Series: The Seminar Of The NUS Psychoanalysis Society - Seminar III: Lacan Loaded?
"In other words, the hole in the real provoked by a loss, a real loss, this sort of unbearable loss for the human being, which provokes mourning in him, is found in the real".
This seminar is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on psychoanalysis, covering the works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud.
The Nostomodernist project is 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.
Please subscribe to our newsletter and follow @thenostomodernreview on Instagram to receive the latest updates on this series. All support is appreciated.
Seminar III: Lacan Loaded? was delivered by Thomas J. Pellarin on Sunday, 23rd October 2022 in the Philosophy Graduates Room at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
Introduction to Seminar III
I must admit that these seminars, while introductory by nature and intention, and reproducible by design, such that they can be replicated and performed as necessary, if one understands Lacan and has some ability to recreate the trains-of-thought and logic in the midst of presenting the seminar itself, are still insufficient in some ways: I am not referring content, but to the approximation of Lacan—to the misrepresentation of Lacan—insofar as Lacan is disfigured to make him understandable to someone who does not know him.
In the same way that a general impression of a person can be imprinted beforehand, such that you can either create a good or bad image of a person by recommending or warning against their company to a friend or acquaintance, such that your friend asks if this person is trustworthy or kind or a good person, these seminars aim for that function—both as an excuse for the deficiencies in my understanding of Lacan as well as for the notion that an approximate Lacan, which captures the spirit of his thought, is better as an introduction than the immediate turn-off of reading Lacan cold or blind, which most people encounter, upon reading him for the first time.
This is not to say that my intention is to be deficient; I have done my due readings, but the vastness and evolving nature of Lacan in his life is also another excuse to say that I cannot know everything, except that which I do know, and which I feel is important enough to me, such that I have a desire to share inasmuch as that desire is reflective of another desire or belief that this knowledge of Lacan can fulfill my Lack too, or at least the common instances of Lack which agonise me as they agonise other human beings. I also reiterate that the other purpose of the seminar is to inculcate an attitude towards Lacan, such that further study of him, particularly of his famous passages, becomes closer to the phenomena of meeting an old and intimate friend, instead of a elusive and baffling stranger.
These seminar notes are also subject to revisions post-seminar, because if the design is reproducible by intention, such that anyone can replicate them on their own, or that I could potentially teach them again, and so long as I can continue to edit them, there is an drive to perfection, because I would like to repair the shortfalls as I see them, so, you the reader, returning to the seminars and have the interest to continue to, will be met with some changes to their contents every once in a while.
Guiding Questions
What is Grief?
What is Mourning?
What is Melancholia or Depression?
What is the relevance of the Real to Grief?
What is the significance of Laertes to Lacan?
What is Acceptance or learning to live with Lack?
What is a Question?
What is a Fetish object?
What is the role of the Analyst?
What is role of the Analysand?
What is the end of Psychoanalysis?
Seminar Notes
In the third seminar, I will be speaking about grief and its manifestations as either Mourning or Depression according to the Lacanian rehabilitation of Freud’s initial framing of them in his seminal 1917 paper on Mourning and Melancholia. It is Freud who frames Grief as either exorcised as Mourning or Depression, but it is Lacan who articulates that we might come out of both by learning how to live with our Lack, or by facing that bit of truth or reality which we know but do not want to yet acknowledge, and therefore cover-up with symbolic gestures and actions, so as to create a minimum symbolic distance from who we were and who we are now in Grief, such that we can say that we are no longer those people insofar as we mythologise a symbolic gap between the universe we once had and the universe which now has a hole at the centre of it, but which we have once again covered up by symbols or deferred onto new desires, which inevitably mask that which we do not want to accept but we will someday have to know.
But to speak about Grief, we must first have to consider what Freud says in Mourning and Melancholia. Freud clarifies that there is no right or proper way to grieve, and that Grief as an encounter with a new and frightful reality, either because of the loss of object of desire or the object onto which reality is associated with, is always catastrophic. Having lost his father in 1896, Freud ruminated for many years on phenomena of grief, such that he remarks that the process of Grief is mediated through the mysterious process of Mourning, or that process of coming-to-terms with the new reality suddenly thrust upon you and which threatens to destroy you.
Freud, however, notes that it is natural to mourn out of Grief and that the subject, through bereavement, or through enduring the pain, eventually finds a way to live with it, and thus to lessen it, until there is eventually a change in their life which allows them as subject to re-enter the world.
