (2008). It is work because it produces an artefact that is durable in the memory of the spectator, yet it is like labour in that the minute it is consumed it has to be made again. How might a circus act be true to its signifier act, the root of Arendt's third term action? How might it be an act(ion), that which acts upon social space, rather than be sequestered within the circus (or the Theatre, Opera, Pop Video, Commercial, Corporate Entertainment) as a cultural artefact that reinforces and is the slave to a cultural Other? Is this the move circoanalysis makes when it facilitates the transition from the demand of the parent/Other/Circus to the desire of the artist and hopefully to the desire of the circoanalyst? The circus subject has something to say for itself, it has an account to give, but it cannot do so on its own terms if it needs the validation of an Other. If it responds to the circus, looks back at it for validation in its execution of the prescribed aesthetic of the tricks of circus, if it responds to theatre, by using an imaginary character to justify its real action, if it is conditioned by the opera to be a symbol, or commissioned in the pop video to be an augmentation of the value of the product being sold, then the subject is effaced and the power of its relationality diminished: it becomes an object. The craft of mentalism for example, a component of New Magic, could be seen as a direct homology of the powers of rhetoric, persuasion and deception used in political oratory and policy making. How are circus artists already making these metaphors in their training and production techniques and how are they obfuscated and masked by secondary metaphorisations that operate as reparations or negations of meaning or relationality? This would be to say that the circus act is already a primary metaphorisation, like the symptom, and that the circoanalytic goal would be not to try and give it more meaning, i.e. to accumulate signification, but to subtract, to distil what the circus act was actually trying to do, given that the spectator is part of and an enabling condition of the act. In a focus group, with a group of companies that only use the discipline of pair acrobatics in their creations - acrobats and handstand artists who perform together, balancing and dancing with each other acrobatically in Stockholm,

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November 2012, we explored the nature of their practice via three lenses: a psychoanalytic genealogy, a hermeneutics of suspicion (distrusting the surface contents or manifest motivations) and a phenomenological reduction of the actions their practice consisted of. From this I asked three questions: what kind of knowledge is the craft, what kind of research question is it, what does it actually do when the circus is bracketed, i.e. removed from the equation? These were the answers: - To understand another body and feel it like my own - To magically communicate without words - To control your own ego and your body's energy to provide an open space for the other - Two people working as one - To take responsibility, to take care of someone's life, to create a safe practice - An acceptance of all possible physical states i.e. strength and fragility can coexist in the same moment/space - To allow oneself to be scared and use that to dare, risk - To develop a trust towards oneself, the other and to life the concentration of fear making one acutely aware of one's limitations - To understand dialogue and compromise - The knowledge of a technique to be present in the here and now - A knowledge about weaknesses, your's, their's, our's highlighting the gaps between who you are and who you want to be. (Pair Acro Convention 2012, 1-14.) These were the primary statements this group of experienced professionals discussed. If we were to replace the context of pair acrobatics with that of being human in the world, their fundamental propositions could be seen as the philosophy of an idea of health predicated on an inseparability from the other, embracing fear, weakness and fragility as indispensable for a strong safe practice of living that involved daring, risk and responsibility in an inter-subjective space of trustful communication. Pair acrobatics here reads like an ethical pro-

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gramme detailing how one could act in the world with the Other. It conjures a world in which we are irrevocably tied to the Other, whether we like it or not, an ethical stance articulated in Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2006). Taking this as an example, I would propose that this would be a next possible phase of circoanalysis, a research into ethics and social responsibility via circus. This would be a circus as a non-dialectical unity of a thought/concept and an action. The circus is a bricolage of effects, different aspects of a discourse. The aerialist, the juggler, the balancer have different things to say within the same horizon of a limit, of a failure. Bearing in mind that a focus group on pair acrobatics could delineate something close to a philosophy of the practice of being human, what could the aerialist formulate, or the juggler? Would object manipulators benefit from a speculatively realist perspective towards their practice, exploring the tool-being of themselves and their objects, their equipmentality? Would aerialists be able to articulate a philosophy of flight via a reading of Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of the line of flight? Would the circus as a whole benefit from seeing each act as an indispensable organ in the body of circus and then attempt a Deleuzian/Guattarian circus-without-acts? Would then the trick be a organ in the body of the act in the collective body or organisation of the circus, making space for the act-without-tricks? To arrive at these points of departure, I propose that one must aspire to the desire of the circoanalyst, homologous to the desire of the analyst the desire to know and to cure the circus artist as researcher and clinician. A good start would be someone who has already been cured of the Other of Circus, equivalent to being released from the parental demand, someone who has seen the lack in the Other's desire and has stopped trying to plug that gap by trying to be the object of the Other's desire which constitutes the subject position of perversion. Someone in other words that has stopped desiring the Other's desire. Someone prepared to face their own desire, name it, bring it to consciousness and then maybe reside in the place of object cause of desire to generate desire in the Other, to make the Other question. This is what the research could not demonstrate but which the methodology was aiming at and as

