Lacanian Approach to Problems of Affect and Anxiety in Psychoanalysis.pdf

7/25/2019 Lacanian Approach to Problems of Affect and Anxiety in Psychoanalysis.pdf

1/30

LACANIAN APPROACH TO PROBLEMS OF AFFECTAND ANXIETY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Alan Rowan

The system of language at whichever point you take hold of itnever results in an index finger directly indicating a point ofreality, it's the whole of reality that is covered by the entirenetwork of language.

1

It has become common among psychoanalytic writers both criticaand sympathetic to Lacan who are not themselves Lacanians to criticis

Lacan for ignoring the role and place of affect in his theorising. ThuKennedy in a co-authored work on Lacan states that 'unlike many othepost-Freudian analysts, he (Lacan) gave little place to any theory of theaffects, or feelings, and the importance of pre-verbal structures. Thesomissions may seem to represent a denial of much analytic experience'and he adds 'it is for this reason his work can seem over-intellectual'.Similarly, Green makes the point that 'with the exception of Lacan nomodern psychoanalytic theory underestimates the importance of affects'while Smith in his epilogue to Interpreting Lacan writes 'Green'formulations ... like the Kristeva and Vergote chapters goes towardcorrecting the inattention to affect in Lacan'.5 Indeed, it could well beargued that Lacanians themselves have by and large not taken up Lacan'

1J. 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, Fre

Association Books, 1986. p. 117.3ibid, p. 168.

4

A. Green. 'BJB/Freud Museum Conference: How do we think about Feelings?'inBritishJournal of Psychotherapy, 1995, 12, p. 2095 J.H. Smith & W. Kerrigan. Interpreting Lacan. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983

p. 268.

67


2/30

call to produce an 'intellectual accounting' for the affects and one purposetherefore, of this paper is to raise debate in just this area.

Lacan, however, adamantly disputed this representation of his workwhich 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 thesignifier. Thus, in Seminar I he writes of:

the ambiguity that always dogs us concerning the notoriousopposition between the intellectual and the affective - as if theaffective were a sort of colouration, a kind of ineffable qualitywhich must be sought out in itself, independently of theeviscerated skin which the purely intellectual realisation of asubject's relationship would consist in. This conception

which urges analysts down strange paths is puerile. Theslightest, even strange feeling, that the subject professes to inthe text of the session is taken to be a spectacular success.

6

In Seminar III Lacan, commenting on the inadequacy of any theoryof affects in psychoanalysis up to that point, offers what he terms aworking hypothesis around affects taking anger as a case in point. Hewrites:

anger is no doubt a passion which is manifested by means ofan organic or physiological correlative, by a given more orless hypertonic or even elated feeling, but that it requiresperhaps something like the reaction of a subject to adisappointment, to the failure of an expected correlationbetween a symbolic order and the response of the real. Inother words, anger is essentially linked to somethingexpressed in a formulation of Charles Peguy's, who wasspeaking 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, 1953-54Trans. J. Forrester. Cambridge, C.U.P., 1988, p. 57.7 J. Lacan. op.cit., p. 103.

68


3/30

On this view, which I will come back to, Lacan has already linked affects tsubjectivity and he goes on to note, for example, the absence of anger adefined above in most animal species. Indeed, in Seminar X Lacan returnto this precise example concerning anger while classifying as 'absurd' th

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 inits immediacy, nor is it the subject in some sort of raw form.It is not, to say the word, protopathetic in any case. Myoccasional remarks on affect mean nothing more than this.And that is precisely why it has a close structural relationshipwith what is, even traditionally a subject ... What on thecontrary 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 thesignifiers which moor it.8

It is in this Seminar devoted to nothing other than an extensive study of key affect, namely anxiety, that Lacan is also clear that anxiety must be seenprecisely as an affect, albeit an affect with particular status CI am far fromrefusing to insert the central object of anxiety into the catalogue oaffects'9), and he is moreover critical of the impasses reached in the worof psychoanalysts such as Rappaport10 which arrived, he claims, at a mercataloguing of affects or psychoanalytic theories of affect with no reaprogress in understanding. A further Lacanian reference point iapproaching the problem of affects in psychoanalysis is found i

8 J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X. Anxiety, 1962-63. Trans. C. Gallaghe

(unpublished).9 ibid.10 D. Rappaport. 'On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Affects1in The Collected Papers o

David Rappaport,1967. Ed. M. Gill. New York, Basic Books.

69


4/30

Television. Lacan here comments again on his 'supposed neglect oaffect'.

11 He writes:

I just want an answer on this point: does an affect have to do

with the body? A discharge of adrenaline - is that body ornot? It upsets its functions, true. But what is there in it thatmakes it come from the soul? What it discharges isthought.

12

Citing Freud's 1915 paper on repression, Lacan points out that affecis displaced but that this displacement must be appreciated as adisplacement of the subject through a representation - what is displaced hesays is the structure (of the affect) insofar as it is linked to the signifier. In

this text Lacan is clear, language and affect cannot be seen as independenentities, rather, 'affect befalls a body whose essence it is said, is to dwell inlanguage ... befalls it on account of it not finding dwelling-room, at leastnot to its taste. This we call moroseness or equally moodiness' .