Freud identifies three characteristics of Mourning, which is first defined by a loss of most interest in interacting with the outside world or Others, secondly by a loss of a general capacity to offer or receive Love from Others, and thirdly by an inhibition of most interest towards common activities—at least when compared to before—such that there is a kind of narcissistic withdrawal into the self that is reminiscent of sleep as an excommunication from the world, and that this retreat, in some way, gives back a certain control of reality to the Mourning subject, who is otherwise bombarded by the interactions and psychic influences of Others and society in everyday life, but who now attempts to deny the shadow of such influence.
What is interesting is the nature of this self-withdrawal, because if we consider this catastrophic loss of reality to be succeeded by a reclamation of reality in the denial of anything which could obscure it further, this action of mitigating obscurity through the withdrawal process likewise occurs at the critical point of denial or admission of an inability to meet reality itself. In other words, to defend what little is left of reality, one must deny reality further—at least until one comes to terms with the change, unmediated by a normal dose of interactions with the Other of society. It should be noted that the concept of Other belongs more to Lacan here, but it is useful to describe what Freud is essentially saying.
However, while Freud say that Mourning is natural, he also writes that it can often develop into something chronic, or that it can evolve into what he knew as Melancholia and what we understand now as Depression, or a case whereby the inevitable coming-to-terms with reality is delayed for the sake of remaining in a state of pain and anxiety, as the subject becomes unwilling to let allow the grieving process to occur, and therefore, deliberately intervenes to suspend the suffering of Grief indefinitely.
However, we will first continue with Mourning as a process and later explore the dangerous state of Depression. To integrate both Freudian and Lacanian theory, if Mourning can end through either a transference of desire onto a new object of desire, such that the loss of the old reality is assuaged by the hope of the new one, or through a slow and painful process of learning to live with the truth of our Lack, such that there is a gradual forgetting of the source of our Grief, or its loss of relevance by our effort to continue living in spite of it, the denial of Mourning and its transformation into Depression involves a transference of the denial to the point of self-mutilation or self-delusion, such that the process is deliberately sabotaged by the grieving subject, in order to deny the power of the new reality, so that the subject may live, as it were, in the half-step dream world between the old and the new realities.
The danger which Freud draws attention to is that this denial, over time, can become a reality itself; which is to say, that the Depressive subject can become delusional and thus trapped by a double aspect of trauma, which will first need to be overcome as the denying or suspended reality, before confronting the initial trauma lying underneath—to expose its truth and therefore its suppressed effects—such that the treatment of Depression, and therefore the analysis of the subject, becomes even more difficult and complex to treat as a result.
Hence, the recommendation for Freud is not to avoid Mourning, but to mourn without holding onto any Fetish object, or anything which could deny, suppress or delay the Mourning process, insofar as you know, at the critical moment, that continuing to delay bereavement will risk a fall into Depression.
However, Freud is sympathetic, because the condition of Grief is nothing less than a catastrophe, and that in a paradoxical way—as framed earlier—to overcome the agony of grief is to come to terms with the agony of that which the unconscious already knows it must eventually know; naturally, pointing to this fact or to inevitable confrontation makes it no easier to resist turning away from the sight of what causes us the agony itself—but what is important, Freud notes, is that we nonetheless continue to try, despite the pain which often is still too much for us, and combat the seduction of remaining in Grief if it means part of the old reality can remain even if it causes agony.
To frame this into the symbolic jargon of Lacan, the condition of Grief is nothing less than a catastrophe too, according to Lacan, but Lacan frames it as a hole in the universe—or the Real—which as an encounter is always traumatic, given that the Real or the underlying reality which always exist outside of our perception—until the day it finally does not—typically adopts a symbolic disguise, such that it can be rendered acceptable to us most of the time, and its horrifying truth kept at a certain and minimum distance and instilled with a symbolic meaning against that which it is: that part of reality which cannot be signified, observed or penetrated by anything in our language, and thus, which we substitute with an unknowable stand-in of something on the edge of out there.
The Real in this case is the immanence of death which exists everywhere, or the aspect of entropy which constantly threatens to destroy our lives, but which we reify symbolically as fate, free will and providence, such that the Real of death is always there, if hidden and made symbolically digestible, such that we can live our lives with the assumption of a consistent and comprehensible world of habits, routines and expectations, but what is usually covered up by the illusion of everyday life and which now stares us in the face as death and thus grief is something that we will desperately do anything to cover with a mask once encountered—we wish to return to things as they were before.
