Intermission: The Fugitive?
"No, not the suppression of suffering, but a suffering until then unimagined, that of learning that she would not come back."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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Diane,
I dedicate these three essays to you, given that you were extraordinary enough to inspire them, and to reveal that I too was extraordinary, having been able to write them because of you—I leave them as a memory of our dancing days.
Thomas
The Fugitive
"My poor friend, our little Albertine is no more; forgive me for breaking this terrible news to you who were so fond of her. She was thrown by her horse against a tree while she was out riding. All our efforts to restore her to life were unavailing.”
In Volume 6 of Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, the Narrator describes, in the same translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the process of grief we undergo when we suddenly break with our loves, namely that “on certain nights, having gone to sleep almost without regretting Albertine any more […] on awakening I found a whole fleet of memories which had come to cruise upon the surface of my clearest consciousness, and seemed marvellously distinct. Then I wept over what I could see so plainly, what overnight had been to me non-existent. […] How could she have seemed dead to me when now, in order to think of her, I had at my disposal only those same images one or other of which I used to recall when she was alive, each one being associated with a particular moment?”
Upon hearing of Albertine’s sudden departure from his Parisian apartment, the Narrator begins to grieve her loss, by his description that “I stepped across the room with endless precautions, took up a position from which I could not see Albertine's chair, the pianola upon the pedals of which she used to press her golden slippers, nor a single one of the things which she had used and all of which, in the secret language that my memory had imparted to them, seemed to be seeking to give me a fresh translation, a different version, to announce to me for the second time the news of her departure. But even without looking at them I could see them, […] And so I could not remain sitting there, I rose; and thus, at every moment there was one more of those innumerable and humble 'selves' that compose our personality which was still unaware of Albertine's departure and must be informed of it; I was obliged […] to describe to all these 'selves' who did not yet know of it, […] "Albertine has gone."”
However, the Narrator, with his typical self-centeredness and scheming, is soon intractable to her departure, and begins to consider all manners of motivations, threats and strategies to eventually win her back to his house. He sends curt telegrams, impassioned and dispassionate letters, and launches, like an armchair philosopher, into pure speculations about her motivations and thoughts, without her actually being there; for instance, he fruitlessly asks himself whether she still loves him, what did he mean to her, and why did she leave him?
But when it is later announced that Albertine had died in a riding accident, in which she was thrown to a tree by her horse, while hiding in Touraine, the Narrator changes altogether in his grief, from the schemes of his letters and telegrams—cajoling her to return—to his overcoming by a new sense of despair, which is driven by his memories of her—and which he solemnly summarises in his reaction, that “I thought with despair of all that covering mantle of caresses, of kisses, of friendly slumber, of which I must presently let myself be divested for all time. The rush of these tender memories sweeping on to break against the knowledge that Albertine was dead oppressed me by the incessant conflict of their baffled waves so that I could not keep still; I rose, but all of a sudden I stopped in consternation; the same faint daybreak that I used to see at the moment when I had just left Albertine, still radiant and warm with her kisses, had come into the room and bared, above the curtains, its blade now a sinister portent, whose whiteness, cold, implacable and compact, entered the room like a dagger thrust into my heart.”
The Narrator is still problematic in his love for Albertine; each moment of selflessness in his grief and memories is counterbalanced by his self-centered loving, which observes in Albertine only her relevant excitement to his ideal and not the woman as she really was. Hence, the Narrator still precludes himself from loving her in any deeper understanding—and thus fails to accept her right to opacity and thus difference. Even in her death, and in the powerlessness of his memories to resurrect her as she lived, except only as what she meant to him, his grief is as much for himself as it is for her.1
And yet, in spite of his limitations to love, which he occasionally admits but inevitably finds little controversy in, he remains profoundly affected by his grief for her—by the loss of this other world—and so he struggles in a very human way with the loss of his beloved.
At this moment, we might renounce the Narrator as a counter-example of how to love, but find insight, by his example and method of loss, for how to grieve. In this way, we might too be able to speak of grief, even if our former beloved is not dead, such that we might peer into the new reality of ourselves—now in the midst of our bereavement and sudden melancholia, having lost the object of our love.
“To find consolation, it was not one, it was innumerable Albertines that I must first forget. When I had reached the stage of enduring the grief of losing this Albertine, I must begin afresh with another, with a hundred others.”
