The Object of Psychoanalysis¹

Presentation of Clinical Study Days ³
A Program of the Members of the
World Association of Psychoanalysis in the United States

Thomas Svolos²
tsvolos@radiks.net

We draw our Clinical Study Days to a close with an announcement for our next and third Clinical Study Days, to be held in 2008 in Omaha, Nebraska, with the participation of our good friend from France, Jean-Pierre Klotz. The title and the theme for the Study Days will be “The Object of Psychoanalysis,” a focus for our work over the next year that we have chosen to coordinate our work with our colleagues in the World Association of Psychoanalysis, as the WAP has selected “The objects a in the analytic experience” as its theme for the sixth Congress of the Association to be held April 2008 in Buenos Aires.

While this title of “The Object of Psychoanalysis” was chosen for its very simplicity, we find immediately in English a certain equivocation with it, for while of course it brings to mind our object a, the great invention of Jacques Lacan, and the partial objects of Freud, we must note here another meaning of object, namely that of the object as a goal or end or as a final destination, that which a psychoanalysis might work towards—a pertinent question in our era in which we find the very survival of psychoanalysis threatened in many places and in different ways.

For Freud, in the earliest period of his work, we might simplify to note that the object or goal was the elimination of the symptom as such. In a psychoanalysis, the formations of the unconscious such as symptoms are interpreted—decoded—and it is because of this process of bringing the unconscious to light that the truth (in a downright Heideggerian sense) of the formation is found. Through this process of decoding, the impetus for symptom formation would be extinguished. But, we note that Freud’s optimism about such a goal is, even at this earliest stage of his work, tempered, as we see in his discussion of the dream of Irma’s injection, where he introduces the concept of a “navel” of a dream, an “unfathomable” point described as a “knot of dream-thoughts refusing to be unraveled . . . a place beneath which lies the Unknown.”³

I believe that this “knot” of Freud’s is a first figuration, a first intimation, of what he will develop over twenty years later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as the death drive, a particular dimension of the drive that Freud developed to confront phenomena such as repetitive traumatic dreams—dreams so knotted, as it were, that they failed to respond to the usual interpretive work of psychoanalysis—and the very fact of the negative therapeutic reaction, a refusal of symptoms to go away, about which Jacques-Alain Miller has commented that this negative therapeutic reaction is nothing other than a reaction to therapeutic initiative itself, a repercussion of the process of the symbolization of jouissance in the application of psychoanalysis.⁴ In response to these developments, the object of psychoanalysis changed for Freud, or, we might say, he moved from great optimism to pessimism that such an object could ever be achieved, as we might read in his musings in “Analysis terminable and interminable.” But, I think, here, where Freud becomes mired in what he identifies as the castration complex, what he calls the “bedrock” the analyst meets after penetrating all the layers of “psychological strata,”⁵ Freud is encountering nothing other than jouissance itself: from the ‘navel’ or the ‘knot’ to the ‘death drive’ to this ‘bedrock,’ we see Freud, at his metaphorical best, alluding to what Jacques Lacan will confront, and attempt to formalize, as jouissance, above all through his notion of the object a.

Indeed, if we just look even briefly at some of Lacan’s comments on what we might speak of as the object of psychoanalysis, we see a different orientation. First, we note in the “Founding Act” that psychoanalysis as pure psychoanalysis is separated from therapeutic goals as such.⁶ The elimination of symptoms, so important for Freud, is, even in 1964, on the side, as it were. Then, with Seminars XI and XIV, Lacan introduces the idea of a traversal of the fantasy as a formulation for the end of, or in his terms a “beyond” of analysis, where the relation of the subject to the object a is paramount, the “mapping” of the relation of the subject to the object a in a psychoanalysis leading to a different relation to the drive itself.⁷ And, we see in the final Lacan, we must note, a shift back to the symptom—not with Freud with a goal of its elimination, but, with Lacan’s development of the sinthome, the rather pragmatic notion that a know-how of what to do with the symptom may define the end of a treatment.

This diversion on the object—as goal or end—of psychoanalysis shows above all the importance of the object as object a in the goal or end, as that which, in its very absence in the work of Freud, was decisive in his formulations of the end of analysis, and which, with Lacan, takes a central point in our understanding of the object of psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis in the Lacanian orientation, thus, there is no idealization. Freud’s notion of an elimination of symptoms is coupled as well with his occasional vocabulary of normalization as a therapeutic goal, and these forms of idealization—along with many others such as the identification with the good part of the ego of the analyst in Ego-Psychology or the oblative relations of Bouvet—persist in some forms of psychoanalysis and, above all, in the psychotherapies such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. Such idealism, constantly veering in the direction of a therapeutic utopianism, defines the psy field—the mental health field—today in so many areas and is that which we must confront. In these other discourses, we might say, following the theories of discourse elaborated in Seminar XVII, the agent of the discourse, animating the discourse, is the master signifier or knowledge, and not the object a, as is the case in psychoanalysis.