In other words, it is possible to explain Mourning via Lacan as a consistent denial of reality through symbolic gestures, insofar as it is not a new reality which is catastrophically encountered, but the true nature of reality which is always there but usually disguised through the Symbolic register, such that this hole in the universe which causes us Grief, as an encounter with the Real, is immediately covered up by a new set of symbolic transferences of our desires onto other desires or symbolic meanings or, once again, anything which we gains us a minimum symbolic distance to safety, away from the agony of Grief—or, we might deny the gaining of any distance, as with the case of Depression.
In observing how the Real is covered up with symbolic methods of transference, we might consider the degree of transference, or the extent to which the same desires are now deferred along the signifying chain as metonymy, such as how funeral rites, the adoption of new hobbies and friends, or other symbolic rituals such as burning love letters or objects which associate with the old reality, may quickly become part of the bereavement process as an escape from catastrophic agony—to deny these transferences is, likewise, to head in the opposite fashion towards stagnancy and thus Depression.
In both cases, a symbolic and imaginary flight into self-delusion occurs, but what does desire refer to in either case? Recall that in previous seminars, we spoke of the objet petit a, or the impossible object of desire which situates our quest for fulfilment through Love, castration and annihilation. The catastrophic nature of Grief can be interpreted as a terrifying confrontation with the limits of desire, or the impossibility of fulfilling the impossible object—which is still nevertheless attempted out of hope through an imaginary process as mediated by symbolic stand-ins and images—but that this impossibility is now revealed as impossible without any hope, and the dearth of hope is what agonises us in Grief: there is no hope anymore and the dream is essentially irretrievable forever.
In this way, whatever was a fixture in our universe is now gone, and that aspect of ourselves which we believed they could fill, as either in the role of Lover or a friend, or as a mirror that reveals how Others see us or as a point of constancy in our lives, which associated with a certain reality, is gone with them: the response is to flee into further other delusions or to immobilise time to preserve whatever is left of the old expectation of fulfilling desire.
But moving forward, the famous example which Lacan uses to illustrate the phenomena of Grief and Mourning is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whereby in Act V, preceding the duel between Laertes and Hamlet, after both men jump into the grave of Ophelia and declare their Grief over her death, Lacan points us to Laertes’ initial comment, which he speaks upon entering the grave of his beloved sister, which I will read for you:
Hold off the earth a while,
Till I have caught her once more in mine arms.
What Lacan draws our attention, in his discussions of Laertes’ process of Mourning in Seminar VI, is the fact that Laertes holds off the burial, in his final goodbye to Ophelia, and thus to the image or symbolic stand-in for her soul which is represented by her body—likewise standing-in for a loss in of itself of an associative or symbolic object that holds the gap in the Real at bay, as a neurotic and fragile stitching between the old and new realities, which nevertheless keeps the truth at a minimum and tolerable distance—so that he may commit one last symbolic gesture before his last goodbye to make peace with her.
This is necessarily a meaningless act to her, in light of her death; however, this symbolic ritual or stand-in to be able to cope with the hole in the universe is meaningful to him in the darkness he now feels towards the new reality which was thrust upon him, such that only this act of symbolic value can signify to him as a form of Mourning which creates a sufficient minimum symbolic distance for him to be able to come to terms with the death of his sister Ophelia.
But it is unlikely, even if Laertes had survived his duel with Hamlet, that this unorthodox funeral rite of stepping into her grave would have been the last instance of symbolic gesture that Laertes would have needed to perform to assuage himself of his Grief over her; Lacan draws us to consider that this is because desire is always present, such that there is no definitive act which could destroy the desire which the yearning for the old reality represents, but that there are only minimum acts which could defer or distance us sufficiently enough, so that we are able to transfer our desires onto other objects and thus become distracted by other answers to desire until we have forgotten or symbolically lessened the hole in the universe—although the hole is still there, in the same way that it remains open since the loss of our ambition to be the object of desire for our mother, which is a topic I will elaborate on within the second half of the seminar.
However, this symbolic gesture still functions as part of the effort to come-to-terms with Lack as Mourning; for Laertes, it is his attempt to accept the omniscience of the Real in his indirect way, because he will forever Lack the person of his sister, who is irretrievable now, and thus, he is doomed to never be able to be filled in his desire for her presence as the Other again, which once he associated as part of his imagined world or universe. Even so, life must go on, and it is possible that he could forget the catastrophe of the death of his sister eventually, until it is awakened again by the phenomena of memory, in the operations as described in the grand novel by Marcel Proust by the incidences of madeleines, novels and footpaths, such that like the signifying chain, we only know how deep we feel when it is too late, because by then, we would have already overwhelmed by it as an involuntary memory.
