Depression doesn’t exist… the pain of existing does

The institution of the subject: moments of structure.

Moment 1:

We need to start from what Freud says about the infant who, at the beginning of life, is prey to fundamental distress, Hilflosigkeit, because of his complete dependence on the primary maternal Other.

You know that in this infant there is a primary jouissance of the whole body that manifests itself as a palpitation of life, of which we know nothing. After the orgastic suffocation of birth, the first cry, then the cry that repeats itself when the child wakes up in a crescendo of unbearable jouissance like the manifestation of a pain of existing, testifies to this jouissance, before speech, before lalangue. In close contact with his mother, who soothes him in response to his purring, to the lallation of his babbling, the infant receives from her the words of a private lalangue, called maternal, which forms traces. Any element of lalangue is, in view of the body’s jouissance, a bit of jouissance, since lalangue is made of this very enjoying, which adds itself to it. It is in this that it extends its roots so far into the body. It animates its jouissance and civilises it ³. In other words, it converts it into satisfaction. (The fact that it can attach itself so strongly to the male organ is an enigma that seems to have no equivalent in the animal kingdom). In such an intimate relationship between the young child and its mother, the spoken word is the sexual rapport, which writes itself between two neighboring generations, as a bath of jouissance through this transmission of lalangue ⁴.

Putting an end to the havoc that is beginning, the mother and father intervene. Not as functions, as we all too often hear in our circles, but as beings of flesh, desiring and speaking so that the child can renounce, of its own (unfathomable decision of being), his primary satisfactions.

Understand now how and why the very young, from the very first days of their lives, caught up in a bath of language, can offer their being to the grasp of the signifier. As Lacan puts it, The call of the Other’s desire is met by “an unfathomable decision of being”, it is a decision of jouissance. We can understand here how the grasp of desire is nothing other than that of an unbeing[2]. This means that the subject exists through the signifier insofar as he has renounced his being.

There are subjects who do not attain this. They are in language, but because of a language-failure of structure, the Foreclosure of the Name of the Father, they cannot form a social bond of discourse to which they have no access. These are the autistic and the psychotic. There are infants who sink and let themselves die.

Moment 2:

This is illustrated, for example, by Freud’s observation of his 3-year-old nephew, who overcomes his distress and sadness at his mother’s absences by playing with the reel. By alternately vocalizing the signifiers fort/da he symbolizes the presence-absence of his mother and destroys her as an object that the reel represents as a symbol. Through his act, the child raises his desire to a second power in his rapport with the Desire of the maternal Other. The fort/da is first of all a symbol as the murder of the Thing constituting in the subject the eternalization of his desire. Hence the scandal of the Freudian truth that desire is carried by death. The fort/da is no longer a simple scansion, but the very foundation of the subjective edifice of desire.

Moment 3:

The mirror stage.

This is a crucial moment in the crystallization of the subjective structure tied to the imaginary. It occurs in the child between 6 and 18 months. Closer to 6 months to be more precise, which is a very early moment. It involves the constitution of narcissism and its egoic instances, that is, the subject’s specular Imaginary, under the direction of the Other of the signifier. We mustn’t forget this, because it’s the reason why the animals don’t have access to it.

I’ll keep two scansions that are essential for our theme.

> The first scansion is this time when the child anticipates his mastery of the virtual image given by the mirror- ideal-I. It is not without turning to the adult who is carrying him to seek his approval, in a state of jubilation that can go as far as ecstasy. It’s a feeling of omnipotence that is part of a paranoid mode of knowing.

> The second scansion marks the opening of a rift between this virtual image of omnipotence and the real of his condition, where the child is at the same time returned to his original powerlessness. Lacan first linked this to the organic prematurity of early life and then correlated it to the action of the signifier, which separates the impulsive body from the organism by dividing it into erogenous zones. This corresponds to the real image (or the real of the imaginary) which is the unconscious image, signifying the body that differs from the corporeal schema provided by the virtual image. The child in it experiences distress, the pain of existing, the effects of depersonalization, the terror of fragmentation. This is what Mélanie Klein very clearly elaborated as the depressive phase in the child’s development. Lacan often borrowed her terms in qualifying the mirror stage as a schizo-paranoid phase.