But there is, as yet, another equivocation in the title of our upcoming event, “The Object of Psychoanalysis,” for in English, with the shift of emphasis from the first to the second syllable on the word ‘object,’ the word shifts from a noun to a verb, and we end up with the ‘object’ of psychoanalysis, in which we might hear psychoanalysis as that which ‘objects.’ Indeed, we might see psychoanalysis in such a way, as that which objects. Lacan’s great early formulation on the mirror stage, for example, shows how in the experience of psychoanalysis the subject encounters objections to the ego formulations and object representations misrecognized by the subject⁸, an important early perspective of Lacan’s further developed as the “L Schema” in “On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis.”⁹ This notion is yet further developed in the graph of chapter 8 on “Knowledge and truth” from Seminar XX¹⁰. In psychoanalysis, the subject will encounter objections to any sense of reality, which is only approached through fantasy. In psychoanalysis, the subject will encounter objections to any notion of truth, which is only partial and incomplete. And, finally, in psychoanalysis, the subject will encounter objections to any statement of being, for being is only approached as semblant, as a function of the objects a. Indeed, we can even look at the object a itself as a form of objection, a bodily objection to the symbolizing and structuring logic of the Symbolic order, as Lacan develops in Seminar X. Finally, I would note that, in the consideration of psychoanalysis in the broader political and social field, Jacques-Alain Miller has pointed out that psychoanalysis is neither really revolutionary (and, in such a sense, idealizing) nor reactionary, but rather subversive, objecting to any forms of idealization or identifications.¹¹

And, so, now, we arrive at the theme itself of our next Study Days, the object, especially the psychoanalytic object, Lacan’s object a.
We would like to explore this object in many dimensions.

We will examine the pre-history, as it were, of the object a in Freud. Of course, for this we have the object of the drive and the partial objects, described by Freud, among other places, in “The three essays on sexuality” and “Instincts and their vicissitudes.” And, as I indicated above, we can even locate in Freud in the very points where it is lacking in his work—where it is not articulated—that which Lacan will name the object a.

We will examine the development of object a in Lacan’s work. We will start with the related notion of agalma developed in Seminar VIII on the transference. We will examine what Jacques-Alain Miller has referred to as the natural objects of Lacan, the five objects a developed in Seminar X, objects of the body, pieces of the flesh, resistant to the structuring logic of the Symbolic.¹²
We will examine Seminar XI and the role of the object a in alienation and separation.

We will examine the place of the object a in the fundamental fantasy in Seminars XI and XIV, noting especially the role of the object a in the fantasy organizing jouissance.

We will examine the object a of Seminar XVI as a logical plus-de-jouir, not connected to the body, but as a surplus jouissance that allows an approach to jouissance beyond fantasy and the Other.

We will examine the final status of the object a in the last Lacan: Lacan’s description in Seminar XX of object a as the semblant of being—disjointed from the Other and fantasy, but also now only one dimension, or part, of jouissance.
Finally, we will explore how, in the Borromean clinic, the sinthome will replace the object a as the central concept for Lacan.

And, we must note here how—in contrast to so many typical American readings of Lacan that emphasize the work of the 50’s, Lacan’s formalization of the Symbolic Order, as his key contribution—Lacan’s work on the formalization (and failures of formalization) of jouissance, especially as organized around the object a, is his most vital contribution to psychoanalysis and that which has the most far-reaching clinical consequences.

Thus, with this, we hope to extract from Lacan’s work the trajectory of this object a, its invention, its transfigurations through Lacan’s work, and its utility for psychoanalysis, especially with regard to its application in the clinic.
This will constitute our theoretical work, which will be developed in conjunction with a series of case presentations and discussions, in which we hope to see how this object a may be put to use in psychoanalytic treatment.
We hope that you will join us again in this exploration and discussion of a most critical concept of Lacan’s.

¹Presentation of Clinical Study Days 3, a Program of the Members of the
World Association of Psychoanalysis in the United States, delivered at Clinical Study Days 2 in Miami Beach, Florida, on January 13, 2007.
²Member of the New Lacanian School – NLS.
³Presentation of Clinical Study Days 3, a Program of the Members of the
World Association of Psychoanalysis in the United States, delivered at Clinical Study Days 2 in Miami Beach, Florida, on January 13, 2007.
⁴Jacques-Alain Miller, Pièces détachées. Orientation lacanienne, III, 7. Course presented January 19, 2005.
⁵Sigmund Freud, “Analysis terminable and interminable,” Standard Edition. 23: 252.
⁶Jacques Lacan, “Acte de fondation.” Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil, 2001, 229-243.
⁷Jacques Lacan, [Seminar XI] Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Norton, 1977, p. 273. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV. Unpublished.
⁸Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror stage as formative of the I function, as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” Écrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 2002.
⁹Jacques Lacan, “On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis.” Écrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 2002.Jacques Écrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 2002.
¹⁰Jacques Lacan, [Seminar XX:] On Feminine Sexuality, the limits of Love and Knowledge. New York: Norton, 1998.
¹¹Jacques-Alain Miller, “L’anguille en politique.” Radio broadcast on France Culture, June 22, 2005.
¹²Jacques-Alain Miller. “AMP 2008. Les objects a dans l’expérience analytique,” La Lettre mensuelle, Number 252, Novembre 2006, pages 8-12.