For Lacan, memory is essentially a imaginary mediator between the self and the Real, as the Real is avoided through its symbolisation of certain events, in the sense that there is no pure memory or act of remembrance, but only a subjective memory that is covered by what we choose to draw attention to, and which is coloured by desire, and that this is how memories can operate in evoking a new set of causes or denials of desire within ourselves if they remind us as a symbol of our Grief.
This enters into the consideration of the unconscious as that which we cannot remember, or that which we know we must remember, such that the act of speaking, or language as the structure of the unconscious, can be expected to eventually brings out for us to find again. In an interview, Lacan said that a question, which a person poses as part of psychoanalytic treatment to the analyst, is nothing more than a voicing of an anticipation of what they are going to eventually find.
Therefore, when we return to the case of Depression, we find an explanation for what constitutes as a masochistic denial, prolongation or procrastination of this anticipation, or the event of coming face-to-face with what you know you are eventually going to find, and that the operation of Depression pushes the subject past the point of recovery, or beyond the critical point of jouissance, where the comfort of Mourning as a natural response to Grief is extended even if the subject is fatigued and wishes to move on with life.
In this moment, the paradoxical cause of pleasure which accompanies the catharsis of Mourning, is converted by a deliberate regression away from recovery, and instead, towards a state which dysfunctionally desires to remain suspended in lost and otherwise irrecoverable time.
Even at the cost of their happiness, the subject will remain lodged in place, unwilling to allow the Mourning process to take its course, having replaced the old reality with the stand-in halfway reality of Depression, as the symbolic stand-in for a lost that is thus never fully consummated, and which therefore does not require itself to be validated for what it is: utterly catastrophic.
And yet, there is a masochistic element here; perhaps, one might say that it is better to live with the Devil you know, then the one you do not, and that the Depressive prefers the comfort of accustomed sadness to the more difficult but eventually lesser sadness of admitting that the dream is over.
I will reiterate, however, that the process of Mourning, which recovers by coming-to-terms with the Real, and thus substituting the Real with a symbolic stand-in, or something which is not the Real itself but which nonetheless, because of its believed proximity to the Real, acts as a catalyst or a psychological safe-house for a point of development where something finally changes, such that the change is sufficient enough for us to accept what we Lack, so as to be able to live with what we Lack, and therefore feel that the agony of loss or the disappearance of the whole universe no longer stops us from living.
Thus, to transition into talking about recovery, we become able to at least clear the three conditions which Freud states are characteristic of Mourning; namely, that we are able to interact with the outside world again, we are able to love again and we are able to find an interest in the world once more.
If not achieved through a transference of symbolic associations onto new desires or stand-ins for old desires—all desire inevitably trace themselves to the impossible object of desire, or the objet petit a—then Lacan remarks that the speaking cure of psychoanalysis can also be considered as a means of remembering that which you know you must remember.
It is unsurprising that in Grief, one often feels the urge to speak and thus act out Grief, as if there were something that needed to be said, and which afterwards, carries us closer to the point of satisfaction and thus silence out of catharsis.
Lacan points to the gesture of silence as the possible point of a successful recovery because it occurs at the moment where one feels nothing except to be silent on the subject of their Grief or feels nausea at the idea of speaking more on the subject. This is the point where the unconscious, or the agony which does not reveal itself consciously as agony—until it is too late—can be assuaged by reifying itself into consciousness, until there is nothing left to say and therefore nothing left to remember as the end of psychoanalysis.
But Mourning is an imperfect process, and the possibility of the hole in the universe revealing itself again, and thus opening up again—although, arguably, it can never be closed, and only deferred or forgotten without a need to remembered—such that the need for psychoanalysis raises itself up again too, is constantly present. It should also be noted that my usage of recovery here is conditional: there is no recovery from Grief, insofar as recovery brings us no closer to the original state of affairs as it does closer to a transferred or deferred one in the future.
There is, in this sense, never a permanent end to need for psychoanalysis, because as Lacan remarks in his 1974 lecture, La Troisième, as translated by Yolande Szczech, “But if psychoanalysis succeeds thus, it will die out being nothing but a forgotten symptom. It ought not to be surprised by this, that’s the destiny of truth, that which itself establishes as a principle: the truth is forgotten. Thus everything depends on whether the real insists. Of course, because of this psychoanalysis must fail. Admittedly, it does take that path and thus there still is a good chance of it remaining a symptom, of growing and of multiplying itself.”
