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Lacanian Approach To Problems of Affect and Anxiety in Psychoanalysis PDF
Lacanian Approach To Problems of Affect and Anxiety in Psychoanalysis PDF
Lacanian Approach To Problems of Affect and Anxiety in Psychoanalysis PDF
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III. The Psychosis, 1955-56. Trans. R. Grigg.
London, Routledge, 1993. p. 32.
2
B. Benvenuto & R. Kennedy. The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. London, Free
Association Books, 1986. p. 117.
3
ibid, p. 168.
4
A. Green. 'BJB/Freud Museum Conference: How do we think about Feelings?' in British
Journal of Psychotherapy, 1995, 12, p. 209
5
J.H. Smith & W. Kerrigan. Interpreting Lacan. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983.
p. 268.
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call to produce an 'intellectual accounting' for the affects and one purpose,
therefore, of this paper is to raise debate in just this area.
Lacan, however, adamantly disputed this representation of his work
which does not mean that he was sympathetic to views of affect that left
out of account the fact that between the real and the subject comes the
signifier. Thus, in Seminar I he writes of:
the ambiguity that always dogs us concerning the notorious
opposition between the intellectual and the affective - as if the
affective were a sort of colouration, a kind of ineffable quality
which must be sought out in itself, independently of the
eviscerated skin which the purely intellectual realisation of a
subject's relationship would consist in. This conception
which urges analysts down strange paths is puerile. The
slightest, even strange feeling, that the subject professes to in
the text of the session is taken to be a spectacular success.6
In Seminar III Lacan, commenting on the inadequacy of any theory
of affects in psychoanalysis up to that point, offers what he terms a
working hypothesis around affects taking anger as a case in point. He
writes:
anger is no doubt a passion which is manifested by means of
an organic or physiological correlative, by a given more or
less hypertonic or even elated feeling, but that it requires
perhaps something like the reaction of a subject to a
disappointment, to the failure of an expected correlation
between a symbolic order and the response of the real. In
other words, anger is essentially linked to something
expressed in a formulation of Charles Peguy's, who was
speaking in a humorous context - it's when the little pegs
refuse to go into the little holes.7
6
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54.
Trans. J. Forrester. Cambridge, C.U.P., 1988, p. 57.
7
J. Lacan. op.cit., p. 103.
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On this view, which I will come back to, Lacan has already linked affects to
subjectivity and he goes on to note, for example, the absence of anger as
defined above in most animal species. Indeed, in Seminar X Lacan returns
to this precise example concerning anger while classifying as 'absurd' the
view that he is less interested in affects than anything else. He writes:
I have tried to say what affect is not: it is not being, given in
its immediacy, nor is it the subject in some sort of raw form.
It is not, to say the word, protopathetic in any case. My
occasional remarks on affect mean nothing more than this.
And that is precisely why it has a close structural relationship
with what is, even traditionally a subject ... What on the
contrary I did say about affect is that it is not repressed, and
that is something that Freud says just as I do. It is unmoored,
it goes with the drift. One finds it displaced, mad, inverted,
metabolised, but it is not repressed. What is repressed are the
signifiers which moor it.8
It is in this Seminar devoted to nothing other than an extensive study of a
key affect, namely anxiety, that Lacan is also clear that anxiety must be seen
precisely as an affect, albeit an affect with particular status CI am far from
refusing to insert the central object of anxiety into the catalogue of
affects'9), and he is moreover critical of the impasses reached in the work
of psychoanalysts such as Rappaport10 which arrived, he claims, at a mere
cataloguing of affects or psychoanalytic theories of affect with no real
progress in understanding. A further Lacanian reference point in
approaching the problem of affects in psychoanalysis is found in
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X. Anxiety, 1962-63. Trans. C. Gallagher
(unpublished).
9
ibid.
10
D. Rappaport. 'On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Affects1 in The Collected Papers of
David Rappaport, 1967. Ed. M. Gill. New York, Basic Books.
69
J. Lacan. Television (1973). Trans. D. Holler, R. Krauss & A. Michelson. New York,
Norton, 1990. p. 20.
12
ibid, p. 20.
13
S.Freud. Repression. S.E., XIV, pp. 23-24.
14
ibid, p. 24.
15
Ornicar 17/18.
