"Body, Symptom, Jouissance" – Escuela Freudiana de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Octubre 2006.
Few years ago, several chapters of a movie circulated in a video that foreshadowed what later became popular as a hidden camera. It was called "That crazy, crazy people". Among other degrading situations, the video showed the first working day of a man in a bakery: with a tube the man had to decorate cakes that would move along a carrying belt, just in time for grab them and place them in a table.
While skill and speed was required, the job seemed simple. Only for the fact that a few minutes later the carrying belt begins to increase its speed, proportionally increasing the desperation of the unprepared victim, running from side to side trying to decorate and grab, grab or decorate the cakes that inevitably end up in the floor.
While skill and speed was required, the job seemed simple. Only for the fact that a few minutes later the carrying belt begins to increase its speed, proportionally increasing the desperation of the unprepared victim, running from side to side trying to decorate and grab, grab or decorate the cakes that inevitably end up in the floor.
I would like for us to keep this image: the perplexity of the man, the insults of the employer, and to top it off, the likelihood that this man had been without work for months and with a family to maintain.
Let us agree that the sadism of this experiment worthy of Pavlov, which could have taken place in a Gesell room instead of just a hidden camera, it has a mitigating factor: thanks to the speed required to print the film, it concludes very quickly. Imagine, instead, that in real life this experience is repeated day after day, for 8-9 hours, with a carrying belt set an ideal speed where the operator could not be distracted for a moment without fearing the worst to happen. It’s hard not to think of "Modern Times" by Chaplin.
Now, how this would impact on the body? It seems to me that this example paradigmatically meets the Freudian Neurasthenia -not for nothing it was first noticed and described in the U.S. industrial society- and the Lacanian Psychosomatic for which Lacan makes use of Pavlov's experiment to make it explicit. In both cases, the hypothesis is that the unconscious is outside of the game. What implications do these hypotheses have?
We know that Freud distinguishes actual neurosis from psychoneurosis symptoms, ascribing to dissatisfaction and sexual inadequacy the direct cause for the former, while in psycho-neuroses is given to read another scene. As indicated by Cancino Pura, this Freudian explanation of neuroses would embrace the belief that a “satisfying”, “normal” and” appropriate” sexual encounter without a rest could actually exists.
Nonetheless, there is another feature of great clinical richness in the concept of actual neurosis and neurasthenia in particular. There are psychological and physical effects that even when triggered by the presence of the Other, cannot be mediated by the unconscious. And when the psychical process does not operate as a mitigating factor, the direct impact of the Other can affect the real of the body.
I understand that it is from this same perspective that, in the Geneva Conference, Lacan will say "hopefully in the treatment of psychosomatics, the unconscious, the invention of the unconscious, can be used for something". The Other’s demand should be properly questioned: “you say you are going to Krakow for me to believe you're going to Lemberg, when you are actually going to Krakow, then why would you lie to me?”
Otherwise, the Other’s demand becomes absolute, that is to say, it becomes a “holophrase”, being the signifier unable to produce formations of the unconscious. What impact does it have then, in the real of the body, not being able to count on the formations of the unconscious?
Let’s go back to Freud who tells us a successful hypnotic treatment carried out with a hysterical patient who could not breastfeed her newborn baby, being afflicted with lack of appetite, aversion to food, vomiting and insomnia. What Freud points out is that the patient was furious at her inability to raise the child and angry with herself, when her will and best intentions fail to overcome their symptoms, which seem to be totally alien to her.
Thanks to the dissociation of consciousness, the painful and contrasting representation becomes unconscious, returning as somatic innervations which surprise the subject as “[hysteric] beautiful soul”. Even lying and cheating would be supportive allies of the resources of the unconscious, if necessary.
Freud tells us that “a neurasthenic –instead- would have felt severe fears facing the maternal tasks she was being required and given endless thoughts to all accidents and potential hazards, winding up, however, raising her child perfectly well, though tortured by constant doubts and fears, unless the contrasting representation had succeed, in which case she would’ve abandoned her purpose, considering herself incapable of carrying it out ".
Not having the resource of repression, the contrasting representation would join the representation of the positive will creating a single act of consciousness. This contradiction would torture the patient leading to the unwillingness of neurasthenia, of which “these patients are well aware," as opposed to hysterics that, as we know, may not notice anything.
The neurasthenic performs the contradictory representations in turns, comes and goes, doing and undoing. The neurasthenic "folie de doute” does not brood over but acts, as it doesn’t have the recourse of postponement.
It is a moment of compelling conclusion, a fire alarm sounding and to which immediate and urgent decision is imposed, causing spasmodic reactions or inhibiting any action, putting the subject on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The neurasthenic cannot hide behind the “[hysteric] beautiful soul”, and as the worker in the bakery, is out of breath.
The “contrasting and contradictory representations” that coexist in the conscious -not having the resource to be pulled by the unconscious- can be related to the "annoyance" [contrariety] that Lacan speaks in Seminar X, referring to Pavlov’s experiment.
Lacan will use this experiment in Seminar XI to introduce the famous quote about the “holophrase” in psychosomatics. "This experiment - he says - has a vital interest of helping us to set what to conceive of the psychosomatic effect: when there is no interval between S1 and S2, when the first pair of signifiers solidifies, holphrases, we have the model of a number of cases ... " (and Lacan will list psychosomatics, psychosis and mental retardation).
Pavlov's experiment is unique in associating a precise natural reaction to a totally foreign stimulus, so for example the secretion of gastric juices to the sound of a bell. "For certain way to make these conditioned responses converge, we will underline some effects of annoyance," says Lacan. "… The organism is forced to respond in two opposite ways at a time, causing, if we can say, a sort of organic perplexity."
Freud also recognized in neurasthenia an act of consciousness containing simultaneously two opposite ways of reacting at the same time. This contradiction or contrariety leads to the organic perplexity, which can cause a kind of exhaustion of the possibilities of response. This is what is commonly known as stress, in another time called surmenage.
What is demanded to the function can cause a deficit that surpasses the function itself, modifying the apparatus beyond the register of the functional respond, generating, in Lacanian terms, a lesional deficit.
The body is deceived by a demand that is not questioned. "Not being the unfortunate animal," Lacan says, "a being who speaks, is not in a position to question the desire of the experimenter". When the demand cannot be questioned and the subject cannot escape from the deceit, either lying, questioning, dreaming, fantasizing or somatizing, the demand becomes a stimulus that requires an immediate response that may alter the biological function.
It’s this altered function that, in its repetition, may lacerate the real tissue. A signifier will not be replaced by another signifier, but a necessity for a signifier, the experimenter’s signifier. As noted by Irma Peusner, the only subject there is the experimenter, and this is what should be subverted in the analysis.
The psychosomatic phenomenon is a lesion to the body produced by the repetition of a biological function dislocated as a result of organic perplexity that arises from the contradiction, the contrariety to which that function is subjected. This lesion in real of the organism can no longer be restored by means of the letter, because it is not made of signifiers, nor is there any way to turn that psychosomatic lesion into a symptom.
What is then the function of psychoanalysis? The psychoanalyst is by definition a mistakener, hopefully he doesn’t understand anything. The psychoanalyst doesn’t understand that bell is synonymous with beef. He does not accept understandings, but misunderstandings, by playing with double sense and questioning conventional meanings. Never Krakow equals Krakow.
Opening this interval in the holophrase, is this what it is, in my view, the invention of the unconscious, and there, "hopefully in the treatment of psychosomatics" psychoanalysis "can be used for something."
Haydee Heinrich.
Translated by: Pablo Xavier Benavides.