We are destined to forget what we have learnt, and therefore doomed in some ways to repeat it. We can never return to where we were, but nonetheless, it is possible to come to a stage in the future, if we choose to avoid falling into Depression, which could be described as the aim of psychoanalysis: or as the silence which, given that the structure of the unconscious as being like a language, for now signifies that there is nothing worth speaking of anymore on this subject of the past, because the unconscious in the present has symbolically come-to-terms with the Real through language wrought out like a string of conscious desires, clearing that minimum symbolic distance which gives us enough strength to live again and thus which offers us peace.
At this point, we will be taking a break before the second half of the seminar, where we will be talking more about the Fetish object and the specific roles of the Analyst and Analysand in recovery, as well as what analysis can and cannot do to help us with the hole in the universe.
The Fetish object can be considered as a product of transference; however, for Freud and Lacan, it often fulfils a peculiar function of suspending Grief by association with the old reality, such that the possession of the Fetish object is enough for the subject to deny the potency of Grief onto themselves as a cause for Mourning.
If through transference, we find an explanation for why people in Grief often affect a change in their lives or a lifestyle or environmental change, which could replace or deny them the interactions with or which resemble the symbolic objects associated with the old reality, and thus, which remain imbued with too much symbolic meaning, then Fetish objects are not avoided but sought to be retained. These objects are considered vital and contingent to the preservation of that old Imaginary reality, such that they can transfer desire onto themselves as related and almost equivalent objects of association, and therefore prevent or delay the acceptance of the new reality, although this is not necessarily Depression.
If anything, it is possible to consider the possession of a Fetish object as almost a third category of processing Grief, acting with a composite nature of allowing the subject to continue living in both the old and new universes, while invoking a withdrawal or denial of some kind towards the Fetish object and yet being able to function as if Grief were not as powerful as it ought to be.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in his 2016 book, Disparities, offers a clear illustration of how the Fetish object functions with his anecdote about the man and his deceased wife’s hamster. To summarise, after the death of his wife, the man in the anecdote appears to be incapable of grieving, or that he is observed as being strangely accepting of the death of his wife, such that when he speaks in the company of his friends, they remark on this behaviour. However, his friends also notice that whenever the man speaks about his wife, he gently caresses in his hands his wife’s hamster, which survived her and which he brings along everywhere.
It is only a few months later, when the hamster dies, that there is suddenly a catastrophic reversal of attitude, such that the man breaks down and grieves uncontrollably, being then admitted to a mental health institution out of inconsolable Grief. What Žižek asks us to notice is that the Fetish object of the hamster, in this anecdote, allows the desire of the husband—to continue the castrating process of Love and thus his admittance of Lack for his wife, which his wife once likewise made as part of the exchange which is instrumental in Love, as explored in Seminar II—to be substituted at a sufficient symbolic level.
Through his symbolic recreation of his relationship with his wife via his affection to her hamster, he is still able to be given the universe, or that aspect of himself which only his wife could inspire out of him, and which he believes could fulfill the impossible object of desire, or the objet petit a, such that this was the reason why he Loved her and thus was willing to castrate himself—to show his Lack—as part of the impossible process of Love involving the exchange of the Beloved and Lover positions; this can be revised by exploring the notes of Seminar II.
This substitution becomes untenable upon the death of the hamster, because it reveals the inescapable Real to the forefront of his consciousness, such that the symbolic impotency of his act is revealed too, and so this act of transference no longer suffices in a symbolic role, and almost nothing could satisfy at this point the symbolic role, because the universe has collapsed a second time, and thus that the truth of the Real is finally shown to him: we are at the horrific mercy of a monolithic fate, which could at any time, destroy the world as we know it, and we have neurotically tried to cover up this fact, first at the point of the mirror stage—that we are not what others think we are and therefore that we are never alone nor complete within ourselves—and now, with everything else that could leave us with some symbolic protection against this fact. It is not surprising that his response was a catastrophic breakdown.
However, it becomes important to distinguish between Grief which is characterised by the death of a loved one and the Grief that arises from the death of a Love affair; in the latter case, the object of Love is not dead but instead has become incomprehensible to us, in a different but also catastrophic way, that the death of a loved one, despite the similar holes created in the imagined universe, cannot be compared to, because one kind of death is more absolute than the other.