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part of any complex causal process. This view runs into a considerable
number of difficulties, not least that it makes emotion purely passive and
sensation-like, something that does not give us knowledge of the world as
such but merely of our being physiologically in a certain state. For
example, on this view one can make little sense of any connection between
emotions and behaviour, (that is, emotions as motivations), for to state
that a particular physiological state, say a throbbing of the heart, leads one
to act in a certain way is simply absurd without connecting this act to a
subject's wants and desires. Lyons brings out this problem of reducing
emotions to sensations by an analogy whereby to say that I am hot is ...
... not to say that I want to do anything or am liable to do
anything, much less that I will do anything.
I might like
being hot, I might not, I might be indifferent.20
Similarly, in Descartes' view it is impossible to distinguish
emotions from, say, a drug induced bodily state that mimics the emotional
one - Descartes has simply no criteria available for such a distinction.
Moreover, as Bedford points out, feelings unlike emotions, just are, for
example, 'we may experience a pang or particular pattern of internal
stimulation' 2 1 but one cannot ask whether such a feeling is justified or
appropriate. Therefore, if emotions were simply feelings we could not
make sense of them as they would be beyond reason. Finally, Wittgenstein
in his Philosophical Investigations makes the point that we could not use
emotional words without them being part of language - for a word only
has meaning as part of language - and, as such, Descartes' internal mental
experiences could never be conceived and expressed by Descartes. 22
Nevertheless, despite these difficulties with the Cartesian theory of the
emotions - some of which Descartes himself sensed - many (for example,
Hume) followed Descartes in seeing emotion as a special feeling in the
soul or the soul's perception from within of the body's changes and
20
W. Lyons, op.rit, p. 7
Bedford, (1967) quoted in Lyons, op.cit.
22
L. Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, 1945. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford,
Basil Blackwell, 1953.
21
72
W. James. Principles of Psychology, Volume II. New York, Henry Holt and Co., 1870. pp.
449-50.
24
S. Schacter & J.G. Singer. Emotion, Obesity and Crime. New York, Academic Press, 1970.
25
S. Schacter & J.G. Singer. 'Cognitive, social and physiological determinants of emotional
state' in Psychological Review, 1962, 69, pp. 379-399.
26
A.F. Ax. 'The Physiological differentiation between Fear and Anger in humans' in
Psychosomatic Medicine, 1971, 15, pp. 433-442.
27
J. Watson. Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. Philadelphia, Lippincot
Press, 1919.
73
C. Darwin. The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. New York, Philosophical
Library, 1872.
29
B.F. Skinner. About Behaviourism. New York, Prentice-Hall, 1974.
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however is that there are also exceptions to these findings and this,
alongside other problems with this approach, has led some researchers
towards a further theory, namely the so-called Constructionist theory
which offers I believe a far stronger theoretical account of emotion than
the previous two approaches.
The constructionist approach is one that puts the emphasis on the
meaning or cognitive content of an emotion, though in a form that is not
narrowly cognitivist insofar as it also highlights the need to understand
the social context in which a particular emotion can be expressed. It then
says two things about emotions. Firstly, that they have cognitive content,
and are therefore not some form of 'natural stirrings' but constructs
related to beliefs or judgements about the world in such a way that the
removal of the relevant belief will remove not only the reason for the
emotion but the emotion itself. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, was the first
exponent of this view and argued, for example, that the belief that one has
been wronged is in some way essential to the experience of the emotion
anger. This implies that if one discovers that one's belief is false - that the
object of one's anger did not in fact exist - then one will cease to experience
the emotion. It also means that emotions are subject to rational
evaluation for insofar as an emotion is based on a false or irrational belief,
then the ensuing emotion can itself be judged as false or irrational given
the actual circumstances the subject finds him or herself in. The claim that
some emotions do not appear to be related to particular beliefs or
evaluative judgements, for example, in cases of apprehensiveness or
'objectless' fear, is countered by pointing to embedded beliefs the subject
has in the situation, such as a belief concerning one's experience of
helplessness in that particular situation or else a belief concerning what
could happen to one rather than a belief concerning what was in fact
happening. This theory is still, however, open to a number of objections,
not the least of them being that it is unclear how one might
independently identify the reasonableness of particular emotions which,
for example, cannot be done in the form of a mathematical or logical proof.