13 He adds

'Is this a sin, a grain of madness, or a true touch of the real?'.14

By sodoing, Lacan hints at the fact that affects in some way also have adimension to them beyond the signifying structures of language and inrelation to the real, which for Lacan is that 'which never ceases being notwritten"15 and which represents for the subject the pre-symbolic, or after

the subject's immersion in language the ultimately traumatic impassesand impossibilities within the symbolic order itself. Two final pointsarising from this text deserve highlighting. Firstly, Lacan is insistent thataffects have an object and that anxiety which he claims some psychologistshave seen as objectless (compared to fear which is said to have an object)does have an object which he calls object a or little a. (This will beelaborated on later in this paper). Secondly, Lacan offers another specific

11 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.

70


5/30

example of an affect, this time 'sadness - as - depression' which he says not a state of the soul but is ultimately 'located only in relation tthought'.16 It is, he claims, a moral failing or weakness in the subject bwhich he means a failure to act on one's desire which, as he argued in hiseminar on ethics, is the only ethical dimension that psychoanalysis ca

lay claim to work in.At this point in the paper however, I propose to make a detour t

examine more generally the major theories of affect before returning tpsychoanalysis and to Lacan while remaining nonetheless in tune witLacan who states 'the affective is not like a special destiny which woulescape an intellectual accounting'.17

What Lyons calls 'the feeling theory'18 of emotions has in Descarteits most influential exponent. Descartes in his work The Passions of thSoul sees passions as belonging to the soul and as 'kinds of perception o

forms of knowledge which are found in us'.

19

His account of how thearise is as follows. Firstly, there is a perception of some object, say, aanimal, which is transmitted to the soul via the pineal gland. Once in thsoul, this perception is compared to previous ones and if it has a closrelationship with formerly frightening or joyful experiences, then thileads directly to a bodily reaction such as, for example, fear which is thawareness of a force (or 'animal spirit') in the body disposing us to flighTo take flight, however, is for Descartes not the actual passion, as this is desire of the soul aimed at moving the body in some way - the passion ipurely the commotions going on in the body and as such, a speciaperception of the soul. It is for a similar reason that what could be seen athe subject's evaluation or judgement of the perception is no part of thpassion itself though indeed, as Lyons points out, Descartes did come closto offering a sequential and causal theory of the emotions. He washowever, prevented from doing so by his preconceived idea that what waimportant to human beings had to belong in man's soul and could not b

16J. Lacan. op.cit, p. 22.17

J. Lacan. op.cit , (Seminar I) p. 57.18 W. Lyons. Emotion. Cambridge, C.U.P., 1980.19

R. Descartes. 'Passions of the Soul'inThe Philosophical Works of Descartes. Trans. E.SHaldene & G.R.T. Ross. Universities Press, 1968.

71


6/30


7/30

activities. Indeed, William James, an arch Cartesian, brought toprominence a modern version of this Cartesian doctrine at the turn of thecentury, through the so-called James-Lange theory, which he outlined asfollows:

... bodily changes follow directly the perception of the existingfact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur ISthe emotion ... Common-sense says we lose our fortune, aresorry and weep ... The hypothesis here to be defended says ...that we feel sorry because we cry.23

James hereby took Descartes' feelings out of the soul and put it into thepurely bodily area which did have certain advantages, such as enablinghim to say that if the cortex is electrically stimulated and produces rage

then this is a fully fledged emotional experience for the subject. Howeverthis theory suffers all the defects of the above Cartesian one. Moreoverexperimental science has consistently failed to distinguish emotions on aphysiological basis, (for example, see the work of Schacter24, Schacter andSinger25 or for a view that does see some progress being made in this areaAx*>).

A second approach to affects that has had considerable influenceand was an outgrowth of so-called scientific psychology is thebehavioural one which sought to reduce affects to specific behaviourapatterns. Watson27 championed this approach in the early 1900s byattempting to delineate - initially in infants - such universal behaviouralpatterns which he saw as hereditary in response to particular stimulus

23 W. James. Principles of Psychology, Volume II. New York, Henry Holt and Co., 1870. pp449-50.24

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 emotionalstate'inPsychological Review,1962, 69, pp. 379-399.26 A.F. Ax. 'The Physiological differentiation between Fear and Anger in humans'inPsychosomatic Medicine,1971, 15, pp. 433-442.27 J. Watson. Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. Philadelphia, LippincoPress, 1919.

73


8/30

conditions. In this task he was building on Darwin's The Expression ofEmotions in Man and Animals28 in which Darwin attempted to defineemotions in terms of adaptive behavioural responses that originally had adistinct survival value for the species. Thus Darwin saw disgust as

originating from a response to a bad or foul taste and the characteristicfacial expressions associated with disgust, (for example, mouth openpartial closure of the eyelids, etc.), as movements identical with thosepreparatory to the act of vomiting. However, Watson was unable to makehis case even to his own satisfaction for he was obliged to accept that onceone considered an adult example of an emotion, one had also to accept thatthe hereditary pattern became diffuse and broken-up which meant thatstereotypical behaviours could not be used to identify particular emotions!One possible way of resolving this was to look to the stimulus conditions

as being the constant factor that allows us to classify particular affects oremotions. However, here, once again, Watson faced an impasse whichrelated to the fact that similar situations clearly caused differentbehavioural patterns to arise in different subjects, (for example, oneperson's reaction to a parachute jump or dog may be very different toanother's), and by virtue of his own theoretical position he was barredfrom appealing to differences in the 'unobservable beliefs' of particularsubjects. B.F. Skinner attempted to find a way out of this impasse bymaintaining that while emotions like anger predispose the subject to

actions of a particular type, the particular behaviour displayed will be whatis operantly reinforced in particular situations.