In other words, the loss of our Beloved, or the one who gave us the universe, or the universe itself, is differentiated by real death and imaginary death. I leave this distinction of two types of Grief to the second half of the seminar because the nature of Mourning is more or less the same for both; however, the process of Mourning for the death of a Love affair involve an aspect of hope, or irreversibility, which could cheat death and therefore carries a greater risk of Depression, which the other kind of Grief lacks.
In the real death of a loved one, if we obfuscate the truth through the small rituals we observe in Mourning, like the ritual of the funeral before burial or cremation, or more neurotically, in the actions afterwards which mimic the everyday life we had in the old reality, such that the real body of the deceased is gone, and yet we carry on with saying religious rites to the ashes of the dead—if we keep them in our homes, as if their presence were guaranteed by their proximity—or that we leave seats or rooms unchanged or open, as if the dead or their mock presence could occupy them sufficiently, we must still admit that these are the symbolic gestures of the living to come-to-terms with that which they already know they must know: that the universe will no longer be the same and that their loved one is dead.
Even if it is possible for the mourners of the deceased to imagine a reality in which the dead are still alive, there is an impossible aspect which cannot overcome death, such that death is absolute; this is the essential difference between Grief over the death of a Loved one and the death of a Love affair, because in the latter, our Beloved is often very much alive, such that we could still love them, and thus what occupies our neuroticism is not the soothing of this fact of permanency nor the completeness of real death, which would signify that death is absolute and irreversible, but the soothing of hope for Love again, which remains as a real possibility of reversal and thus lies in the magical cheating of death itself—a miracle of a plausible kind.
In other words, there is a hope that we might undo the process of death, and thus reclaim the universe with the person who refuses to give it to us, but who once gave it to us and therefore can give it to us again, especially if they ended the Love affair between us. Along the signifying chain, this hope exists for as long as it needs to, because it can only be consummated retrospectively and hence, it could exist forever if not intervened or stopped prematurely, in a deliberate admission or foreclosure from possibility.
The death of our Beloved is hence different from our separation from them, because it is possible for people to hope for the rest of our lives for the return of a Beloved who has long become incomprehensible to them, and yet which they might hope out of hope can return, as if their Beloved could still fill the impossible object of their desire.
Therein lies the danger of hope in separation: to grieve the death of a relationship is more dangerous than to grieve the real death of a person, such that the end of a love affair is characterised by an incomprehensibility rather than an impossibility. It is not that our Beloved is dead, but that they have become incomprehensible to us, having made a decision that hurts us greatly, such as refusing to make the exchange which is so characteristic of Love, or by betraying us to their own desires, whose transference they no longer believe could work out with us, such that therefore, in either case, there is a hole which carves itself into the universe, and which signals the death of the universe or the end of reality as we know it, symbolically-speaking.
We are thus forced into a new universe which we cannot accept, but which we must live in, as decided for us by our former Beloved who, in this episode of incomprehensibility, fosters a catastrophic double encounter between ourselves and the Real —with us as the now-obvious Lover subject and not the Beloved—as well as between ourselves and the Real of our Beloved as Other, such that in Love we are always fall in Love at a distance, not with the person but with the part of a person we believe could possibly fill our Lack or the objet petit a, and hence, for whom we are willing to give everything in Love and thus castrate ourselves for—overcoming our anxiety over this loss of potency by the promise of fulfilment—but for whom we now observe as a stranger.
What hurts the most in this case, and therefore what we grieve, is the sincere belief that for a short time, we indeed were able to satisfy the impossible object of our desire, such that it is sometimes incomprehensible to us why, if this satisfaction were possible, it could be destroyed so quickly by the Beloved who we believed gave us the universe of ourselves—it should be noted that this fulfilment was inherently impossible, but somehow we fooled ourselves into believing it, which we might consider as being good as the real thing.
Hence, given their betrayal of our hopes for fulfilment, we may no longer be able to recognise them as our Beloved, or the person who we believed could fulfil the impossible object of our desire. However, at that moment, we also encounter a question and thus an opportunity to learn who this person actually is, or rather, who they are as more than our object of symbolised desire.
I said in Seminar II that in the aspect of love, there is an aspect of hate, such that there is an incomprehensibility which defines a hatred towards this person who we call our Beloved: that their inability to meet our expectations and needs causes us to question why we believed this person to be the best chance we had for fulfilling our Lack.