As the Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, writes in his famous 1917 essay, Mourning and Melancholia, as translated by the British psychoanalyst, Joan Riviere, if “Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person”, then “there is nothing unconscious about the loss.”
For Freud, mourning is distinguished from melancholia by a clear consciousness of its cause, its pathology and its eventual way out of itself. As he outlines the process of mourning, “Now in what consists the work which mourning performs? […] The testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object. […] This struggle can be so intense that a turning away from reality ensues, the object being clung to through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis. The normal outcome is that deference for reality gains the day. Nevertheless its behest cannot be at once obeyed. The task is now carried through bit by bit, under great expense of time and cathectic energy, while all the time the existence of the lost object is continued in the mind. Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment of the libido from it accomplished. […] It is worth noting that this pain seems natural to us. The fact is, however, that when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”2
Hence, in the regular process of mourning, we will eventually recover from our loss with time, if our object of love is clear to us, and we have faith that it will eventually be replaced by new objects of love in the future, such that our current pain is slowly to become bearable by this prospect. But while this might be true of general mourning—or mourning for those who have truly died—it is often less so in romantic mourning, or romantic melancholia, to which Freud might say, is filled with uncleared libido and imaginary death, which thus becomes a genesis for melancholia, or what we know today as depression.
On melancholia, he writes, the “fall in self-esteem is absent in grief; but otherwise the features are the same. Profound mourning, the reaction to the loss of a loved person, contains the same feeling of pain, loss of interest in the outside world—insofar as it does not recall the dead one loss of capacity to adopt any new object of love, which would mean a replacing of the one mourned, the same turning from every active effort that is not connected with thoughts of the dead. It is easy to see that this inhibition and circumscription in the ego is the expression of an exclusive devotion to its mourning, which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests. It is really only because we know so well how to explain it that this attitude does not seem to us pathological.”3
By comparison, melancholia “is possible only because the reactions expressed in their behaviour still proceed from an attitude of revolt, a mental constellation which by a certain process has become transformed into melancholic contrition. […] First there existed an object-choice, the libido had attached itself to a certain person; then, owing to a real injury or disappointment concerned with the loved person, this object-relationship was undermined. The result was not the normal one of withdrawal of the libido from this object and transference of it to a new one, but something different for which various conditions seem to be necessary. […] the free libido was withdrawn into the ego and not directed to another object.”
Hence, for the melancholic, “there is a loss of a more ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has become lost as an object of love (e.g. the case of a deserted bride). In yet other cases one feels justified in concluding that a loss of the kind has been experienced, but one cannot see clearly what has been lost […] This, indeed, might be so even when the patient was aware of the loss giving rise to the melancholia, that is, when he knows whom he has lost but not what it is he has lost in them. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an unconscious loss of a love-object, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing unconscious about the loss. […] In grief the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any effort and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and chastised. He abases himself before everyone and commiserates his own relatives for being connected with someone so unworthy. He does not realize that any change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past and declares that he was never any better. […] Shame before others, which would characterize this condition above everything, is lacking in him, or at least there is little sign of it. […] From the analogy with grief we should have to conclude that the loss suffered by the melancholiac is that of an object; according to what he says the loss is one in himself.”
For Freud, melancholia fixates on the sudden loss of a love object, out of which, the ego recoils into itself, denying its own energies to reconcile itself with the loss, fixating as it were on the loss through self-deprecation, such that the subject is now in the midst of coming apart by the zombified love object in their mind.4
With melancholia there are “countless single conflicts in which love and hate wrestle together are fought for the object; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to uphold this libido-position against assault.” In other words, “Just as the work of grief, by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the benefit of continuing to live, impels the ego to give up the object, so each single conflict of ambivalence, by disparaging the object, denigrating it, even as it were by slaying it, loosens the fixation of the libido to it. It is possible, therefore, for the process […] to come to an end, whether it be that the fury has spent itself or that the object is abandoned as no longer of value.”
For Freud, this ambivalence and regression of the libido into the ego of oneself, are the main conditions of melancholia: that the love object is not dead, but exists in the mind of the subject—who will not let it die, and thus fights to keep it alive—through self-destruction as a means of grieving, or as a sign of guilt for having felt so strongly about something now lost forever.
In romantic melancholia, this is often the case: we can no longer see the person we once loved; in other words, things have changed between us. And yet, we are seized by a cognitive dissonance, as engendered by our memories of otherwise, that this cannot be the case: I know you, I know who you are, this is not you, come back to me, please, it can be as it was, it can be better than it was, do not let me lose you, I cannot bear to.
