Who Needs Yalom When We Have Žižek?
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Lacanian Jouissance and the fantasy object
As was said in our discussion of the Kantian experience of the Thing, we receive a distinct ‘pleasure’ from our very judgment of the displeasure we feel in failing to adequately represent the Thing. This surplus ‘pleasure’ procured by a frustrating encounter with the Thing is precisely the Lacanian definition of jouissance, usually translated as ‘enjoyment’ to distinguish it from pleasure proper, indicating its location ‘beyond the pleasure principle.’ (Tarrying, 280)
The usual reading of jouissance is that it forms a substantial Real that supposedly grounds the Symbolic which fails in symbolizing this Real completely, so that what we are left with are these objects of surplus-jouissance, these objets petit a. So although the Real as the substance of jouissance is always lost In-itself, existing in an external relation to our reflective consciousness, we at least have as compensation the objet petit a acting as an ‘In-itself which is for us.’16 This thinking is behind the common (mis)understanding of Lacan’s idea of the Oedipal phase as a transition from nature to culture: the symbolic agency of the paternal prohibition – the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ – is the conceptual framework behind the father as the incarnation of the (Master-)signifier, since he is the one who deprives the child of his mother by giving the child his name. (Roudinesco, 284) After being named, the child has an ambivalent relationship with his father, having been thus torn away from his natural state of unity or wholeness with the Mother-Thing; yet he is compensated with surplus-jouissance in the form of cultural products such as education and career. Likewise, this reading would have us view the group process as one in which the members must come to terms with a positive, natural state that once really existed prior to or still does exist just beyond the group’s artificial-cultural aspect, but which now is lost or out of reach forever. Furthermore, the therapist would be seen as holding out promises or gifts of, perhaps, new knowledge of Self and Other, if only the group members would completely sacrifice their castration of this irreparably lost or out of reach Group-Thing-jouissance. Contrary to this view, Žižek would point to the fact that this group qua cultural-symbolic agency ‘gives body to the impossibility which is co-substantial with the very fact of the symbolic order – “jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks as such” ’ (Interrogating, 207) That is, the ‘natural’ state the group members believe exists prior to or beyond its transformation into a socio-cultural group is a retroactive product of the formation of that group and did not exist prior to its loss, just as the child/adult must come to terms with ‘nature’ being always-already lost.
For Žižek and (his reading of) Hegel, we have seen that there is no beyond in which some Thing-jouissance exists as a positive, substantial entity. This In-itself is similar to what one deals with in a positing reflection, the first in the triad of the dialectical process: it is ‘not-yet’ fully itself, failing to achieve its self-identity. It becomes a ‘For-itself’ as we have seen through an external reflection, through the supplementary remark which brings a coherency, accomplishing a self-identity and is thus ‘no longer’ just itself. Žižek criticizes the usual reading of jouissance for remaining caught in this reflective illusion, since all that is accomplished at this point is a simple remarking of a pre-existing In-itself. What needs to occur is a determinate reflection in which the In-itself is experienced as retroactively posited; this ‘In-and-For-itself’ experience is precisely the experience of the loss as constitutive, in which the loss that occurs in the reflective process is what constitutes the lost object. (Indivisible, 48)
So the paradox is that the surplus-enjoyment (modeled by Lacan on Marx’s surplus- value) retroactively invokes the substance of jouissance. The latter is not the underlying substratum of our symbolic world, but an illusion brought on by a ‘deceitful’ objet a. (Tarrying, 36) It deceives not by fooling us into believing it is It (the group members do not mistakenly take the therapist as the Thing) but it deceives by feigning to deceive, by giving us a fantastic impression of some substantial Thing behind it.17 So although they know the therapist is not the Thing, they are obligated to act as if he were. In the group, the members suppose the therapist knows something of their individual and collective symptoms and holds the key to their lost enjoyments in life. We have already mentioned the blame therapists face in the group when they are perceived as stumbling blocks in the members’ pursuit of their goals. We can now try to further specify this logic utilizing the concept of jouissance.