But the maturity or coming-to-terms with this Grief is learning to live with our Lack, even in Love, and thus to accept that we are not going to get everything out of a relationship, and that even with these aspects which irritate anger and disbelieve us from our Beloved, we may still choose them as the object of our Love, and for whom we are still willing to castrate ourselves and attempt to make that crucial exchange with, because there must have been a good reason, or rather, because you are still my best chance to fulfill my Lack, so that the two of us may have the best chance, even if it is impossible, to fulfil the Lack of each other together.
It is possible, based on this premise, to find an explanation for forgiveness this way: that despite their betrayal, we are willing to forgive our Beloved partner, for whom we no longer see unreasonably as being able to fulfill our impossible object of desire, but in whom we still believe we could get close as possible to fulfilling it more than anyone else, such that we are able to overcome our hatred for what we despise about them with what we Love.
It is also permissible that no forgiveness occurs, and that therefore, in the death or end of a Love affair, this double hole in the universe—one hole in the universe of the Real and one hole in the imagined universe of our Beloved, and both of which invite us to learn more about our Beloved as beyond what they meant to us as well as what it reveals to us about ourselves and beyond what we have imagined or desired the universe to be—offers us a means out of Grief, if we can admit and live with the fact that our Beloved can no longer satisfy us and that it is no longer wise to hope that they could.
In a way, the nature of Grief is similar to that of Love, in the structure of a reversed process of Love, or by the fact that Grief too is an impossible process in search for an impossible hope, because you are never going to be able to patch up the hole in the universe, which is coloured by Grief, in the same way that you are never going to be able to patch up the hole in your impossible object of desire, which is coloured by Love, but that it is the effort in both cases that counts: it is the mere attempt which is more important than any result, such that in the end, even if imperfect, it will be better than what you have, because there is an inherent hope that accompanies every attempt to fulfill our desires or to find the pleasures which makes life worthwhile, or the pleasure with pain that makes life worth living.
But we should not neglect nor forget what the catastrophe of Grief and all its steps of its agony reveal about us as well: that we find an explanation for the notion that the strength of Grief is proportional to the strength of its Love upon our agonising encounter with Grief; it reveals that we have within ourselves an inherent and grand capacity to hope for the better in our lives, and that even through pain, such that we will tolerate a great and significant amount of suffering, again and again, we will weather it for the possibility of fulfilling that object of desire, which originated in the mirror stage and has been haunting us ever since.
In other words, in every agonising effort of Love and Grief lies a warmness or desire for Love and connection with other human beings; and that we only grieve their loss because we Loved the world in which they lived so much that we cannot bear to see it changed, and that we are so willing to live in delusion if could find this Love again, and that we would be willing to symbolically destroy the world in order to live in beautiful illusion which we can access in the hope of you and me—the birthplace for every Romanticism as a rejection of the Real.
Hence, we have explored what Freud and Lacan might say about the process of Mourning and Depression and how it relates to desire and Love. I should explain, before the final portion of the seminar, that in Grief out of the death of a Love affair, which I admit is a partial invention of my own to explain Lacan in better terms than his bare own, we find an explanation for the chasing of frivolous sexual encounters, which are often associated with this type of Grief, in the desire to reclaim the phallus by both men and women: or that in the case of betrayal, and the failure of the exchange of Beloved and Lover positions to occur as necessary in Love, there is a desire to reclaim the phallus which was castrated in presenting our Lack to each other.
Lacan explains that it is the masculine impulse, as the one who suffers the greater risk of castration because he is the one who mythologically possesses, to engage in wanton acts that prove his repossession of sexual power and thus his ownership of the phallus—or as the one who gives. This retributive sexuality is considered by Lacan to be a transference of his desires, in the wake of his loss of the universe, towards a more primordial image, reminiscent of the Name-of-the-Father, as a method of grieving which underscores how vast the depth of agony was to him who, despite his power, was willing to deliver it up to his Beloved, if it meant that the latter could give him the universe.
Conversely, the feminine impulse, which I would like to clarify, in the liberatory interpretation of Lacan, is more performative than essential to the identity of woman, is less wanting of a repossession of the phallus, given that it is she who Lacks and who therefore receives what the masculine offers her, which she accepts as both his castration and her pleasure; in other words, what the feminine seeks out of Grief is not a resumption of power, but a desire to once again feel loved, or to be possessed, or to be desired as a castrating source of jouissance and thus indirect phallic power.
With this explained, I would like to conclude the seminar by clarifying on the role of Analysand in the process of recovery from either Mourning or Depression, which is oriented by Lacan as to discover for themselves that which they already know they are going to discover, or that which is within the unconscious as a forgotten bit of truth, which therefore the Analysand knows must be remembered or that it is going to be remembered, and that the Analyst therefore plays a role in multiplying the possibility or probabilities of this bit of truth emerging out of a combination of events, feelings and symbols during the session, so that the Analysand might be able to solve the problem themselves.
