Lacan said that we need psychoanalysts to survive the real[1]. We have science, but the problem is that it decided to plant its roots in a constancy observable in the universe where things have a fixed place. This observation serves the discovery of scientific laws that require the reliability of this constancy in the real.
Two problems:
- The universe is not the cosmos which concerns a whole in which potentially all is knowable, whilst the former concerns a hole as the universe is unlimited and not all-knowable[2].
- Laws based on the universe may not apply to a limited earth[3].
Certainly, these laws are impotent with regards to this other real, the real of the speaking being that causes anxiety. Why psychoanalysts? Analysis does not want to adapt the subject to the real to create harmony with it. This adaptation fails and leads to an endless repetition, an endless search for a truth as the real is outside discourse. There is commensurability between the scientific laws based on the endless universe and language conceived as an endless meaning-producing apparatus. However, language contains a hole and thus a limit. The orientation of psychoanalysis concerns a real that forms a limit, the singular real of the analysand at the end of analysis when the letter, as littoral between language and real, can be articulated and border this real through which the pressure of an endless search for meaning can be reduced.
What kind of psychoanalyst? Lacan wonders whether gadgets will become dominant and says we will not reach a point in which gadgets are not symptoms[4]. Lacan indicates here that gadgets and symptoms overlap, and they are different. Gadgets are made because they provide satisfaction and their increasing supply to the market leads to an increase in demand and, thus they do well as objects of consumption and profit. Would symptoms do well on the free market? Symptoms contain jouissance, but in a form that is burdensome. The symptom is the answer of the real, it is a parasite and when gadgets will function as symptoms it means that they will also parasite us. Gadgets have the power to free jouissance, are made for our comfort, yet cause anguish, because we become dependent on them. Symptoms and gadgets are commensurate because we often respond to this anguish with repeating the use of the latter to calm us. This is not the solution of psychoanalysis.
So, what kind of psychoanalyst? Lacan, “[someone] who has gone far enough into the realization of his desire to be able to integrate it back into […] what is irreducible into its cause”[5]; or Jacque-Alain Miller, “the father that we now call the Analyst of the School”[6]; Éric Laurent: “One can manage without the father as guarantee of meaning providing one finds something similar that allows one to say no – an analyst – not to bring one to a point of adaptation, but to a knowledge that once something is unbearable one can say no, beyond conformism, identification, and any form of interest that the father once used to have.”[7]
References from the author :
[1] Lacan J., « Du discours psychanalytique, Conférence à Milan », Lacan en Italie, 1963-1978, Milano, La Salamandre, 1978, p. 106.
[2] Miller J.-A., « The Pass of Psychoanalysis towards Science: The Desire for Knowledge », The Lacanian review, 7, 2019, p. 75.
[3] Lacan J., « Du discours psychanalytique… », op. cit.
[4] Lacan J., « The Third », The Lacanian Review, 7, 1974, p. 108.
[5] Lacan J., Le Séminaire, book X, Anxiety, est. J.-A. Miller (trans. A. R. Price), Cambridge: Polity, 2014, p. 337.
[6] Miller J.-A., Objects a in the analytic experience, 2008, available online: www.lacan.com/LacanianCompass9miller.htm.
[7] Laurent É., « Les Nouveaux Symptômes et les autres », La Lettre mensuelle, 1997, p. 40.
Picture : © Ambre Reddman