Once again, we see in the manifestation of these phenomena the alternation between manifestations of jubilation, awakening, triumph that can go as far as ecstasy, even bliss, and manifestations of distress, sadness, despair, and the pain of existing. These phenomena cease as suddenly as they appear, testifying to a structural fact, a touch of the real. They may recur at other moments in the course of life. Here, with The Mirror Stage, we find the Möbian coordinates of such extreme positions as monastic acedia and its melancholic distress, and mystical experience, with its ecstasy going even to the point of bliss.

In this respect, I’d like to give some advice to those dealing with depressed subjects, outside any therapeutic context. For example, for someone around you:

Never shake them up, or even ask them to do it themselves. Why?

Because they find themselves on the verge of breaking up, like a crystal glass that can be shattered by the vibration of an opera singer’s voice. In fact, this subject finds himself hindered (empêché) and prey to emotion, the etymological meaning of which signifies loss of power, dejection – he says so explicitly: “I’m hindered, I can’t do anything”. At best, he commits the acting-out of wanting to stay at the bottom of his bed, in his room, with the lights off and the shutters shut. This is the minimum of an acting-out, which is not a rejection of the unconscious, but an appeal that does not await interpretation as a response. If you force him, he’ll go one step further and make repeated suicide attempts, taking 3 tablets of Lexomyl, which at best fail, because he doesn’t really want to die, to stop suffering. If you force him a little more, you push him to the limits of emotion, which means a movement that disintegrates, a catastrophic reaction. While he is pushed to the maximum of anguish and embarrassment – he also says: “I’m falling apart, I’m very distressed, everything’s barred”. The passage-à-l’acte by rejection of the unconscious is not far off. It’s a brutal act of suicide, with no appeal, no parade, no return. He throws himself out of a window or under a train.

Here we have to trust the structure, let the subject take his time, a tipping point will bring him out of his refuge. Psychoanalysis neither prescribes nor proscribes medication. You have to know that they are Santa’s “candy”. Handling them is a delicate matter, it must be subtle and well-monitored. You don’t give someone anti-depressants and expect to see them every three months. Prescribers are often too heavy-handed. Just as candy contributes to tooth decay, psychotropic drugs, which all have addictive effects, hinder the work of the unconscious, which is deciphering, or the gay-science, which is a virtue as the best treatment for sadness.

Moment 4:

The Oedipus.

Freud, Melanie Klein, Lacan, each in their own way demonstrate how the incidence of symbolic castration in the structuring of desire through the Oedipal parade always has a depressive effect. To put it better, it has a mortifying or even temporarily distressing effect on the subject. Therefrom, for the little girl, her emergence through anguish, which for her is the equivalent of castration, and for the boy his emergence through the castration complex. This depressive effect is caused by the share of consent to the loss of jouissance involved in integrating the signifiers that organize desire by correlating it with the Law. But alternately, the subject who triumphs over the ordeal will also experience a feeling of joy, even euphoria, wellbeing[3] (which I write in two words like Lacan, to evoke the register of the good encounter). Here we already have a first alternation game between sadness and joy. You could have all observed how your grumpy, irritable, and morose child, elsewhere, in the moonlight, for a few months, wakes up transfigured, joyful. A decisive stage has been overcome, it’s a structural fact.

But the thing is that the integration of symbolic law is never fully realized, and there is always an element of failure, it is in this margin that the Superego (the scar, from the Oedipus, as Freud wrote) finds accommodation and produces the effects of its impact, in particular the unconscious feeling of guilt, which is to be distinguished from the awareness of guilt, which is sometimes felt for our petty daily misdeeds.