From this point onwards, the dead are unable to die, neither peacefully nor gradually; the ego thrashes against the truth, fixated in its denial of reality by means of the fetish of memory, in which, our beloved remains alive—as we remember them—and still loves us too. We cannot find any good explanation which we might satisfy us, without having to accept reality itself, and thus we elect to destroy ourselves as a method of grief—as a denial of death—until we are entirely destroyed, having razed ourselves to scorched earth, or until we renounce, out of hatred, every notion of love we once held for our beloved, or some combination of both, until we are in cold desolation and no longer in love.5
“Life, according to its habit which is, by incessant, infinitesimal labours, to change the face of the world, had not said to me on the morrow of Albertine's death: "Become another person," but, by changes too imperceptible for me to be conscious even that I was changing, had altered almost every element in me, with the result that my mind was already accustomed to its new master—my new self”
As the Proustian Narrator explains, “For even if one love passes into oblivion, it may determine the form of the love that is to follow it. Already, in the heart even of the previous love, daily habits existed, the origin of which we did not ourselves recall. It was an anguish of a former day that had made us think with longing, then adopt in a permanent fashion, like customs the meaning of which has been forgotten, those homeward drives to the beloved's door, or her residence in our home, our presence or the presence of some one in whom we have confidence upon all her outings, all these habits, like great uniform highroads along which our love passes daily and which were forged long ago in the volcanic fire of an ardent emotion. But these habits survive the woman, survive even the memory of the woman. They become the pattern, if not of all our loves, at least of certain of our loves which alternate with the Others.”
Hence, in grief, we are also left with the ghost of memory—a spectre of gestures, untethered to their original cause, and yet perpetuated by a phantasmagorical spirit both dead and alive; as the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, might say: a hauntology remains in the original place of our love.
As Derrida writes in his 1993 book, Spectres Of Marx, as translated by Peggy Kamuf, “It affects and bereaves it in advance, like the ghost it will become, but this is precisely where haunting begins. And its time, and the untimeliness of its present, of its being "out of joint." To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology.”
In other words, even in separation, the ghost of love continues to haunt us, via our memories and memorabilia, by the habits of our previous life, and the bitterness which occurs at the disjunction between our imaginary life and the real one, which now comes too close to the surface and to the borders of our life-world, and which shoots us an incomprehensibility: its over—and you were powerless to stop it, as though you were not even alive.
“And thus my home had demanded, in memory of a forgotten Albertine, the presence of my mistress of the moment whom I concealed from visitors and who filled my life as Albertine had filled it in the past.”
As the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, writes in his 2008 book, In Defence Of Lost Causes, “In psychiatric circles, there is a story told about a man whose wife was diagnosed with acute breast cancer and who died three months later; the husband survived her death unscathed, being able to talk coolly about his traumatic last moments with her—how? Was he a cold, distant, and unfeeling monster? Soon, his friends noticed that, while talking about his deceased wife, he always held a hamster in his hands, her pet object and now his fetish, the embodied disavowal of her death. No wonder that, when, a couple of months later, the hamster died, the man broke down and had to be hospitalized for a long period, treated for acute depression.”
As Žižek explains, the fetish—in this case, the hamster—is “what enables you to (pretend to) accept reality "the way it is". In other words, far from obfuscating "realistic" knowledge of how things are, the fetish is, on the contrary, the means that enables the subject to accept this knowledge without paying the full price for it: "I know very well [how things really stand], and I am able to endure this bitter truth because of a fetish (a hamster, a button…) in which the illusion to which I stick is embodied. […] what the fetish gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge, my refusal to subjectively assume what I know. Therein […] resides the contrast between the fetish and the symptom: a symptom embodies a repressed knowledge, the truth about the subject that the subject is not ready to assume.”
