Sinthome

Abstract: Freudian psychoanalysis started as a therapeutic treatment meant to remove pathological symptoms. Moreover, it was Freud’s ambition to install a causal treatment, by which the symptoms would be removed in a permanent way. His initial enthusiasm about psychoanalysis as psychotherapy gave way to a more pessimistic view at the end of his career. Finally, he considered the analytic process as “interminable,” thus turning psychoanalysis into an impossible profession. In the meantime, he had elaborated a whole new theory on psychopathology. Since Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, pathological processes are explained on the basis of defense, in which repression takes the prominent place. After Freud, it was more or less forgotten that repression in itself is already a secondary moment within the dynamics of the pathogenesis. Indeed, repression is an elaboration of the defence process against the drive. Right from the beginning of his theory, Freud recognized a twofold structure within the symptom: on the one hand, the drive, on the other, the psyche. In Lacanian terms: the Real and the Symbolic. This is clearly present in Freud’s first case study, that of Dora. In this study, Freud does not add to his theory of defense, which had already been elaborated in his two papers on the psychoneuroses of defense (Freud, 1894, 1896). It can be said that the core of this case study resides precisely in this twofold structure, as he focuses on the Real, drive-related element, what he terms as the “Somatisches Entgegenkommen”. 1 Later, in his Three Essays, this will be called the fixation of the drive. From this point of view, Dora’s conversion symptoms can be studied from two perspectives: a Symbolic one, that is, the signifiers or psychical representations that are repressed, and a Real one, related to the drive, in this case the oral drive. Freud will confirm this hybrid composition of the symptom in all his later case studies. Little Hans’s phobia is built upon and against oral, anal, and scopic drives; the obsessions of the Rat-man go back to the scopic and the anal drive; and the same holds for the Wolf-man’s phobia and conversion symptoms (Freud, 1909a, 1909b, 1918b).

Abstract: This article uses Bracha L. Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial borderspace in relation to Jacques Lacan’s analytic of sexuation to argue that transsexuality isn’t reducible to psychosis. Rather, transsexuality taps into an Other (feminine) sexual difference that is subjectifying and can be understood in relation to Ettinger’s conception of metramorphosis and the matrixial. Transsexuality involves the somatization of the Other sexual difference and the creative use of this difference as sinthome. The sinthome of transsexuality can enable the subject to negotiate the aporia of sexual difference. I establish parallels between the (neurotic) hysteric and the transsexual to argue that transsexuality can be a subset of neurosis. The transsexual transition (which often involves Sex Reassignment Surgery) can be understood as a metramorphical becoming, a borderlinking enabling separation and distance in proximity. It is not as Catherine Millot (1990) contends an attempt to abolish the “nature” of the Real ...

Abstract: This essay seeks to go beyond the arguments of Lee Edelman's 2004 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman's book uses Jacques Lacan's theory of the sinthome to critique the homophobic ideology of reproductive futurism, which seeks to guarantee the future in the name of the child. Edelman uses Lacan to argue that queer theory should forgo any engagement with a politics of the future, and that queers should instead embrace the position of the reviled sinthomosexual, whose embrace of jouissance in the Real undercuts reprofuturity. By contrast, this essay offers an alternative interpretation of Lacan's theory of the sinthome that sustains several productive accounts of a future that could lie beyond the fantasy of reproductive futurism – options that are far more promising for queer theory than Edelman's refusal of all politics and signification.

Abstract: Schizophrenia is rarely referred to in Lacan’s scholarship, and even more rarely in the socalled later Lacan. Yet the French psychoanalyst’s teaching on knotting and the theory of the sinthome of the 1970s can be utilized for the theoretical and clinical approach to this psychotic type. The gradual emphasis on the real in Lacan’s teaching can act as a guide both for its conceptualization and for the treatment supported by those clinicians who see schizophrenic subjects. My investigation of the conceptual history of schizophrenia led to the conclusion that despite psychiatric scholars having noted from early on an aspect that pertains to the real – schizophrenic discourse – this was disregarded, having been deemed one of the condition’s numerous morbid outcomes. In the same way, early psychoanalysts emphasized the aspect of subjectivity that Lacan calls the imaginary in the treatment of schizophrenia, trying, thus, to address it via a mechanism typical of the other major psychotic type, paranoia. This approach does not seem consonant with Freud’s reading of the two types, although he never elaborated upon their differentiation beyond the early 1910s. In fact, although the suggested Lacanian approach to schizophrenia derives from the last decade of Lacan’s teaching, it has roots in Freud’s view of psychosis of the mid-1910s and early 1920s. I have attempted to create a paradigm for the impact of those findings in examining the case of the late-19th-century Greek poet, writer and scholar Georgios Vizyenos. I argue that Vizyenos was characterized by a schizophrenic’s relation to the body, language, and the social bond. In his life and work, examined in detail, we see how the cause, triggering, and temporary treatment of his psychosis are linked to a concept with a direct relation to the real: ‘child’. Testimonies from Vizyenos’ childhood show his resistance to semblance, which had specific effects upon his body. It is, then, demonstrated how in late adolescence and mature life the subject renamed himself and acquired a sense of his body thanks to a ‘modified’ narcissism that did not resemble the coordinates of the paranoiac’s ego. This construction is approached through the later Lacan’s theories of the sinthome and the escabeau. Finally, it is shown how that invention was temporary, with Vizyenos being unable, in the end, to avoid the return of jouissance to the subject’s body. The theoretical and clinical implications of the study of Vizyenos’ case are discussed in relation to the contemporary Lacanian approach to schizophrenia. It is suggested that the singular character of the subject’s relation to the real could lead us to cross schizophrenia with a bar, schizophrenia, as Lacan did for the signifier ‘woman’ in his later teaching. Thus, the sinthomatic approach, which emphasizes the subject’s relation to the real rather than the universal subscription to Oedipus, does not seem unsuitable for the treatment of subjects who are schizophrenic. This is argued at greater length by comparing it with psychoanalytic orientations that place more emphasis on the use of the imaginary or the symbolic.