If a slight vacillation of the subject is produced in relation to the structure, and we move on the side of the signifier by which the division of the subject is determined, even his guilt, as a guilt linked to the Superego, manifests itself in the form of a feeling of unworthiness, illegitimacy accompanied by self-reproaches, with effects of depreciation and of sadness. The Superego does not present the law of the prohibition of incest; it is, on the contrary, the obscene and ferocious imperative command of impossible enjoyment. By giving in to it, these demands become ever more pressing and can lead the subject to the abolition of his desire and to despair, to the point where he feels nothing but the pure pain of existing. This is what happens to the victims of Sade’s writings, suffering torment for eternity beyond life, while their tormentors in return are plunged into the extreme of the pain of existing, by demonstrating that life no longer makes any sense for them.

In brief, what we call the institution of the subject is written $. That is, its division by the signifier that represents it for another signifier, in which its alienation to the signifiers of desire found in the Other consists. This is what happens each time a subject accedes to a new symbolic function, whether desired or forced, as I’ve already said. If there is a moment of triumph, it is not at the same time without what is being produced, by the fact of the subject’s fading and the mortification of his jouissance, of a series of effects that I designate by the terms of unbeing, desertedness, distress, and pain of existing, summoning the subject’s suffering in the silence of the death drives. This doesn’t last.

Let’s take $ here to be a little matheme of sadness. Here we have the constellation of effects and affects of the depression of alienation to the signifier in the institution of the subject. A subject who is brought into existence at the cost of mourning his being.

Here we always find this same beating of the structure and the affects produced by it as a fact of discourse in which bursts of sobbing alternate with cascading laughter, which are also manifestations of the body caused by thought.

As early as 1900 Freud abandoned his Neurotica, in which he invoked the causality of trauma, in favor of fantasy, in the overdetermination of choices, by the subject, of neurosis, perversion, or psychosis. They are each normal positions of the subject in relation to the structure – which is why the psychoanalytic clinic is not a clinic of deficiency, but of the subject who is always responsible for his ethical choices. It is quite clear that it is not society that engenders repression but the opposite. It is the society that builds itself from repression – to understand this, we need only read Totem and Taboo.

The fantasy is the subject’s response in his encounter with the castration of the mother, her symbolic lack, in other words, that of the Other of the signifier. This is borne out by the sexual theories of the child, no less learned or more stupid than those of so-called adults.

The fantasy provides the key to the subject’s position in relation to the embodied structure.

The fantasy is a scenario, a sentence that stages the subject’s desire and jouissance in its correlation to the object. Lacan can therefore write it as follows:

Fantasy is a pleasure machine. It is the support of desire by which it ensures its own pleasure by keeping it within the limits of the Pleasure principle. It thus regulates jouissance under the banner of the Law, that is, of the phallic function. If the fantasy falters, loses its consistency, or dissolves itself, there is an intrusion of jouissance beyond its threshold, the fabric of which borders on pain.

In its imaginary valence, fantasy is a narcissistic dressing up of the object. It is the object desired and loved, written as i(a), that is in front of the subject, as distinct from the objet petit a that causes desire and is found behind, which is formulated as follows:

We have spoken of depressive states, depression of alienation to the signifier, linked to the institution, to the subversion of the subject in the dialectic of desire. That is to say, correlated with repression, and therefore situated on the side of $.

We now turn to the depressive manifestations, which are depressions of separation from the object and from the signifying chain.

A: Depressions linked to the loss of the object: amorous states and mourning.

This is a classic in the Freudian tradition. After Mourning and Melancholia (1915.), in Symptom, Inhibition, Anxiety (1923.) Freud gives the following elaboration:

The loss of a desired and loved object causes grief and pain to the point of the pain of existing. With the subject’s signifying and object moorings broken off from, life loses all meaning for it is deserted by desire, leading to disarray and distress. “You miss one sole being and the world is depopulated”.