But what of the subtle fetish of memory, from which grief is mediated and recalled, as the source of both living and dead worlds? As the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, might say: mourning is the traumatic process of coming to terms with the unwanted vision of the Real—the catastrophe of Loss—in which reality has come part to be irreversibly changed and to never be the same; and into which we are suddenly thrust to closeness and thus become horrified by its line, which it immediately draws, across the history of our lives—this is what we might call the gulf of Loss.6
At the centre of our memories lies a hole out of which the Real has split and erupted into, and the fetish of memory is what allows us to both accept and to deny this reality—memory is a fetish we cannot live without, but a fetish which reveals its own reality too: that love exist in the Real, beyond the Imaginary order of the I of ourselves, and the Symbolic order of society, history and culture into which we are born, linked by the sinthome—the fixation—or the symptom of our neuroses.7
Memory is in fact a dual omen: it preserves the past and destroys our present, and yet, in this contradiction which it now symbolises, it reveals that both worlds can co-exist: that both happened and the existence of one does not overrule the existence of the other. In other words, memory is both the signifier which we lack and the signifier which we have; it sustains our grief in perpetuating the hole of Loss in our reality but validates in its negation too: that we were once in each other’s lives, and that this fact is ours to keep forever.
As Freud explains, to grieve is to detach ourselves from each instance of memory the traumatic loss at the centre of grief itself, until we have finally detached from the living the symbols of the dead, and we can reconcile this new reality with the memories of the past, diverting our libido, slowly, to other places—so that we might slowly forget in time.
Melancholia occurs when we cannot forget; the libido stagnates in place, destroying the body in a perpetual war between the reality of our memories and the reality of the present—the latter of which, we cannot accept, and hence, must attack the only thing we have to control: ourselves, as impelled by our memories and unable to escape the catastrophic present.
Haunted by a ghost, we blame ourselves for being worthy of being haunted, as if the only explanation were that we were meant to fail because of who we are, given the exasperation and the powerlessness of ourselves to have turned the outcome otherwise. But we cannot forget our memories, insofar as we have been made by them, and which we have taken into ourselves to become our personalities, from which we cannot separate without a total collapse of the Ego itself.
Freud’s suggestion, that we might substitute for the libido of our dead life-world the house of a new one, in which our destitution may find itself overturned by new distractions, is therefore insufficient for romantic melancholia, in which our object of love is still alive, but separated from us by the gulf of Loss, irreparably changed, as we are, by the experience of having loved each other.
Unless we treat our beloved as though they were dead, having been completely severed from us in this mortal world—a complete separation of their signifier—we must live with the fetish of who they once were to us, and who they are now, such that both of these persons exist simultaneously and validly, and that the loss of one does not preclude the previous time we spent with our beloved, nor does the existence of the other destroy what we remember of them before. If memory is the fetish we use to deny reality, it is likewise the fetish we use to come to terms with the progression of reality—that we were once loved before, and in some ways, are still loved and that this is an irreparable fact; and the present and its future cannot touch this past, but instead, are part of the same past which now becomes our lives separately together in the present.
We would otherwise substitute so as to weaken our memories, to remove them of their significance, to rearrange the libido which lingers in them, but this is a substitution of what makes us ourselves—it is a flight from the integration of the past and the present, from the dialectic of our past and present experience, which once we resolve by looking to its contradiction, and thus its negation, we show that both sides of grief are necessary to make us whole: that we both have the right to remember and to forget, to continue loving and to slowly detach ourselves, to adore and yet not to tolerate, to remain in the past and to move on with the future; we must forgive ourselves for feeling so much, and eventually, for feeling so little.
So, if we must forget something, then let us forget the potency of the reality we lost—which now tears a hole in the reality of our present—and remember the past while it transfer its significance to the present. And that if we love our beloved, we likewise accept their right to opaqueness and thus to difference, in making a decision which is incomprehensible to us, and which hurts us tremendously, and which destroys the world we might have created together; we must forgive them too, for once feeling so much, and for now feeling so little as to leave us. We must accept their right to annihilation, of both ourselves and the life we gave to them, and say that you have hurt me, but I still love you, even if I must forget you and some part of me must hate you. I will always love you, and that this is compatible for its own reason: the world you destroyed is the world in which we loved, and it is the one we must still live in together.
And we might admit that this is another way out of grief, which does not substitute our pain for an escape into another, nor does it destroy us, with sound and fury, and everything we once held dear as a means of gaining a minimum distance from who were, but rather that there is a third grief which acknowledges the cause of grieving and yet ties the line between the past and the present through the hole it cleaves into our reality—grief is a bridge between two worlds, and both worlds exist equally in time; it is possible to live in both, and to come to this fact is to come out of grief, and back to the reality of us together and us apart, and eventually as a unified middle of the present.
And so we come to this conclusion: I love you and so I must forget you; and in doing so, I can live with you once more.