29 The difficulty here is that

while an angry man may pick a fight, raise his voice, pound the table, etc.,he also may not, and on this view it is simply impossible to find a list ofbehavioural items, some or all of which must be present if the behaviourin question is to be dubbed angry, and thus one is stuck with a circulardefinition. The most compelling evidence for this theoretical approachis that experimental research has demonstrated that most people,regardless of culture, agree on the meaning of certain characteristic

human expressions such as sorrow, surprise, and rage. The problem

28 C. Darwin. The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.New York, PhilosophicalLibrary, 1872.29 B.F. Skinner. About Behaviourism. New York, Prentice-Hall, 1974.

74


9/30

however is that there are also exceptions to these findings and thisalongside other problems with this approach, has led some researchertowards a further theory, namely the so-called Constructionist theorwhich offers I believe a far stronger theoretical account of emotion thathe previous two approaches.

The constructionist approach is one that puts the emphasis on thmeaning or cognitive content of an emotion, though in a form that is nonarrowly cognitivist insofar as it also highlights the need to understanthe social context in which a particular emotion can be expressed. It thesays two things about emotions. Firstly, that they have cognitive contenand are therefore not some form of 'natural stirrings' but constructrelated to beliefs or judgements about the world in such a way that thremoval of the relevant belief will remove not only the reason for themotion but the emotion itself. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, was the firs

exponent of this view and argued, for example, that the belief that one habeen wronged is in some way essential to the experience of the emotionanger. This implies that if one discovers that one's belief is false - that thobject of one's anger did not in fact exist - then one will cease to experiencthe emotion. It also means that emotions are subject to rat ionaevaluation for insofar as an emotion is based on a false or irrational beliefthen the ensuing emotion can itself be judged as false or irrational giventhe actual circumstances the subject finds him or herself in. The claim thasome emotions do not appear to be related to particular beliefs oevaluative judgements, for example, in cases of apprehensiveness o'objectless' fear, is countered by pointing to embedded beliefs the subjechas in the situation, such as a belief concerning one's experience ohelplessness in that particular situation or else a belief concerning whacould happen to one rather than a belief concerning what was in fachappening. This theory is still, however, open to a number of objectionsnot the least of them being that it is unclear how one mighindependently identify the reasonableness of particular emotions whichfor example, cannot be done in the form of a mathematical or logical proofIt is at this point that the second aspect of this theory becomes prominen

and indeed strengthens it. The argument is that emotions gain theimeaning in complex patterns of cultural relationship and indeed are

75


10/30

constitutive of particular forms of social life. Thus, emotions are seen aslearned by the child through exposure to his or her familial and socialenvironment in which, as Nussbaum puts it, 'these beliefs and the relatedemotions are housed'.

30 On this view emotions, as embodied expressions

of judgement, which may or may not also be ways of accomplishing certainsocial acts, would be expected to vary historically and culturally, which isindeed the case. Thus, Indo-Europeans have no emotion similar to whatthe Japanese call amae which expresses something like a state of sweetemotional dependency towards another adult while as Averill hasdemonstrated, what in the Western World would be termed a display ofhostility is an emotional pattern that is absent in many cultures. 31

Similarly, Lutz in her study of the Ifaluk people has shown how it isimpossible to achieve any one-to-one translation of emotional terms

between English and Ifaluk, while other writers have documented radicalchanges in the meaning and use of emotional terms over time.

32 For

example, Stearns and Stearns have shown how anger in the beginning ofthe eighteenth century referred to a public display of outrage and had nopersonal reference to inner feelings as part of its meaning while ourmodern and frequent use of words like depression, burnout, and stresswould have puzzled our forefathers of even a hundred years ago.

33 Clearly

there are some problem areas faced by such a theory, particularlyconcerning the status of the so-called irrational emotions and the related

problems of relativism given the existence of different culturallyinfluenced emotional 'sets' or capacities which, in turn, gives rise to thequestion of whether some sets of emotions have a greater capacity tocontribute to human flourishing than others, (see Nussbaum

34 for a

discussion of these issues). Nevertheless, I believe this theory issubstantially correct and does not have the obvious weaknesses of the two

30M. Nussbaum.Love's Knowledge. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990. p. 293.31 J. Averill. Anger and Agression: An Essay on Emotion. New York, Springer-Verlag, 1982.32 C. Lutz. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments of the Micronesian Atoll and theirChallenge to Western Theory. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988.33 C.Z. Sterns & P.N. Sterns. Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's

History. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986.34 M. Nussbaum. op.cit.

76


11/30

approaches I outlined earlier. The interesting questions I would like pose now are: in what ways might this theory be compatible witpsychoanalysis, and in particular with Lacan's theorising, and secondly, the latter capable of developing or enriching this account in a meaningfuway. At this point let us turn to psycho-analysis with a hopefull

deepened understanding of the various issues and dilemmas one faces ithinking about and accounting for affects.