The fear of suffering provokes inhibition, which Freud qualifies as “a functional limitation of the I.”. It leads to the retreat of the subject, who can no longer face a task that exceeds his psychic capacities: recognition of his sexual fantasies or transformation of his affects, etc. The sadness that ensues is a transitory state, characterized by the withdrawal of object investments by the libido, which is accompanied by an impoverishment of the I. The subject, disinterested in the world, withdraws to the shelter to protect himself, he believes. Mourning is the paradigm of these states.

For the subject, mourning in fact consists in the loss of the object adorned with all the signifying features that made it dear and lovable among all. It is precisely these features that constitute the narcissistic clothing of the object i(a) that sustains the subject in his rapport with the world, and which are inventoried through funeral rituals, as a reminder of his memory for the living. They constitute the series of exalted qualities of the deceased, producing in the subject feelings of sadness, regret, and remorse for not having loved them enough, but also of reproaches to oneself and against them for having left us.

In the work of mourning, there is this first stage of idealization of the Other, i(A), that is, an idealization of someone who has become Other by his death, and with whom we identify. For the subject, the loss of the object entails the temporary loss of signifiers. A hole in the Other, such that the subject’s fantasy wavers, and can no longer buffer the pain, in other words, the jouissance, which overwhelms him.

In the second stage, the work of mourning comes full circle. The beloved object is separated from its insignia, from its narcissistic finery, in other words from its phallic brilliance – we speak of mortal remains when the body is being transferred. The result is that it passes from the status of the object desired and loved in the fantasy, i(a), to that of unbeing, a pure, unassimilable objet a, which can be left to rest in peace for eternity – which allows the subject, in the realization of his loss, to take up these signifiers by reworking them so as to be able to project them onto a new object. The hole in The Other is once again circumscribed. Mourning is accomplished. With regard to mourning, Freud breaks down the series in the following order:

Mourning (loss of the object), pain, inhibition, sadness, and depression which marks the end of the process.

There are mournings without sadness, that is to say without depression, no doubt because the subject is clear about his rapport with desire and the object – let’s say that the embarrassment, agitation, and anguish are lifted. Without being cynical, there are mournings that liberate the subject. There are also societies that carry out funeral rituals with the joy of the living, considering that the deceased is freed from the pain of existing. Freud, however, was less interested in the depression of bereavement than in the pain that accompanies it. He wonders: “Why is the work of mourning so painful?” Is there a continuum between this pain and the pain of what he called melancholic depression? For Freud, the question of pain is difficult to resolve in terms of metapsychology, and moreover, in 1915. he did not have the data from his Beyond the Pleasure Principle to answer it.

I’ll sketch out a bit of an answer, as I’ve already indicated:

Pain is an affect linked to jouissance. It is a return of the ruinous jouissance experienced by the subject beyond its regulation by the fantasy that maintains it within the framework of the Pleasure Principle. The retreat we qualify as depression is, as we have seen, a way for the subject to avoid experiencing pain by withdrawing his interest in the world.

The important thing to note here is that Freud does not correlate depression with repression; it is not a symptom, since he locates its cause in the loss of an object. Lacan would say like a Hole in the Other that is already lacking. The inverse of sadness, nostalgia is love for the lack of which the lost object is the cause. Love of this missing object.

For Freud, depression is an effect in the I. How should we qualify it? Is it a signal in the I, as Freud said à propos anguish? Freud doesn’t see it that way, because for him it would have been linked to a symbolic depopulation of the world. In short, he doesn’t really make of it an affect caused by symbolic displacement, clinging to other representations. He did, however, come close to it in his text entitled A 17^th Century Demonological Neurosis, in 1923. But he reaffirmed, as he did in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the I, that the I-ideal, a symbolic instance, has a depressing function in relation to the ideal-I, an imaginary instance. As for the superego, its function is one of guilt, that is, of jouissance.