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such remains a speculation as what this circus act as object cause might be. It may well no longer be called circus, yet it would stem from its traditions and techniques. Circus subjects would have to be able to mourn the loss of the circus, their significant and signifying Other, their point de capiton, signalling the emergence of the new subject of circus and the construction of new objects/artefacts/identities. For this, one would need a new programme, an ethics or conceptual apparatuses arising from the individual, established and emerging practices that make up the circus rather than the reified apparatus, dispositif (Other) that is the circus. These conceptual apparatuses forming the thinking behind the creation of the work would merit being called makings, as analogies to Badiou's thinkings.

4. The Ethics of Circus

Psychoanalysis was the privileged tool in this research, but it began as a bricolage of theories, just as circus is a bricolage of techniques. Along the way I engaged with Althusser, Marx, iek and Agamben, Heidegger and Arendt, Nussbaum and Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes, Levinas and Badiou and they remained spectral allies in my thinking and will be invaluable for the future of a circoanalysis that found its catalyst in psychoanalysis. There is a necessity for an analysis of circus production and the way it reifies and supports uncritical representations of gender and how it objectifies its artists as instruments of the Master's idea. Martha Nussbaum in Sex and Social Justice reworks MacKinnon and Dworkin's idea of objectification around the central concepts of instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership and denial of subjectivity (1999). The idea of the Master could be further elaborated in this context via Deleuze's Coldness and Cruelty (2006) where he opposes the contractual nature of the masochist's demand with the institution (of circus in this case) of the sadist. Deleuze describes Le Marquis de Sade's logic in 120 Days of Sodom, as pornological, an accumulation

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of acts performed upon the victim as object to prove an idea (of circus), in De Sade's case, an idea contra nature. I am reminded of Sugarman's analysis quoted in Chapter One, of the fungibility and violability of the performers if one breaks, get a replacement. The object of circus might well benefit from an analysis of its position as a commodity, that robs the subject of its ownership of its means of production. There is lacking an examination of its ontological status of being-in-the-world, how it re-invents, how it disregards the proper use of things, how its approach to living (not its way of life) is by definition creative, how the objects and materials it uses are not merely ready-to-hand but already broken, meaningless and waiting for reinvigoration, re-use, present-to-hand. It still has to deal with the ethics of the Other, face to face, under the rubric of death, in this medium that has its historical roots in gladiatorial practices, where the human faces extinction and must conquer it for the attention and approval of the public. It is clear to me now that circoanalysis, as a cure for the circus in the subject, but not its practices, could pave the way for such analyses to take place. For this to happen, circus practitioners will have to mourn the demise of the circus in themselves, mirroring the process psychoanalysis takes one on in order to find the freedom to desire and think desire and generate desire as an unending, properly human question. This is not to say that the circus should not and cannot exist in its myriad current forms but that for it to take its next leap into the unknown, into newness, it has to leave something behind and make space for a making, already known but not yet thought, to take place.

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Interviews and reflective texts from the circoanalysands Transcripts of the interviews and the reflective texts are published in the Cd that accompanies this thesis

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John-Paul Zaccarini: Circoanalysis: Circus, Therapy and Psychoanalysis. There is an object/artefact of circus and a subject/process that makes it. This research considers the subject of the circus-making in order to bring it to the foreground of future discussions about pedagogy, practice and production. If the shift from Traditional to New Circus brought with it changes in circus education the incorporation of theatre and dance then the shift to what is being called Contemporary Circus may also need a more refined set of tools to facilitate its creative growth. This thesis sets out how psychoanalytic theories can be adapted and its key practices adopted to bring about this shift from New to Contemporary Circus in pedagogic practice, with the development of a new practice: Circoanalysis.

John-Paul Zaccarini began as an actor/dancer/mime/performance artist before discovering circus. Since 1992 he has produced, directed, taught, mentored, choreographed and performed multidisciplinary work internationally, been artistic director of two performance companies garnering both awards and critical acclaim and has consistently turned down offers to work with Cirque Du Soleil.

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