Freud's earliest accounts of affects sees them very much aphysiological processes or processes of discharge (and therefore similar tthe James-Lange viewpoint), the final expression of which is perceived afeeling. Thus, in his first major paper on anxiety, namely On the ground

for detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under thdescription of anxiety neurosis,35 Freud outlines a theory of anxiety atransformed libido. On this view there is a direct transfer of embodie

sexual energy - a 'quota of affect' - which is denied access to psychirepresentation into the somatic symptoms of anxiety which means thaanxiety is fundamentally a biological process, though one which hapsychical consequences. However, Freud was also aware that this accounof anxiety did little to explain the psychoneuroses, (for example, hysteriaobsessionality, etc.), where symptoms arose on the basis of repression ancontained within them traumatic memories and blocked affects. There is tension, therefore, between Freud's view of affect as arising fundamentallas an excessive and disorganising factor in the psychic apparatus versus hiseeing affects as essentially linked to ideas, beliefs or fantasies that thsubject holds. This latter viewpoint is obvious, for example, in Freuddescriptions in the Rat Man case; he writes:

... between an affect and its ideational content, (in thisinstance between the intensity of his patients' self-reproachand the occasion for it), a layman will say that the affect is toogreat for the occasion - that it is exaggerated - and thatconsequently the inference following from the self-reproach,(the inference that the patient is a criminal), is false. On the

35S. Freud. On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia undethe Description of Anxiety Neurosis. S.E., I.

77


12/30

contrary, the (analytic) physician says: No. The affect isjustified. The sense of guilt is not in itself open to furthercriticism. But it belongs to some other content which isunknown (unconscious) and which requires to be lookedfor.3*

Here unconscious ideas are clearly held to explain the emotion and inso doing, to establish its appropriateness or rationability for that particularsubject. Nevertheless as Cavell notes,37 Freud continued in his belief that:

the release of emotion and the ideational link do notconstitute the indissoluble organic unity ... but that these twoseparate entities may be merely soldered together and canthus be detached from each other by analysis.38

This position, which implies that the respective destinies ofrepresentations and affects are different, is evident in Freud's paper on

Repression where he writes:

If a repression does not succeed in preventing feelings ofunpleasure or anxiety from arising, we may say that it has

failed even though it may have achieved its purpose as far asthe ideational portion is concerned.39

In the same year, Freud wrote his paper The Unconscious and inthis he defines affects in the following way: 'affects and emotionscorrespond to processes of discharge, the final manifestation of which areperceived as feelings'40 and thereby assigns affects a secondary orderivative role arising as a consequence of a blocked action. He also insists

36 S. Freud. Notes upon a case of Obsessional Neurosis. S.E., X, pp. 175-176.37 M. Cavell. The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. Harvard, HarvardUniversity Press, 1993.38 S. Freud.The Unconscious.S.E., XIV.39 S. Freud.Repression. S.E., XIV, p. 153.40 S. Freud.The Unconscious.S.E., XIV, p. 178.

78


13/30

at this point, contrary to his earlier formulations concerning, for examplthe possibility of unconscious guilt, that there could be no such thing aunconscious affects, as affects, by their very nature, had to be conscious anexperienced by the person having the emotion. What exists in thunconscious is, therefore, something like dispositions or prowesses t

have certain feelings which only come into being at the point at whicsuch dispositions are linked up to a conscious representation. However, iThe Ego and Id,*1 Freud suggests that this link does not involve thpreconscious system but is more like an internal perception linkinconscious and unconscious directly which emphasises, according tGreen,42 that there exists an essential difference between affect and verbarepresentation with the former being an elementary form of sensation anone which has moreover a different mode of existence in the unconsciouwhich, of course, also thus re-introduces the idea of an unconsciou

modality for affect. In 1926, Freud suggests a further modification to htheory which, as Green notes, both reduces the gulf between thought ananxiety while simultaneously holding on to the idea that anxiety can causa traumatic flooding of the ego (now seen as the seat of anxiety) anthus act as a disrupter of all thought processes. Freud describes thformer process as follows:

The ego notices that the satisfaction of an emerginginstinctual demand would conjure up one of the wellremembered situations of danger. This instinctual cathexismust, therefore, be somehow suppressed, stopped, madepowerless. We know that the ego succeeds in this task if it isstrong and has drawn the instinctual impulse concerned intoits organisation. But what happens in the case of repression isthat the instinctual impulse still belongs to the id and the egofeels weak. The ego therefore helps itself by a techniquewhich is at bottom, identical with normal thinking.Thinking is an experimental action carried out with small

41 S. Freud. The Ego and Id. S.E., XIX, p. 186.42 A. Green. (1977), On Private Madness. London, Hogarth Press and the Insti tute oPsychoanalysis, 1986.

79


14/30

amounts of energy in the same way as a General shifts smallfigures about on a map before setting his large bodies of troopsin motion. Thus, the ego anticipates the satisfaction of a

questionable instinctual impulse and permits it to bringabout the reproduction of the unpleasurable feelings at thebeginning of the feared situation of danger. With this, theautomatism of the pleasure-unpleasure principle is broughtinto operation and now carries out the repression of thedangerous instinctual impulse.

43

At this point, and accepting that this review of Freud's thinking onaffects and anxiety provides more of a sketch than a comprehensive

review of his work, I think it is evident that Freud did not so muchpresent a coherent theory of affects but rather held a number of, at timesincompatible hypotheses which he went about changing throughout hiswork as his theory developed and as he attempted to clear up variouscontradictions and problems within it. What I now wish to suggest is thata coherent theory of affects is available to psychoanalysis, though only onthe basis of a thorough going privileging of the signifier combined with anunderstanding of the essentially linguistic nature of subjectivity. Byimplication, I will be arguing against writers such as Green. Green, for

example, argues that affects are colourings within psychic life or puretransformational forces over which we have little control. He states theyoperate in distinction from, and prior to, representation and can invade ordiffuse over any or all parts of an individual psyche and insofar as theyaccompany, define, qualify, and connote mental states, can only beinhibited or mastered but do not change in their structure

44 - an approach

which ultimately I would suggest lends emotion a mystical aura andmoreover is subject to most of the flaws earlier associated with a Cartesianreading of emotion.