Lacan took this a step further in 1974. in Télévision (text p.39), which, if you recall, is addressed, without the slightest theoretical concession, that is, without vulgarization, to the general public of non-idiots. It’s a lesson for us. He thought that the larger the audience, the more numerous would be those able to hear him – Michel Foucault was approving of this choice. Lacan doesn’t start immediately from the Freudian coordinates. He defines sadness, or what is called depression, not on the basis of the philosopher Pierre Janet’s “psychic tension”, nor as a “state of soul” that denotes the unity of the body’s functions, but in the tradition of seventeenth-century rationalism, which correlates feelings to thought, that is, to knowledge. The sentiment, le senti ment (in two words)[4] always. Lacan uses the same terms as Spinoza to say that sadness is an affect linked to the disorder of thought. It’s a passion that can be dissolved by putting thought back in order. Let me quote that Lacan’s famous passage on p. 39 of Télévision :

“Sadness, for example, is qualified as depression, giving it the soul as a support or the philosopher Pierre Janet’s “psychological tension”. But it’s not a state of the soul, it’s simply a moral fault as expressed by Dante, or even Spinoza: a sin, which means moral cowardice, which in the last resort can only be found in thought, be it in the duty to say things well or to find one’s way in the unconscious, in the structure.

And what follows, insofar as this cowardice, being a rejection of the unconscious, leads to psychosis – is the return to the real; it is the manic excitation by which this return becomes deadly”.

Lacan is thus closer to Patristics, which condemned Acedia and the procession of its sad manifestations, than to psychology.

To sadness he opposes the virtue of gay-science, to avoid falling back into the slime, or for the wellbeing[5] (in the sense of a good encounter) of the subject, of making use of the deciphering in which saying things well consists. Sadness is the affect of someone who betrays himself. The only thing the subject can be made guilty of, adds Lacan, is to give up on his desire. The consequence of which is to be ever more at the service of goods, to a point where the return is impossible (the “good” being defined as that which the subject must abandon to access desire). Sadness as an ethical fault testifies to the subject’s wandering in his own structure, in other words, the unconscious or again, the desire. Sadness renders the subject’s lived experience inauthentic, but it is to be taken seriously, in the sense of the series I evoked earlier, because it can lead him to suicide.

It will be noted that in what I have just developed about these manifestations of sadness linked to the loss of the object of love and in mourning, it was more a question of a loss of the phallic brilliance of the object desired and loved than that of the object itself. This nuance will serve us well for what follows.

I’m just quoting in passing the daily alternations between good and bad moods. For Lacan, the mood is situated “at the most intimate joint of the sentiment of life”. Therefore, it’s always a lying feeling[6]. Whereas, paradoxically, anguish, which is not without the objet a cause of desire, is an affect that does not mislead. It goes for hatred as well, which Lacan considers to be the most lucid of passions, provided that it really is a hatred of being, not within reach of every subject and not without ultimate consequences for him, thereby distinguishing itself from ordinary hatred, that of the other, the similar. Finally, the melancholic affect is not without jubilation and lucidity either.

1: Neuroses.

I: Hysterical neurosis

The hysterical subject maintains himself in the oscillation of an either/or regarding the choice of his sexuated position. Divided, $. Consequently, the indeterminacy of his desire that is unbeknown to him, as to what causes it (a) and what he loves and desires, i(a), remains in the register of dissatisfaction. No response to his demands should be able to satisfy them. This is the sense of the hysteric’s strategy of evasion. Missed encounters, repeated disappointments in the demand for love and reparation, due to an insecure desire, are sources of pain, sadness, and dejection. Which is not without resounding on the side of the lack of an object and of the Superego. Suffering and loss of the meaning of life.