It is at this point that the second aspect of this theory becomes prominent
and indeed strengthens it. The argument is that emotions gain their
meaning in complex patterns of cultural relationship and indeed are
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S. Freud. On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under
the Description of Anxiety Neurosis. S.E., I.
77
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79
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81
H.Keller. The Story of My Life. New Jersey, Doubleday, 1954. pp. 35-37.
R. Hobson. Forms of Feeling. London, Tavistock Publications, 1985.
82
This naming is what allows the human being to move from the concrete,
the realm of perception, sensations, objects and images, to the world of
concepts, which can then be manipulated through thinking. Interestingly,
we can see here, at least in outline, a further proof of Lacan's thesis that the
punctuation that allows the signifier to take on a meaning occurs both
through the intervention of another and from the locus of the Other
(language) within a retroactive effect of temporality. It is perhaps
important to note here that the capacity for language is independent of the
process of interpretation (the deaf can and do 'speak' a language) which is
again consonant with Lacan's view that the symptom or, for example, the
so-called 'Freudian slip' is, in fact, 'a successful, not to say well tuned
discourse'. 48 One can ask more here about the elements of language and
how they are acquired. Lacan argues that language comes to the speaking
being more or less as a whole which means that...
... the particular effects of this or that element of language (la
langue) are bound up with the existence of this total
ensemble, anterior to any possible link with any particular
experience of the subject. Thus to consider this latter
particular link independently of any reference to the first is
simply to deny in this element the function proper to
language (la langue)49
We can see this concretely in how children develop language, for words
are already generalisations for the child (for example, names only slowly
acquire specificity), and reflect reality in quite another way than perception
and sensation, the latter being presymbolic until the point that they too
are, in a sense, taken up in language. Lacan is explicit on this point and
like Freud gives us reason to recognise the special importance to language
development of the ability to code the real according to the categories of
yes/no, affirmation/negation. He asks what makes the symbol into
language and states:
48
49
J. Lacan. Ecrits: a selection (1966). Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Tavistock, 1977. p. 58.
ibid, pp. 63-64.
83
In order for the symbolic object freed from its usage to become
the word freed from the Hie et nunc, the difference resides
not in its material quality as sound but in its evanescent being
in which the symbol finds the permanence of the concept.
Through the word - already a presence made of absence absence itself gives itself a name in that moment of origin,
whose perceptual recreation Freud's genius detected in the
play of the child, and from this pair of sounds modulated on
presence and absence ... there is born the world of meaning of
a particular language in which the world of things will come
to be arranged.50
This explains Lacan's emphasis on Freud's 'FORT! DA!' game where
Freud describes the child's 'great cultural achievement - the instinctual
renunciation', - that allows the child to substitute in place of his mother's
disappearance a rudimentary form of language that frees the child from
the immediacy of the situation. For Lacan, language is a radical otherness
at the core of the subject. 'Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol
has made him man'. 51 Returning to affects, we can see how the child's
ability to use signifiers introduces the child to an emotional world. Thus,
where previously the (M)other's absence was just that, and leads, to what
some observers have described as a wilting or 'low-keyedness' in the
infant, 52 there is now the emergence of sadness which is related to the
ability of the infant to grasp the notion of loss in relation to this object. It is
important, however, to highlight two points here. Firstly, we must
recognise that emotions are necessarily grounded in pleasure and pain and
as Cavell - shadowing Lacan - insists, in some form of wanting or demand
prior to desire. For as she states:
... only a creature who can experience pleasure to begin with
can be pleased to have won the lottery, proud of having
50
ibid, p. 65.
ibid, p. 65.
52
E.R. Zetzel. 'Depression and the Incapacity to Bear it' in Drives, Affects and Behaviour.
Vol 2. Ed. M. Schur. New York, International Universities Press, 1965.