“For there is in this world in which everything wears out, everything perishes, one thing that crumbles into dust, that destroys itself still more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself than Beauty: namely Grief.”
Perhaps my motivations are obvious; I write this as a means to deal with my own grief. It reminds me, almost uselessly, of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the latter dies and the former pleads to Hades himself for her return to life.
Motivated by the beauty of Orpheus’ lyre, Hades heeds to the young lover that he might return to the overworld and take Eurydice with him, but that if he looks back at her prematurely—like the wife of the biblical Lot—while she follows him to the opening, she will return to Hades once more and forever. And Orpheus, while egressing out of the underworld, upon but a few steps to the exit, he turns around in paranoia, having been unable to hear the footsteps of his beloved behind him; and Eurydice returns to the underworld for the final time.
In his second grief, Orpheus leaves the underworld for a forest, in which he plays an elegy with his lyre, until he is torn apart by wild animals—them having been brought out by his grieving song. And the Muses, the three sisters of Greek fate, pluck his tearful head from the earth and keep it forever—singing of his grief—so that he might sing for them till the end of the world itself.
In other words, there is nothing but a futile method of analysis here; there is only a roundabout understanding, an indirect coming to terms with; there is only a fading yearn for regrets and for now-lost futures. I can only gesture to the grief I feel; I cannot touch it directly. In citing from these sources, so many notions of mourning, I pull nothing out of myself and from them, other than a consolation of unwanted time.
Is this a confession of melancholia? Or a philosophy, that in our moments of grief, we become aware of our powerlessness in the face of the Real—of reality as it subtly exists outside of us—and to which we have no power over, insofar as we might imagine we do, until its awakened force exerts a Cthulhuian gaze onto us: the paralysing despair of pure Otherness, in our waking to a reality which we can no longer call our own nor share with the object of our love, and which is being pulled apart by the intrusion of the Real into the space of the Imaginary world of I.
In such a way, we are torn from our right to annihilation, almost violently; and our former beloved, in separating from us—whether in depressive or liberatory circumstances—leaves us in a foreign galaxy of ourselves, now alone and bewildered, having once shared a life with another, and having once before and now again, sharing a life with just ourselves.
This is to say, we begin to unannihilate ourselves from each other; we reclaim our selfhood in the most unpleasant of ways—being torn apart, like Orpheus and his cruel beasts, while singing a song of grief throughout our pain.
And so, this treatise is my fetish—my talisman, my charm—against the oblivion of our memories together; inadvertently, I follow in the tradition of many people of letters this way—in the lineage of Sappho, Catullus, Dante, Goethe, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, Proust, Takuboku, Kafka, Fitzgerald, Maschwitz, Asaf, among others—and give the most precious thing we can give, with our meagre gifts of language and words: a memory of us together—meant to outlast us—as evidence that once, we were both alive and loved each other for awhile on Earth.
This is evidence too of the potential we had and of the power in the lost future we gave up; imagine if we had more time, if we had gone on loving each other, and what we would have created together—silly questions for a lifetime. But out of grief, I surface to an irrevocable fact: I have given you the key to my heart, and I want you to keep it forever.
And this has been said before: an evidence of grief is an evidence of love; the deeper the grief, so deeper was the love; but grief is also proof of what we had in us to give, and to dream, and to fashion out of nothing, and to stake everything we had, in hopes that it could give us everything we could ask for.
Hence, there is dignity in grief; there is nobility in feeling strongly for another; but we cannot stay here and so we must repeat again: I love you and so I must forget you, so that I might live with you, once more.
So, whisper in the ear of your beloved: let us forget each other—you and I—together.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.
This would have been less tendentious, if only, the Narrator had not asked her to change so much of herself for him, or rather, to accommodate him and to live with him as his sycophantic muse. As the French psychoanalyst, Félix Guattari, writes of the Narrator in The Machinic Unconscious (1979), as translated by Taylor Adkins, “Isolated, infantilized, "reeducated," Albertine is little by little transformed into a sort of mechanical doll perfectly adapted to the Narrator's domestic life. The Narrator's attachment is based more on the jealousy that she stirs up in him, rather than any real love. Furthermore, his first concern paradoxically seems to be to liberate himself from his "Prisoner." His goal is not to keep her with him but to extract her essential substance. And here we would do best to compare her less to a marionette than to an enigmatic formula whose solution is of vital interest for him. She has become like one of those equations which we are required to add to a mathematical corpus to solve a problem and which we deduct from the end of the calculation.”