Freud underlined how, in the decline of the Oedipus, the little girl had to mourn the loss of the symbolic phallus. Privation is only worthwhile because the phallic object is symbolic. But in the real, a woman lacks nothing. She does not have it, this damned phallus, but she is not without being it, and the promised beyond of her specifically feminine additional jouissance. In certain cases, oedipal mourning may be accompanied by an episode of sadness, or even nostalgia, which is an affect linked to the love of the lack of what has been lost as an object. In feminine hysteria, there are cases where this mourning is impossible to do. The cause is too great a love for the Father, to whom the hysteric remains attached, in the hope of obtaining reparation from him. To this may be added the impact of the feminine Superego, which plunges the subject into an unenviable jouissance, because beyond its phallic regulation. The dissolution it carries out on the ideals renders the constitution of a phallic semblant impossible. The narcissistic overestimation of the dream object i(a) by her excess of love makes it so that no real man is worthy of being her partner. The phallic lack that has become an irreparable loss can lead, in the words of some post-Freudians, to a veritable “hysterical melancholy”, or chronic sadness. This is the neurasthenia, out of phallic nostalgia, celebrated by nineteenth-century novelists. This sadness, which is not without a certain languor, found its cushioned continuation in Françoise Sagan’s famous novel Bonjour tristesse. Alexandre Kojève reviewed it with irony and detachment.

II: Obsessional neurosis

The obsessional subject, faced with the sexuated choice, remains frozen in the oscillating position of neither one nor the other. In other words, he maintains his desire that is unbeknown to him in the impossibilities of realizing it. There is, in this case, a promotion of the object by idealization, in similarity to the fact of raising the object to the dignity of the thing, i(A), which goes beyond its mere phallic valorization, i(a). It is a way of denying the desire of the Other by derealizing it. The subject is reduced in return to discrediting himself, to the turning point where he positions himself for the exquisite jouissance of getting thrown out like a piece of shit. An object that especially interests him and with which he identifies preferentially. Here it is about an avoidance strategy. Proscratinisation is a way of playing dead so that it doesn’t happen, because for him “death is a failed act[7]”, hence his checking rituals (RSI, 18 February 1975). The will to control everything, replacing the aphanisis of desire, has consequences: debasement of love life by forced subjective destitution, with its effects of depersonalization, guilt, aggressiveness, gloom, sadness, and so on.

III: Perversions

All perversions can be traced back to this position by which the subject makes himself a semblant of objet a, as waste or instrument of the Other, by making the coerced partner bear (this should be underlined) his own subjective division ($), that is, his castration projected and seen in the other, as a denial of the real.

Even if it is a game of lure and simulacrum, by dint of making a mockery of the Law of desire by replacing it with the Will to jouissance, imputed to the Other – or an appeal to the Superego, the pervert ends up wallowing in the pure pain of existing, all especially depreciative. His activity is to demonstrate relentlessly that life has no meaning because he is a proselytizing educator. This is the reason for the torments he inflicts on the other, even if it means flogging himself for so doing. It is ultimately a heroic position, which he holds for a semblant, not without a certain comic effect, but which by its tireless repetition, according to the same scenario always deserted by desire, leads him to boredom and to a Saint-Fons sadness. If you permit me to equivocate on the proper name of the central figure in The Philosophy in the Boudoir.

IV: Sadness and psychoses

I will only give a few lineaments concerning manic-depressive psychosis, and what is characterized by the rejection of the unconscious.

In the manic phase, the subject, relieved of the plumb line of the objet a, is entirely given over to the mad waltz of the signifiers of lalangue, and properly embodies division as a pure real, $.

Make no mistake about it, manic excitation is of the register of the pain of existing carried to its incandescence, without limit, that is, without the quilting of the signification of neurosis, without the absolute signification of paranoid psychosis, without the hallucination where the imposed words by which the subject is interpellated find a benchmark. Ultimately, manic excitement, despite its appearance of overflowing joy, is in reality, through the return of too much jouissance, the death of the subject leading to the death of the body.