To illustrate the profound impact of thought on the human being,something that indeed fundamentally creates a subject, I will shortly take adetailed quote from Helen Keller's autobiographical study entitled The

43 S. Freud.New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. S.E., XXII, pp. 121-12244 A. Green, op.cit, p. 211

80


15/30

Story of my Life. Firstly, however, it is worth noting how Lacanreferences to the subject are dominated by this very emphasis on speakingThe subject is for Lacan essentially a speaking being (parletre), 'what in thdevelopment of objectivation, is outside of the object',45 which he latedefines as that which is represented by a signifier for another signifier - i

other words, the subject is for Lacan an Effect of language. Now foKeller's description of her experience:

One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivanput my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled 'D-OL-L' andtried to make me understand that 'D-O-L-L' applied to both.Earlier in the day we had a tussle over the words 'M-U-G' and'W-A-T-E-R'. Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon methat 'M-U-G' is mug and that 'W-A-T-E-R' is water, but I

persisted in compounding the two. In despair she haddropped the subject for the time being, only to renew it at thefirst opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attemptsand, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I waskeenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken dollat my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionateoutburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world inwhich I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness.

She brought me my hat and I knew I was going outinto the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordlesssensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skipwith pleasure. We walked down the path to the well-house,attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which itwas covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacherplaced my hand under the spout.

As the cool stream gushed over my hand, she spelledinto the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. Istood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of herfingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness, as of

something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought; and

45J. Lacan. op.cit, p. 194. (Seminar I).

81


16/30

somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. Iknew that 'W-A-T-E-R' meant the wonderful cool somethingthat was flowing over my hand. The living word awakenedmy soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There werebarriers still, it is true, but barriers that would in time beswept away. I left the well-house eager to learn. Everythinghad a name and each new name gave birth to a new thought.As we returned to the house, every object which I touchedseemed to quiver with life. That was because I saweverything with the strange new sight that had come to me.On entering the door, I remembered the doll I had broken. Ifelt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried

vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears,for I realised what I had done, and for the first time I feltrepentance and sorrow.

46

This is a rare and rich description and I will unpack it in a number ofpoints. Firstly, as Hobson notes, Helen's reaction to her teacher bringingher hat - she hops and skips - is a pleasurable reaction to a sign or signathat is clearly non-linguistic in form and is rather like a dog frisking its taiwhen the owner produces the dog's lead.

47 Secondly, we see the power o

naming. As Helen puts it, 'everything had a name and each name gavebirth to a new thought'. Helen, with words, could now draw lines throughwhat was previously a flux of experience. The word 'water' offers Helennot a simple one-to-one correspondence with a cool something but is aconstruction of her experience, a conception of an object is formed whichpoints beyond it, the importance of which she illustrates by the powerfumetaphor of sight. For Helen, language brings power and meaningsmaking every object 'quiver with life'. Thirdly, and perhaps mosimportantly in the present context, we see Helen assuming a subjective

identity through language. Emotions or 'strong sentiments' emerge now loss and sorrow - and Helen becomes a subject that experiencesretroactively, apprehends herself as experiencing sadness or remorse

46 H.Keller.The Story of My Life.New Jersey, Doubleday, 1954. pp. 35-37.47 R. Hobson.Forms of Feeling.London, Tavistock Publications, 1985.

82


17/30

This naming is what allows the human being to move from the concretthe realm of perception, sensations, objects and images, to the world oconcepts, which can then be manipulated through thinking. Interestinglywe can see here, at least in outline, a further proof of Lacan's thesis that thpunctuation that allows the signifier to take on a meaning occurs bot

through the intervention of another and from the locus of the Othe(language) within a retroactive effect of temporality. It is perhapimportant to note here that the capacity for language is independent of thprocess of interpretation (the deaf can and do 'speak' a language) which iagain consonant with Lacan's view that the symptom or, for example, thso-called 'Freudian slip' is, in fact, 'a successful, not to say well tunediscourse'.

48 One can ask more here about the elements of language an

how they are acquired. Lacan argues that language comes to the speakinbeing more or less as a whole which means that...

... the particular effects of this or that element of language (lalangue) are bound up with the existence of this totalensemble, anterior to any possible link with any particularexperience of the subject. Thus to consider this latterparticular link independently of any reference to the first issimply to deny in this element the function proper tolanguage (la langue)49

We can see this concretely in how children develop language, for wordare already generalisations for the child (for example, names only slowlacquire specificity), and reflect reality in quite another way than perceptioand sensation, the latter being presymbolic until the point that they tooare, in a sense, taken up in language. Lacan is explicit on this point anlike Freud gives us reason to recognise the special importance to languagdevelopment of the ability to code the real according to the categories oyes/no, affirmation/negation. He asks what makes the symbol intlanguage and states:

48 J. Lacan.Ecrits: a selection(1966). Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Tavistock, 1977. p. 58.

49 ibid, pp. 63-64.

83


18/30

In order for the symbolic object freed from its usage to becomethe word freed from the Hie et nunc, the difference residesnot 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 theplay of the child, and from this pair of sounds modulated onpresence and absence ... there is born the world of meaning ofa particular language in which the world of things will cometo be arranged.