The experience of jouissance is part and parcel of the group experience. Examples include simultaneous conflicting feelings of rivalry and support, or wishing to progress so as to leave the group and stagnating so as to remain behind, or wishing for both the improvement and detriment of others – all of which Yalom calls ‘Common Group Tensions.’ He finds these not only a necessary component to the group process (28) but admonishes: ‘ Do not forget these tensions. They are omnipresent, always fueling the hidden motors of group interaction.’ (Yalom, 169) This always-everywhere state of tension is thus not a measure of failure, as is often thought by the group, nor is it something to be ‘worked through’ in the sense of harnessing the energy for facilitating a ‘corrective emotional experience’ as Yalom would put it. (27) Rather , a change in consciousness is in order – a move to a determinate reflection – in which the group’s experience of jouissance is itself experienced as a fantasy object which masks the inconsistency of the big Other. The entire group experience and its attendant feelings of tension act as a fantasy screen of sorts, allowing the group members, the therapist and the group theorists to overlook how their very activity is constitutive of that very ‘reality’ they are engaged in. And Žižek’s point would be that the only way to conceive of this fantasy as an object within the structural logic of the group is to realize that it is precisely embodied in that particular group member, the therapist, who occupies that special chair in the group circle. And as long as he remains seated in that chair, he will continue to guarantee the stability of the group and act as the place-holder of that tension which always threatens to fatally rupture forth and dissolve the group.
Žižek writes that ‘fantasy... implies the choice of thought at the expense of being: in fantasy, I find myself reduced to the evanescent point of a thought contemplating the course of events during my absence, my non-being.’ He goes on to say that ‘it is as if we are observing “the primordial scene” from behind our own eyes, as if we are not immediately identified with our look but stand somewhere “behind it.” ’ (Tarrying, 64) Is this not exactly what occurs in the group process? The contentious points, issues and tensions raised during that process act as a fantasy frame which structures the experience for each member and the point from which they gaze onto this experience is a positivization of this frame, a collapse of sorts, into the object qua gaze. The critical step to make for each member is to experience how his external gaze through which he perceives the substantial group from the ‘outside’ as some transcendent mystery is simultaneously the gaze by means of which this group perceives itself as its own mystery. In terms of reflective logic, we must ‘experience how the subject, by means of his very failure to grasp the secret of the Other,’ caught as he is in his own fantasy framework, ‘is already inscribed in the Other’s “accountancy,” reflected in the Other: the experience of how his external relationship of the Other is already a “reflective determination” of the Other itself.’ (For They, 90) Following Žižek’s lead, we could say that the reflective determinate object is not an object different for each group member (Sublime, 229); rather, surplus-jouissance is embodied for the group as a whole in the therapist who stands in for the embodiment of the fantasy object for the group, retroactively filling out the void of the Group-Thing-jouissance, ‘healing’ the wound in the big Other. The ‘original’ trauma for the group is the non-existence of its Thing-jouissance, of its void and the fantasy (object) makes this livable.18
The paradox is that while this void the group encircles is logically prior to any fantasy object that fills it out, it is only the intervention of the (Master) signifier that brings about the space within which the group can be seen as encircling this void-space. And in as much as this void–space-lack is coextensive with the Lacanian notion of desire, we can see that with the therapist qua object-cause of the group’s desire, we have an object which is originally ‘lost’ and overlooked by the group, an object which coincides with its own loss and emerges as lost; while the tension-laden activity of the group can be seen as an attempt to enact that void itself directly – what could be called the psychoanalytic drive of the group. (Parallax, 62) The drive of the group ‘is quite literally the very “drive” to break the All of continuity in which [it is] embedded, to introduce a radical imbalance into it,’ and this is what Lacan means by the ‘satisfaction of drives:’ the group generates jouissance in the very repetition of failure to reach its goal. This endless circulation around the ‘object-loss of drive’ generates a satisfaction of its own, so the true aim of the group in its drive is not to reach its stated goal but to circle endlessly around it. (Parallax, 63) From a Žižekian perspective, once the therapeutic group members gain knowledge of the drive and experience this truth, they are no longer in need of the group, for they have effectively ‘traversed the fundamental fantasy,’ which is one of the Lacanian definitions of the end of psychoanalytic therapy. (Fink 1995, 62)
Lacanian-themed puzzles