The melancholic phase, of which sadness is the gateway, is characterized by the release of the Other – the fact of the foreclosure of signifiers that make a return in the real. The fantasy cannot then take shape, and the subject, reduced to the rank of a waste object, is overwhelmed by an atrocious pain that nothing can buffer. It’s a pure pain of existing, beyond having been desired or not, which is accompanied by a procession of superego-comments. It’s a major affect that anyone can experience, but only temporarily, when they are torn from the moorings of life, one that has been deserted by desire. This doesn’t last, as long as we know that we are mortal and that life cannot go on forever. I have evoked the fundamental distress of a newborn. A life made up of painful trials, even if they are overcome, does not necessarily make people good and wise. It can leave them in wild distress, preluding the agony of the end of life. It is this that the mythical figure of Oedipus bears witness to, uttering the terrible curse at the end of his life: “Me funai, better not to have been born”, even though he had fulfilled his destiny with great courage – he wanted to know at all costs, even the unspeakable. The melancholic testifies to this with a rare lucidity, even irony, which Freud did not fail to underline. He even lamented the fact that we have to go through this to grasp that life has no meaning other than that given to it by desire.

Cut off from their signifying attachments to the foreclosed Other, the melancholic subject is constrained to identifying himself with the hole in the symbolic for want of being able to discern it. He then becomes a pure object, a waste product thrown into the world outside the dialectic of desire and the power of reparation. This position is so untenable that it can lead to suicide, repeating for the subject the failure of the murder of the Thing by the symbol. It’s a suicide that consists in completing the Other in the real, by taking leave of the Other of language, that is, of the signifying chain. It’s a suicide of exit from the world, a passage à l’acte that isn’t a call to the O(o)ther, but at the same time a way of making oneself a subject in the eternity of desire, like a slope of the Freudian enigma of indestructible desire. Psychosis is no longer defined in relation to narcissism but in relation to the language-parasite.

Unlike melancholic suicide, the neurotic suicide is a call to the O(o)ther, an entry into the world. The subject seeks to exist as irreplaceable in the memory of the living. We can understand how, in each case, the lifting of inhibition can lead to suicide.

> In melancholy, it is about a passage à l’acte by rejection of the unconscious.

> In neurosis, it’s about an acting-out by ignorance which is not a rejection of the unconscious.

We can therefore contrast the manic-melancholic sadness engendered by the hanging-out-to-dry by the Other, a mortal sin, to the neurotic sadness, a venial sin, linked to the vacillation of the fantasy. In this case, there is an indeterminacy of desire, either through alienation or separation of the subject from the signifying chain ($), or through the veiling of the cause of desire (objet a) by the loss of the phallic brilliance of the object loved and desired i(a), more than by its pure loss, which must be repaired by the work of mourning.

Suicide Remains on the horizon as the only successful act, to which Lacan pays tribute. We are not talking here about the suicides of thoughtlessness, and therefore for futile reasons, which I have just mentioned, but of suicide decided with full knowledge of the facts. Lacan gives a paradigm of this in the suicides of Socrates and Empedocles. He was, of course, against all forms of euthanasia and eugenics.

V: Moments of sadness linked to psychoanalytic practice

This is how I describe the transitory moments of sadness produced by the psychoanalytic treatment:

1 / There are those caused by the undressing of narcissistic lures, those that stem from the subject’s alienation to the imbecilic representations conveyed by the signifiers, but also to the significations of fantasy or to the polymorphous manifestations of symptoms. The effect of all these causes is that the subject is at odds with the desire that inhabits him, engendering confusion and sadness.

2 / The most important is the one that Lacan refers to in the traversing of the fantasy, or la passe, which le passant goes through rather manic-depressively, whereas identification with the Sinthome features the point of finitude of the cure.