50

This explains Lacan's emphasis on Freud's 'FORT! DA!' game whereFreud describes the child's 'great cultural achievement - the instinctualrenunciation', - that allows the child to substitute in place of his mother'sdisappearance a rudimentary form of language that frees the child fromthe immediacy of the situation. For Lacan, language is a radical othernessat the core of the subject. 'Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbolhas 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 theinfant,52

there is now the emergence of sadness which is related to theability of the infant to grasp the notion of loss in relation to this object. It isimportant , however, to highlight two points here. Firstly, we mustrecognise that emotions are necessarily grounded in pleasure and pain andas Cavell - shadowing Lacan - insists, in some form of wanting or demandprior 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. 65.51 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.

84


19/30

learned to tie her shoelace, grateful for the favour done. Onlya creature who can experience pain can feel ashamed of hisrude remark, or sad because he's going away ... it is pleasure,pain and volition that become articulated in an endlessnumber of ways by cognitions and beliefs.53

Secondly, if we are not to descend into confusion at this point, we musdefine what the word 'object' implies. In doing this, we need to first maka distinction between the different uses of the word 'representation'. IEnglish this usually refers to an image or likeness and is linked tperception, whereas in the Freud Cartesian tradition the expression Viderepresentative is linked with symbolic capacity. In other words, it is thability to hold on to an enduring representation as against an image oworking map of one's environment which, for example, almost a

animals develop to some degree. Thus, at approximately eight months oage, the infant can keep the mother in mind, even though she is out of throom, and also clearly recognise her. The infant thus has a working anlargely perceptually or sensed-based map of important objects in the worldout-there. However, at approximately eighteen months the infant acquirelanguage and can think (and have fantasies) about the (M)other in contradistinction to any experience he has had with her. Some psychoanalytiwriters here refer to 'internal objects' but the question is: What can thesbe if not symbolic constructs or pieces of language? As Jones (1993) puts i'Simply stated, internal objects must refer to our first concepts, the infantfirst attempts to categorise and conceptualise what is important in hiworld', which are ...

... certainly not the infant's first experience with relationships

... Unfortunately, the term object relations is routinely usedto describe both the relationship between the subject andanother person and the symbolic encoding of thisrelationship, thus blurring the distinction between the two.54

53 M. Cavell. op.cit, p. 149.

54 J.M. Jones. Affects as Process: An Inquiry into the Centrality of Affect in PsychologicaLife. New Jersey, The Analytical Press, 1993. p. 190.

85


20/30


21/30

the work of association. But the sum of excitation which hasbeen detached from it must be put to another use ... Inhysteria, the incompatible idea is rendered innocuous by itssum of excitation being transformed into somethingsomatic.

56

Affects function, therefore, by being disassociated from their originideational content under certain conditions and re-associated with anothset of ideas that are in some way suitable for this operation, as can be sein Little Han's 'creation' of a fear of horses in place of an original fear othe 'castrating father'. My point here is that displaceable affects, far frobeing a random occurrence, depend on emotions having, in the first placan ideational content which both fits with the present theoreticelaboration and explains why animals and the pre-symbolic infant ca

only respond to concrete signals of danger which convey specifinformation, a point I will shortly come back to when considering whcan be said about affects prior to language acquisition. Firstly, though,would like to highlight a point made by Cavell, who argues that we munot restrict our understanding of a subject's emotions solely to his or huse of emotional terms. Rather, beliefs and desires which always functioin a context of related beliefs and desires - eventually, in the adult, formina vast signifying network or complex text - have to be seen as 'shthrough' with emotion. She cites Freud's account of the beginning of h

treatment of the Rat Man as an example. Freud writes:

He had a friend, he told me, of whom he had anextraordinarily high opinion. He used always to go to himwhen he was tormented by some criminal impulse, and askhim whether he despised him as a criminal. His friend usedthen to give him moral support by assuring him that he was aman of irreproachable conduct, and had probably been in thehabit, from his earliest youth onwards, of taking a dark view

of his own life.57

56 S. Freud. The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense. S.E., III, pp. 48-49.

57 S. Freud, S.E., X, p. 159.

87


22/30

Now not all language use is like this but as Cavell points out, it is virtuallyimpossible to deny that within this language, there is present a sort of'thick description' of a scene where the emotions are, if not present, thenimminent 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, othersentient creatures) prior to language and following on from there, tofinally address the question of anxiety - namely, is anxiety an emotion?

The argument so far has been that emotions are subjectivephenomena, they belong to a subject and the subject is, and comes intobeing, as a subject of language. To speak of a subject (or self) prior tolanguage simply makes no sense from this view point, though this has not

prevented many writers from doing just this. Thus, for example, Stern inThe Interpersonal World of the Infant writes:

It is a basic assumption of the work that some senses of theself do exist long prior to self-awareness and language. Theseinclude the senses of agency, of physical cohesion, ofcontinuity in time, of having intentions in the mind, andother such experiences we will soon discuss. Self-reflectionand language come to work upon these pre-verbal existential

senses of the self, and in so doing transform them into newexperiences. If we assume that some pre-verbal senses of theself start to form at birth (if not before) while others requirethe motivation of later-appearing capacities before they canemerge, then we are freed from the partially semantic task ofchoosing criteria to decide a priori when a sense of self reallybegins.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