51
84
learned to tie her shoelace, grateful for the favour done. Only
a creature who can experience pain can feel ashamed of his
rude remark, or sad because he's going away ... it is pleasure,
pain and volition that become articulated in an endless
number of ways by cognitions and beliefs.53
Secondly, if we are not to descend into confusion at this point, we must
define what the word 'object' implies. In doing this, we need to first make
a distinction between the different uses of the word 'representation'. In
English this usually refers to an image or likeness and is linked to
perception, whereas in the Freud Cartesian tradition the expression Videe
representative is linked with symbolic capacity. In other words, it is the
ability to hold on to an enduring representation as against an image or
working map of one's environment which, for example, almost all
animals develop to some degree. Thus, at approximately eight months of
age, the infant can keep the mother in mind, even though she is out of the
room, and also clearly recognise her. The infant thus has a working and
largely perceptually or sensed-based map of important objects in the worldout-there. However, at approximately eighteen months the infant acquires
language and can think (and have fantasies) about the (M)other in contradistinction to any experience he has had with her. Some psychoanalytic
writers here refer to 'internal objects' but the question is: What can these
be if not symbolic constructs or pieces of language? As Jones (1993) puts it,
'Simply stated, internal objects must refer to our first concepts, the infant's
first attempts to categorise and conceptualise what is important in his
world', which are ...
... certainly not the infant's first experience with relationships
... Unfortunately, the term object relations is routinely used
to describe both the relationship between the subject and
another person and the symbolic encoding of this
relationship, thus blurring the distinction between the two. 54
53
85
On this view, as the baby grows and acquires greater degrees of competence
or immersion in language, its initial emotional states are increasingly
refined by cognitions, or mental contents constructed on the basis of this
encounter with language which, of course, has to some degree an
accidental character. Indeed, it is this very accidental character in the
subject's symbolic structure that can lead to the formation of symptoms as
Leader and Groves somewhat amusingly illustrate in their description of a
subject who banged her head each morning on waking on the basis of an
identification with her father, described frequently in the mother's speech
in terms of 'he woke up on the wrong side of the bed' - a symptom which
disappeared when linked to the mother's oft repeated phrase. 55 The
approach I am outlining also emphasises the way incongruent affects
should be, and sometimes are, understood within psychoanalysis. The
point here is not cathartic release nor is the task of the analyst affective
elaboration, which is strictly a non-analytic approach, rather the analyst
faced with, say, a phobia, should in some way ask what the subject is really
afraid of, thus making a link to unconscious objects, constructs, and
ultimately language. In a similar way the analyst, when faced with the
affective control of the obsessional, may speculate on the terror of evertempting transgressions, or when faced with delusions of being watched
and observed, consider the workings of a vigilant and self-punishing super
ego. In each case, the apparent incongruity is something that in the
progress of an analysis loses its character. As I noted earlier in this paper,
Freud, and later Lacan, insisted that affects are not repressed but are rather
displaced, inverted, metabolised, etc., and so one can pose the question of
how to account for this. Freud, in his paper The Neuro-Psychoses of
Defense, notes how the ego cannot eradicate the affect but nevertheless
can, in its defensive attitude, reach an approximate fulfilment of this task
if it succeeds in turning a ...
... powerful idea into a weak one (therefore) robbing it of the
affect - the sum of excitation - with which it is loaded. The
weak idea will then have virtually no demands to make on
55
D. Leader & J. Groves. Lacan for Beginners. Cambridge, Icon Books, 1995. p. 52.
86
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Now not all language use is like this but as Cavell points out, it is virtually
impossible to deny that within this language, there is present a sort of
'thick description' of a scene where the emotions are, if not present, then
imminent and only awaiting a more fine-grained description for their
arrival.
At this point, it is time to pose the question concerning what is
sometimes referred to as the emotional life of the infant (or, indeed, other
sentient creatures) prior to language and following on from there, to
finally address the question of anxiety - namely, is anxiety an emotion?
The argument so far has been that emotions are subjective
phenomena, they belong to a subject and the subject is, and comes into
being, as a subject of language. To speak of a subject (or self) prior to
language simply makes no sense from this view point, though this has not
prevented many writers from doing just this. Thus, for example, Stern in
The Interpersonal World of the Infant writes:
It is a basic assumption of the work that some senses of the
self do exist long prior to self-awareness and language. These
include the senses of agency, of physical cohesion, of
continuity in time, of having intentions in the mind, and
other such experiences we will soon discuss. Self-reflection
and language come to work upon these pre-verbal existential
senses of the self, and in so doing transform them into new
experiences. If we assume that some pre-verbal senses of the
self start to form at birth (if not before) while others require
the motivation of later-appearing capacities before they can
emerge, then we are freed from the partially semantic task of
choosing criteria to decide a priori when a sense of self really
begins. 58
However, as Jones points out, Stern simply assumes here that a
sense of self begins at birth and thus confuses biological capacity with the
58
D. Stern. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York, Basic Books, 1985. p. 6.
88
nature of a subject.59 All sentient species who can pay attention to their
environment, which includes all mammals as well as fish, birds and
reptiles, have the capacities Stern outlines. For example, they can control
their bodies in a display of agency, make perceptual discriminations
concerning their body and their environment, demonstrating selfcoherence, and they have the ability to record their experiences in
memory and learn from them in a way that demonstrates continuity of
form. But this hardly implies that one's dog or cat is a subject, or possesses
subjectivity and can think 'thoughts', though it does confirm the point
that living organisms are complexly organised and necessarily have the
capacity for some form of biological self-regulation. What then are we to
make of the obvious capacities of the human infant prior to the acquisition
of language? Clearly, infants as well as animals are from birth capable of
paying attention and noticing various aspects of their environment
through information gained from the senses. They also begin to construct
a working map of their environment that with time includes, in our case,
the infant itself as well as significant others and important aspects of the
inanimate environment. To understand these capacities we do not,
however, have to postulate the workings of a mind or subject capable of
representation existing in a sense behind the infant's behaviour. On
seeing that a baby is attending to something or signalling that it is hungry
it is easy to place a subject at the centre of that experience, yet what we need
to recognise is that it is not the baby's ego or self that is somehow
orchestrating this behaviour, rather there is just the-baby-acting-in-thisway on the basis of particular internal or external influences or stimuli. In
other words, the baby (or an animal) functions presymbolically on the
model of an analogic machine rather than a symbolic subject. A mercury
thermometer is a good example of an analogic machine, the height of the
mercury column measures the temperature though clearly it does not
symbolise it. Thus, it can be seen how the baby, for example, can have
available a continuous reading of its bodily states (for example, level of
hunger) which moves it to alter or not that state which, however, does not
require inner symbolic representations but merely sensing capacities.
Similarly, if an animal is confronted with two competing motivational
59
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word (that is, outside symbolisation) and, therefore, for Lacan, linked to
one sense of what he means by jouissance (and to Freud's libido) - the
purpose for the human subject being to limit the effects of such jouissance
in the name of subjectivity, the total failure of which leads to psychosis
and the failure to inhabit language, (rather than inhabiting language the
psychotic is possessed by language). The infant, of course, also quickly
develops and becomes more proficient within its environment, which
includes the development of new biobehavioural capacities, (for example,
social smiling at approximately eight weeks) though such developments
prior to the acquisition of language need to be seen as examples of
increasing effectiveness in how the infant processes various signals either
in terms of its interior states or from the environment; it does not alter
the fact that what is being processed remains data linked to perception
(or images) and not symbolic representations. The acquisition by the baby
at about six months of what Piaget and Inhelder termed 'object
permanence', 62 which means that the infant relates to objects existing
independently of the infant's perception of the object, allows the infant to
develop a basic map of its environment (similar to an animal's
appreciation of its environment - which can, of course, equate with a vast
amount of know-how). Though again it is important to keep in mind that
a capacity to revive stored perceptions, form schemas of the environment,
and even discriminate between them is not the same thing as having
beliefs about the environment, the latter being possible only on the basis of
language. In finishing this section, I think we can now make a number of
points, powerfully supportive of Lacan's theorising on psychoanalysis.
Firstly, we can see how language gives birth not just to the subject but, as
Lacan argues, to the unconscious itself insofar as prior to language, no
symbolic representation is at all possible - the unconscious is thus not
some primary and natural given. This, however, does not mean that
prereflective experience is not significant for the human but rather that the
infant's experience, motivational states, and stable behavioural patterns
are retroactively encoded into fantasies when the ability to symbolise
emerges. Lichtenberg - though I would dispute particularly his use of the
word 'affects' - puts it neatly when he writes:
62
J. Piaget & B. Inhelder. The Psychology of the Child. New York, Basic Books, 1969.
91
J. Lichtenberg. Psychoanalysis and Infant Research. New Jersey, The Analytic Press,
1983. pp. 168-169.
64
J. Lacan. The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the T in Ecrits: a selection
(1966). Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Tavistock, 1977.
65
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and the
Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaseli. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1988. p. 210.
66
And let's face it, not just charming but gorgeous, beautiful, delightful creatures who
moreover always pose to us that intriguing question of our origins, etc.
92
93
ibid.
72
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII. The Transference and its Subjective
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