In his 1940 book, An Outline Of Psychoanalysis, Freud comments on the purposes and limits of the Analyst in analysis: “However much the analyst may be tempted to become teacher, role model and ideal for others, to create humans in his own image, he mustn't forget that this is not his task in the analytical relationship; indeed, that he would be betraying his task if he allowed himself to be swept away by his inclinations. He would then simply be repeating one of the mistakes of the parents, who crushed their child's independence by their influence. He would be merely replacing the earlier dependence by a newer one. In all his efforts to improve and educate the patient, though, the analyst should respect his individuality. The degree of influence that he can legitimately allow himself will be determined by the degree of developmental inhibition that the patient exhibits. Some neurotics have remained so infantile that in analysis, too, they can only be treated like children. Yet another advantage of transference is that it allows the patient to present us with an important part of his life story in all its plastic clarity — a part about which he would probably otherwise have given us insufficient information. He as it were acts it out for us instead of telling us about it.”
However, we can sense from this passage a kind of paternal tendency which Freud maintained throughout his work: that there is something essentially to solve about the Analysand or return them to as a prior and functioning state out of their neurosis, which could allow them to live in society.
When we consider the Lacanian rehabilitation of this idea, we find no expectation of a conclusion to psychoanalysis other than the possibility of being able to work through it through silence on the subject; or rather, that the effectiveness of psychoanalysis is dependent on the ability of the Analysand to know or act out themselves what they think they need to know, and whether they can arrive at a point of self-knowledge which immediately negates the need for self-knowledge further.
As I have stressed in previous seminars, the mechanism of psychoanalysis is hinged upon on the working of the Analysand to solve their own problems, with the assistance of the Analyst as a mirror which reifies them as the Other and the necessary image which shows them, in the dialectical fashion, everything which they are not, and therefore, everything which they are.
This is to say: the set which contains everything that you are is able to reveal everything that you are not, insofar as the latter is not included in the everything of you. Therefore, in the process of figuring out what others see as you, you figure out what you do not want to be seen as, and hence, how you desire to be seen, and therefore what are the vague limits of the Real, such that it begins to irk you upon its encounter.
Speaking outside of Lacanian theory, as a final anecdote to bring the topic of Grief closer to a real-life case study, I would like to point to my own application of psychoanalytic method to my own experiences of Grief and Mourning, such that I also learning to live in the new universe of my experience, attempting to avoid a narcissistic withdrawal within myself, so as to be able to function with three conditions as Freud described, such that my learning of psychoanalysis has been a means to gain enough symbolic distance from where I was to who I am now, in the wake of the loss of the whole universe or the catastrophe known as the death of my Love, such that these seminars are also an act of creating a minimum symbolic distance. They are a transference of my desires, or a symbolic ritual that allows me to be able to lessen the power of the past to me, such that I question if this seminar is itself a fetish object, which I use to stave off my memories of her as significant to me as the one who could have given me the universe.
I am not embarrassed to admit my Lack here; there can be no Love without a willingness to offer the castration of oneself, because in every human being lies the hope or instinct for warmth which sustains hope, that our impossible object of desire might be fulfilled in our intersubjective relationships with each other.
But my own method of flight, in the aftermath of the end of my Love affair, was to speak about her until either I had nothing to say or until I had reached a critical point of jouissance, such that to say anything else would bring me nausea, and that at that point, I could finally begin to eliminate my need for self-knowledge or the articulation of the unconscious which I have forgotten, because I have now remembered it sufficiently enough to be able to live with my Lack, even if I still desire it, and that I therefore still desire the person who signified to me the best possible means of filling the possible object, or the objet petit a, because of how she once gave me the universe to the point of unforgettable jouissance.
Therefore, I eventually stopped speaking of my Lack as the only appropriate action which would signify the possibility of coming-to-terms with Lack, which raises the question if these seminars signify a continuing and hidden analysis of myself. But remembering that life is not a matter of perfection nor is psychoanalysis, and that the nature of analysis is the coming-to-terms with imperfection, or to the hallmark condition of Lack which colours every human being in their search for fulfilment, love and happiness at the centre of our relationships between each other—as motivated by the visions of Eden we see in our love for each Other—we ought to do our best in this life with each Other.
Thank you for attending the seminar.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.