23/30

nature of a subject.59 All sentient species who can pay attention to theenvironment, which includes all mammals as well as fish, birds anreptiles, have the capacities Stern outlines. For example, they can contrtheir bodies in a display of agency, make perceptual discriminationconcerning their body and their environment, demonstrating sel

coherence, and they have the ability to record their experiences memory and learn from them in a way that demonstrates continuity oform. But this hardly implies that one's dog or cat is a subject, or possessesubjectivity and can think 'thoughts', though it does confirm the pointhat living organisms are complexly organised and necessarily have thcapacity for some form of biological self-regulation. What then are we make of the obvious capacities of the human infant prior to the acquisitioof language? Clearly, infants as well as animals are from birth capable opaying attention and noticing various aspects of their environmen

through information gained from the senses. They also begin to construa working map of their environment that with time includes, in our casthe infant itself as well as significant others and important aspects of thinanimate environment. To understand these capacities we do nohowever, have to postulate the workings of a mind or subject capable orepresentation existing in a sense behind the infant's behaviour. Oseeing that a baby is attending to something or signalling that it is hungrit is easy to place a subject at the centre of that experience, yet what we neeto 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-thiway on the basis of particular internal or external influences or stimuli. Iother words, the baby (or an animal) functions presymbolically on thmodel of an analogic machine rather than a symbolic subject. A mercurthermometer is a good example of an analogic machine, the height of thmercury column measures the temperature though clearly it does nosymbolise it. Thus, it can be seen how the baby, for example, can havavailable a continuous reading of its bodily states (for example, level ohunger) which moves it to alter or not that state which, however, does no

require inner symbolic representations but merely sensing capacitieSimilarly, if an animal is confronted with two competing motivationa

59J.M. Jones, op.cit.

89


24/30

systems, (say, on the one hand, hunger which however, involveapproaching the carcass a dangerous animal is feeding on) what happendepends purely on the strength of the competing motivational systemsand the animal does not have the capacity to override these systems as alanguage-using subject would. To be motivated to act does not require

thought but merely a need and the know-how or behaviour required tomeet that need. Freud named these mechanisms devoted to bodily needthe 'instincts of self-preservation' which are what regulate ouphysiological and bodily requirements. With regard to movement, recenneuro-physiological research (see Pilbram60) confirms that motor activitydoes not occur on the basis of a prior internal representation particular tothe piece of motor behaviour, but that the motor cortex is itself a 'sensorycortex for action' which once motivated by a want or interest, makecontinuous and ongoing alterations of movement based on sensory

feedback in eventually achieving the 'know-how' necessary, say, for theinfant to pick up or touch a particular item. The infant on this view thucomes into the world with a certain amount of pre-programming (forexample, the ability to signal distress and discriminate pain from pleasure)and is capable of being in a number of different states, for example, sleepversus wakefulness. These states should be seen as fundamentallymotivational ones for the infant insofar as the infant will be motivated tocontinue, say, sucking if this is pleasurable, and to cry if it is hungry. Inaddition to these two states, Jones argues that two other states are presen

from birth, namely, interest, which will motivate the infant to explore hisworld,61 and is similar to Freud's notion of mastery, and surprise, whichhe sees as having its prototype in the startle response and represents amoment when the infant's attention is abruptly refocused. These statewhich are 'in the body' are not to be confused with affects and though theymay seem in some way similar to moods, if not to affects proper, there isliterally no way we can, for example, describe such prior-to-languageexperiences; they remain always unspeakable. They are, neverthelesswhat drives the infant to act and are states of being which require ordemand a response of the body. They are real in the Lacanian sense of the

60 K. Pilbram. Languages of the Brain. New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1971.61 J.M. Jones, op.cit.

90


25/30

word (that is, outside symbolisation) and, therefore, for Lacan, linked tone sense of what he means by jouissance (and to Freud's libido) - thpurpose for the human subject being to limit the effects of such jouissancin the name of subjectivity, the total failure of which leads to psychosand the failure to inhabit language, (rather than inhabiting language thpsychotic is possessed by language). The infant, of course, also quickldevelops and becomes more proficient within its environment, whicincludes the development of new biobehavioural capacities, (for examplsocial smiling at approximately eight weeks) though such developmenprior to the acquisition of language need to be seen as examples oincreasing effectiveness in how the infant processes various signals eithein terms of its interior states or from the environment; it does not altethe fact that what is being processed remains data linked to perceptio(or images) and not symbolic representations. The acquisition by the bab

at about six months of what Piaget and Inhelder te rmed 'objepermanence',

62 which means that the infant relates to objects existin

independently of the infant's perception of the object, allows the infant tdevelop a basic map of its environment (similar to an animalappreciation of its environment - which can, of course, equate with a vasamount of know-how). Though again it is important to keep in mind thaa capacity to revive stored perceptions, form schemas of the environmenand even discriminate between them is not the same thing as havinbeliefs about the environment, the latter being possible only on the basis o

language. In finishing this section, I think we can now make a number opoints, powerfully supportive of Lacan's theorising on psychoanalysiFirstly, we can see how language gives birth not just to the subject but, aLacan argues, to the unconscious itself insofar as prior to language, nsymbolic representation is at all possible - the unconscious is thus nosome primary and natural given. This, however, does not mean thaprereflective experience is not significant for the human but rather that thinfant's experience, motivational states, and stable behavioural patternare retroactively encoded into fantasies when the ability to symbolis

emerges. Lichtenberg - though I would dispute particularly his use of thword 'affects' - puts it neatly when he writes:

62 J. Piaget & B. Inhelder. The Psychology of the Child. New York, Basic Books, 1969.

91


26/30

The toddler of about eighteen to twenty-four months is in aposition similar to Pirandillo's six characters in search of anauthor : the infant has memories, affects, organised states,(with transitions between them), preferences and complex

interactional patterns all in search of a form of symbolicrepresentation.