In his 1922 book, Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego, as translated by James Strachey, Freud explains that the “Libido is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions. We call by that name the energy […] of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word 'love'. The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists […] in sexual love with sexual union as its aim. But we do not separate from this—what in any case has a share in the name 'love'—on the one hand, self-love, and on the other, love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas. […] all these tendencies are an expression of the same instinctive activities; in relations between the sexes these instincts force their way towards sexual union, but in other circumstances they are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it, though always preserving enough of their original nature to keep their identity recognizable (as in such features as the longing for proximity, and self-sacrifice).”
For Freud, a pathology, as first begun in early life, is to fail to let go of something at a crucial stage of childhood development. His well-known example is fixation, which interferes with the process of letting go and which typically occurs at one of the five stages of psychosexual development: in either the oral, anal, phallic, latent, or genital stages of childhood. For instance, if a fixation occurs during the phallic stage of development, whereby the child first begins to develop awareness of their sexual differences to others, but does not progress to the next stage of latent development, due to some external cause, such as the shaming by or the absence of a parent, this may lead to the formation of neuroses, psychoses and complexes in their adulthood, such as well-known examples of the Oedipus complex for males and the Electra complex for females—although the latter complex is an invention by the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, who among other disagreements, fell out with Freud on the subject.
As Freud elaborates on grief, “Reality passes its verdict—that the object no longer exists—upon each single one of the memories and hopes through which the libido was attached to the lost object, and the ego, confronted as it were with the decision whether it will share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of its narcissistic satisfactions in being alive to sever its attachment to the non-existent object.”
Upon writing this, I am suddenly reminded of the ending to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869), as translated by Constance Garnett: “Obviously everything had been forgiven him”.
For Lacan, each of us has a neurosis; according to him, there is no normal state of human being, as Freud might have hoped to bring us back to. The aim of psychoanalysis, hence, is thus not to resolve a problematic neurosis, but to resituate it within the subject, such that the latter may become aware of its pathology—its nature and its presence—within the history of their lives, and that this awareness, if successful, is enough for an end to analysis. According to Lacan, there are four types of neuroses: the hysteric, the obsessive, the perverse and the psychotic. An example which illustrates each of them is to imagine that you are driving a car, now having to stop at a red light. For the hysteric, the question is identitarian, in the sense that, they are unsure of their identity and must rely on the actions of others to orient their actions; therefore, the hysteric will only stop at a red light if they see others doing so too, and likewise, will continue forward if others go first. For the obsessive, the question is ontological, in the sense that, they are unsure of whether they exist in the world as they believe they do; therefore, the obsessive will only stop at a red light if they see the light change themselves, and hence, will start again if they see the light turn green. Lacan comments that, typically, it is women who are hysteric, and men who are obsessive; however, he adds that everyone is neurotic to a degree, and that these two types of neuroses are simply the most common. For the perverse, the question is rebellious, in the sense that, they understand the rules of the Big Other—the Law—and yet choose to rebel against this sensibility so as to violate it; therefore, the perverse will observe the red light and consciously choose to ignore it, speeding up and driving through the intersection, and from this comes pleasure. For the psychotic, the question is non-existent, in the sense that, the psychotic does not acknowledge the Law at all; therefore, the psychotic does not observe the red light whatsoever, and continues on their way irrespectively.
As Lacan speaks in Seminar IV - Desire And Its Interpretation (1958 – 1959), using the example of Ophelia’s funeral from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as translated by Bruce Fink, “Laertes jumps into the grave and, out of his mind, embraces the object whose disappearance is causing him pain. It is clear that the object here has an existence that is all the more absolute because it no longer corresponds to anything that exists. In other words, mourning, which involves a veritable, intolerable loss to human beings, gives rise in them to a hole in reality. […] What, in the final analysis, are funeral rites designed to do? To propitiate [satisfaire à] what we call the memory of the departed. And what do these rights involve if not the total, massive intervention, from hell to heaven, of the entire symbolic system [jeu symbolique]. […] The work of mourning presents itself first of all as a palliative for [satisfaction donnée à] the chaos that ensues owing to the inability of all signifying elements to deal with the hole in existence that has been created by someone's death. The entire signifying system is brought to bear on even the slightest case of mourning.”