ABSTRACT
Key concepts: discourse, letter, jouissance, sexual relationship, society as Other, alienation, psychotherapy, the imposition of the Other and language must be understood in a different way. Leadership and the metaphor of a different G-d.
This chapter focuses on how Lacan applies his theory of meaning inside and outside the signifier. Lacan considers the sexual relation outside the signifier and inside the body of jouissance, while discussing some complicated relations among language, discourse, letter, jouissance, and the sexual relationship. We are sure all of that is going to have to be unpacked because we are not sure Lacan is using precise distinctions here, and that’s always the problem. Sometimes we think Lacanian texts should have a glossary of terms so that it would make it easier for the reader when talking about one or different concepts to clarify that we are all talking about the same thing, because it is not always clear. This is part of the difficulty with Lacan’s discourse or Lacanian theory, because when one tries to pin it down or define it precisely, it gets blurry – that’s part of the encounter with the Real as it appears in language – which unfortunately makes it confusing. So the solution is somewhere between the two extremes of having a very clear definition of all the concepts which would make it more understandable (but then reducing the Real to the Symbolic) and at the other end, having the tolerance for the ambiguity of the aspect of the definitions that are blurry or undefined. So, we find ourselves somewhere in the middle there.
There is an idea that language or society (as the Other) imposes an unnecessary alienation on us, and psychotherapists must help patients get rid of the unpleasant excess that society imposes on them. People nowadays don’t want to accept any restrictions placed on the individual, as if there could be a society without any normal repression or incest prohibition. The imposition of the Other and language must be understood in a different way. This form of change has something to do also with the movement of the Name of the Father from the Symbolic to the Real.
This makes the Name of the Father a more rational symbolic function, which makes it more palatable and apparently more democratic, because it doesn’t seem to be imposed by anybody. Bion himself experimented with group analysis. The group authority was suspended, and the group was allowed to do whatever it wanted. Bion underwent a lot of criticism because the people who were funding his work were not sure about what he was doing: “This is just chaos”!
John Rickman found that the group itself then wanted to organize and create a hierarchy among them in ways that were functional, pretty much like the brothers of the primal horde after they had killed the father. Members were all good at different tasks, so they all worked out of their own free will and the tasks did not have to be imposed by the powers that be. Leadership becomes rational in the way that Freud talked about in terms of transforming the rigid boundaries of the superego into the flexible boundaries of the ego. However, this type of group organization may only be possible in small groups or nations.
We cannot escape the fact that the question of limits or “the NO” is emotionally construed in relationship to the father and the mother. Freud, Lacan, and Joyce were all transgressive of the normal rules, of the normal prohibitions of the society at the time. Freud would identify the imposed irrational or religious basis of authority that he was struggling with. But as Lacan said, even atheists are rebelling against the Father, precisely because as they reject belief in God, they are still rebelling against God or the metaphor of ‘a god’.
