Symptoms

“Open the books by Mr Jung and his school, and you will see that there is an entire stock, the entire baggage of images – they sprout and they vegetate everywhere. There is the serpent, the dragon, tongues, the flaming eye, the green plant, the pot of flowers, the concierge. They are all fundamental images, incontestably stuffed with signification. It is just that we can do strictly nothing with them, and if you move about at this level, you will only succeed in losing yourself in the vegetating forest of primitive archetypes.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious

Liv Ullmann in Persona, 1966

Lewis A. Kirshner, Having a Life: Self Pathology After Lacan (2004)

The analyst must [...] know that his occupying the correct position is not contingent on the criterion that he understand or not understand. It is not absolutely essential that he understand. I would even say that, up to a certain point, his lack of comprehension can be preferable to an overly great confidence in his understanding. In other words, he must always call into question what he understands and remind himself that what he is trying to attain is precisely what in theory he does not understand. It is certainly only insofar as he knows what desire is, but does not know what the particular subject with whom he is engaged in the analytic adventure desires, that he is well situated to contain within himself the object of that desire. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VIII: Transference (1960-1961)

Not that drugs would be inherently incapable of surprising or enhancing how people live with drugs in general (Dennis, 2020: 68; Gomart, 2004). But insofar as an apparatus of addiction has come to organise the experience of a particular subject, the Lacanian position would be that the drugs will offer few opportunities for surprise and otherness. On the contrary, addiction centres, fixes and totalizes experience through its orientation towards a particular object. To re-enchant and surprise this apparatus, one instead needs to engage in that area of psychosomatic experience that is radically indeterminate, namely the domain of unconscious fantasies. It is with this focus on fantasy that psychoanalysis introduces a dimension of radical indeterminacy between subjective, bodily and social reality, which touches on ongoing discussions in body studies. Palm, F. (2023). Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Addiction and Enjoyment. Body & Society, 29(1), 56-78.

In contrast to this addict speech, it is then vital for psychoanalysis to establish a speech that incorporates enjoyment, and this is precisely what desire allows for as it (re)introduces the question of enjoyment in relation to the symbolic Other. Allowing the subject to articulate her enjoyment in terms of an appeal to the Other (Fink, 2014: 168), the aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to break the opposition between speech and enjoyment and to form an enjoyment-in-speech, or what Žižek has coined an ‘enjoy-meant’ (Žižek, 1994: 156). And rather than being a process of cognitive integration or understanding, this articulation awakens and re-enchants the subject by introducing her to something in her existence that positions her being in relation to others, to the enigma of enjoyment (Kelly and Malone, 2018; Loose, 2018). Palm, F. (2023). Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Addiction and Enjoyment. Body & Society, 29(1), 56-78.