In la passe properly speaking, if such that we can remain at these coordinates today, there is the crossing of the threshold of identification with the Other, I(A), by which the subject separates himself, liberates himself from the signifying chain. It is the destitution of the subject, previously instituted by the alienating signifier that represents it for another signifier by dividing it. Therefore, we have the emergence of the pure subject ($) as a slit through which the real is defined, whose touch produces an affect of sadness, mixed with the enthusiasm of an awakening. This brings the emergence of his being of jouissance objet a, with as well its affects of well-being (in two words[8]) but also of sadness. Here we cannot speak of cowardice, but rather of a resolute act that touches on sin, on what is at fault as a lack-of-being, $. It is thus in a double chiasmus that the position of the subject to the objet a and return alternate. Subjective destitution, by separation from the signifier, also engenders sadness, as it does for its institution. It is a position that no subject could simulate, while le passant, just as paradoxically, is moved to enthusiasm by the emergence of his being of jouissance. This is the condition requested by Lacan in his 1967 proposition, for there to be an analyst. He would later modify his position on this point. Beyond the lack of reality of the fantasy, there is “another reason”, a passage to the real ⁵ that entails a satisfaction other than that of endless deciphering, which always leads him back to sin. To know how to deal with the real of the Sinthome is to enjoy the real unconscious. In other words, satisfaction as an affect of the body that takes the place of the pain of existing that affects the subject, directly connected to the guilt linked to erogenous and moral masochism.

Treatment :

Before concluding, I would like to make a very general remark. All the practices of creation through the letter, theory, science, art, literature always have a somewhat depressive dimension, because the subject has to put in the work, including the ability to let go of the object produced, which escapes him. Here you have the horizon of sublimation. It is a satisfaction of the drive without repression says Freud, but it is not without a dimension of pain of existence for the subject. In Courtly Love, where it’s all about elevating the Lady, i.e. the object, to the dignity of the Thing, the Trouvère (occupying a masochistic position) must face trials in order to receive the reward of consolation. Here it is not about slaying the dragon, but about competing with others in oratorical jousts, or in making tropes, which are judged by the Court of Love. Quite the opposite in today’s world, where love is particularly absent, the age we are entering is no longer the modern world, it is the one of the atom. It is populated by a plethora of things, and according to Lautréamont’s sentence:

“It now covers a notable quantity of zero importance.”,

I have therefore only retained three main orientations in the treatment of sad affects.

The said depression, which is not an illness, but an affect, as I hope you’ve understood, is to be taken seriously, like the series of other passions of the being, and in particular the sad passions, linked to the silent din of the death drives: In the absence of love, Sadness initially, undoubtedly the greatest passion of the contemporary world, which Lacan is far from praising, but also hatred, jealousy, ignorance, the pain of existing, and so on. Far from cultivating the pathetic, it’s about recognizing in suffering a fact of saying to be able to escape from it.

They summon the subject, who has betrayed himself, to the duty of well-saying. For they are faults in the eyes of thought, that is, of knowing. Without mitigating circumstances, sometimes without apology, they are not without recourse:

Neurosciences and their pharmacopeia?

I have been careful to well distinguish the life sciences, or the science as thought, and the poppycock of cognitive-behavioral scientism, which is very much in tune with the times. That’s as far as I can go in extending them a helping hand.

Undertake psychotherapy, but not just any psychotherapy?

There is no psychotherapy of psychoanalytic inspiration, of expiration, nor of sighing.

But there are psychotherapeutic practices (including psychomotor or speech therapy) that are carried out in institutions or elsewhere, by subjects who are engaged on a path to becoming psychoanalysts. They know how to find themselves in the structure.

Read an entire library and follow it up with Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy?

Play Scrabble or do crosswords?

Love?

It’s a much better remedy, but it’s subject to the vagaries of fortune. We know that “the pleasure of love only lasts a moment, the heartache lasts a lifetime”, as the song goes.

Provided that it has been decided by the structure that motivates it.

Through transference, it summons the love of knowing[9]. But beyond the gay-science as a pleasure of deciphering, psychoanalysis can promise to introduce the subject to ‘another reason’, that of the desire to know, which is of a different register, that of the ethic of Well-saying, with the satisfaction it brings.

Patrick Valas. 20 January 2003. – 14 March 2009.