63

The basic mechanism for this is, of course, Freud's notion of 'deferredaction' much emphasised by Lacan, which means, for example, that onedoes not need to hypothesise an innate ability for symbolic functioning toexplain 'oral phantasies'. On this view, we must also recognise with Lacanthat the ego is not something that one can think of as present from birth(as Klein does) but rather represents a developmental task dependent on

the capacity for recognition.64

Similarly, one cannot but agree with Lacan'way of defining the difference between animal psychology, which he seeas entirely dominated by the imaginary, and the human order which iscompletely taken up in the symbolic, which, in the human, structuresretroactively the imaginary or as Lacan states it: 'in man the imaginaryhas deviated (from the realm of nature)'.

65 Our attributing thought to

babies is, therefore, purely metaphorical though one can understand it, aprojecting our mental lives onto infants is what allows us to treat them aspotential members of the human community and also is, in a sense, a way

of inviting them into this community of subjects. There are also morareasons for treating human infants at this stage as subjects for while theyare, in fact, more similar to charming domestic pets, 66 they will rapidly

63 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, CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988. p. 210.66

And let's face it, not just charming but gorgeous, beautiful, delightful creatures whomoreover always pose to us that intriguing question of our origins, etc.

92


27/30

achieve self-consciousness, becoming a subject and acquiring a sense o'self. We must not confuse this, however, with the idea of arriving at unifying unity or synthesised self for the human condition, an idea whicLacan writes: 'has always had an effect of a scandalous lie'.

67

Earlier in this paper, I posed the question of whether anxiety was aaffect which is clearly enigmatic, given the fact that anxiety is in manways the pre-eminent affect within psychoanalysis and moreover, onwhich Lacan situates at the centre of any theory of affects which is attesteto by his devoting a whole Seminar to this topic.68 Nevertheless, there is sense in which anxiety is not like other affects and it is this sense of anxietthat I wish to briefly highlight in concluding.

69 Lacan maintains th

anxiety emerges as a traumatic element linked to the real and asomething that does not deceive which, therefore, puts it in contrast tother affects which can never be taken as a sign or locus of truth. What h

means by this is that anxiety is always linked to desire and is, in fact, thmost radical mode of sustaining desire, for, as he says of phobia: 'It constructed to sustain the relationship of the subject to desire under thform of anxiety'.

70 Contrary to Freud, Lacan does not see anxiety a

arising on the basis of a fear of loss of the object (for example, the breaspenis, love of the superego, etc.), but as an encounter with thoverwhelming presence of the desire of the Other (entailing therefore lack of separation) which threatens to eliminate subjective desire. Hlikens this moment to the occasion when the praying mantis settles he

eye on a potential mate who is, however, unaware of his identity, what his for the Other - which is far from reassuring and brings with it the imagof being engulfed and devoured. The nature of the danger is not, as it for Freud, bound up with the helplessness of the ego in the face oexcessive quantities of excitation, but is linked to the Other insofar as thOther addresses the subject as its cause, thereby placing this little other (thinfant) radically into question. In Seminar X, Lacan writes:

67 J. Lacan. ' 0 / Structure as an inmixing of an Otherness pre-requisite to any subjec

whatever'inEcrits: a selection(1966). Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Tavistock, 1977.68 J. Lacan. op.cit. (Seminar X).69 To cover the subject matter of the Seminar in detail would require a separate paper.70 ibid.

93


28/30


29/30

ego as a signal of infinitely slighter dangers, of dangers, we aretold somewhere by Jones ... (which are) ... 'buried desires'.73

In other words anxiety, in the latter sense, is linked to affects and can bassimilated to how these have been presented in this paper so far

However in Lacan's first sense, it is anxiety that introduces us 'witmaximal communicability to the function of lack',74 which, as there is nlack in the real, is only graspable through the mediation of the symbolicIn finishing, I would like to allude briefly to the work of Keirkegaard asindeed, does Lacan himself in noting Keirkegaard's 'audacity' in speakinof the concept of anxiety, he writes:

What can this possibly mean if not the affirmation that eitherthe concept functions in the Hegelian manner, entailing

symbolically a veritable grasp of the real; or the sole grasp thatwe can have - and it is here we must choose - is that affordedus by anxiety, the sole and thus ultimate apprehension of allreality.

75

For Keirkegaard anxiety was not a consequence of circumstances, but parof the human condition itself and man in unity or harmony with hinatural condition is only potentially human. To attain humanness, prohibition must be introduced which he alludes to in the myth of th

Garden of Eden, putting it as follows:

The prohibition alarms Adam (induces in him a state ofdread) because the prohibition awakens in him the possibilityof freedom. That which passed innocence by as the nothingof dread has now entered him and here again it is a nothing,

73ibid, pp. 6-7.74ibid, p. 10.75ibid.

95


30/30

Lacanian Approach to Problems of Affect and Anxiety in Psychoanalysis.pdf

Documents

Transcript of Lacanian Approach to Problems of Affect and Anxiety in Psychoanalysis.pdf