Unpacking the Dialectic of Demand and the Hysteric's Desire
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It's quite out of vogue nowadays to speak of hysterics. The language of contemporary mental health eschews it, and anyway it tends to offend the sensibilities, not least of all for a history of sexism that haunts the word at every turn.
Like some vast image out of spiritus mundi stretching impossibly from ancient Greece, when wombs went “wandering,” right up through the Victorian age, hysteria can seem the watchword for every misogynistic dismissal, every pathologising judgment passed against women. And for many, the figure who appears seated on the central throne (like, if I may say, flowers in a vase) is Freud himself, a metonymy, in the minds of its critics, for psychoanalysis as a whole.
There may, however, be good reason to persist in speaking of hysterics. For one thing, it has never been the position within psychoanalysis that hysteria is solely the purview of women. From the very outset, Freud spoke of male hysterics as well as female ones. For another, hysteria continues, alive and well today, though perhaps rarely acknowledged or approached as such.
Much is lost by treating the word and the concept as anathema because the hysteric still has much that she or he might teach us—as Freud learned from his hysteric patients—about the complexities of human desire.
"The Dream of the Butcher’s Beautiful Wife" and "The 'Still Waters Run Deep' Dreams"
In this post, I'll be dealing with two questions as they are developed in chapters 20-21 in Jacques Lacan's Seminar 5: Formations of the Unconscious (all page numbers refer to the English edition of this text).
First is the question of how the subject initially comes to be differentiated from the Other. Lacan maps this out as a product of what he calls the dialectic of demand and desire. In short, signification transforms need such that desire is situated somewhere beyond demand. Desire in the human subject is determined by the dialectic of demand. And it’s in this process that the signification of the phallus takes on its meaning.
The second is the question of the way this operation is reflected in the structure of the hysteric, in particular, because hysteria is a structure in which, as Lacan says, the dialectic of desire and demand is particularly straightforward.
I’m going to say something about both of these as they are developed in these two sessions of Lacan's seminar of 1957-58.
Part 1—Reciprocal Circuits
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To begin with, intersubjectivity can only be established through the speech of the big Other, because the locus of speech is first in the Other. Speech gains its status first as the Other’s speech since it’s in the Other’s speech that the subject’s first thoughts are formed. Desire is thus “obliged to be mediated by speech” (335).
All of this is in the dimension of the Symbolic, which is one of two planes on which the subject is alienated.
To sketch this briefly: the infant cries, the mother or primary caregiver has to decipher or answer that cry, but inasmuch as the infant wants something in particular (say it’s hungry as opposed to cold) it behooves it to differentiate its crying, to use it in order to communicate something as best it can. The cry is, first, a demand (for a need to be fulfilled), but there’s also another demand that answers it, which is the Other’s demand (the parent will come to say to the child not just “what do you want?” but also “use your words”), and that demand of the parent’s is already expressed in the Other's language.
So there’s a reciprocity built into the Symbolic dimension of demand. To communicate by speaking, is always-already something formed in the framework of the Other’s speech. But there’s also necessarily a residue and a place opened up beyond demand because the nature of articulation changes, diverts, and transposes some component of need.
Then there’s a second dimension that’s operating simultaneously, which is that of the Imaginary. Lacan doesn’t develop this much in these chapters, beyond saying that on the imaginary plane there is “only a weak border between the subject and the other, an ambiguous border in the sense that it can be crossed” (335).
Loosely, we can understand the reference here to be to the mirror stage and the image of the infant’s “disorganised” body that arrives alongside that of the caregiver’s body of supporting it.
What’s important is that the subject’s differentiation from the Other is not simply self-evident but must be accomplished somehow, and that it’s established only with difficulty. Specifically, it’s the discordance between the two dimensions of alienation—the one on the Symbolic plane and the other in the Imaginary—that, Lacan says, “opens up an initial possibility for the subject to differentiate himself as such” (336).
So this ability for the subject to differentiate itself is possible, first, because there is a space, a gap, between these two orders. Both of them are simultaneously at play, and it's in the ‘field of play’ that’s opened between them that the subject is formed as one differentiated from the Other.
When Lacan speaks of the dialectic of demand and desire he’s talking about this in terms of a very early, pre-Oedipal formation. But he also says that “the profound reworking of initial desires by demand is permanently palpable,” in particular with regards to the anal object.
The anal object supports the “dialectic of the primitive gift, essentially tied in the subject to the fact of satisfying or not satisfying an educative demand, that is, the demand to accept or not to accept to let go of a certain symbolic object” (336).
It’s in the letting go or not letting go of the symbolic object in response to the Other’s demand that we find something that stays with the subject, a permanent remnant. And maybe also (Lacan doesn’t specify this here, but it seems implicit) a jouissance that repeats.
What he does say is that “in demand, identification is with the object of a sentiment” (335), and that the fate (of assimilation, incorporation or rejection) of the symbolic object is also shared in some part by the Other with whom the subject is caught in the relation of demand.
Crucial to the operation of demand is the question of whether the Other is present or absent (i.e. giving their presence or withholding their presence, giving their absence or withholding their absence). It’s from this observation that Lacan presents the famous formula that every demand is, at its root, a demand for love:
a demand for what is nothing, no particular satisfaction, a demand for what the subject brings purely and simply by responding to the demand (361).
So what we see with regards to demand is that the Other and the symbolic object are caught up with each other in these operations of giving or withholding which can appear as representatives of love.
But this still leaves the question of that which ends up beyond demand—the residue produced by the nature of articulation in which something of need is diverted or lost. For the subject’s distinction and differentiation from the Other to be established, two things are necessary: both the gap between the Symbolic and the Imaginary that was mentioned earlier, and also the recognition of something (desire) that’s beyond what the Other demands of the subject.
Desire borrows from the raw material of need, but in doing so, also “abolishes the dimension of the Other” insofar as, with desire, “the Other doesn’t have to respond yes or no”—the matter isn’t resolved by an other’s presence or absence, which is why Lacan calls desire an “absolute condition” (361).
[Desire is] the margin or result of the subtraction […] of the requirements of need from the demand for love. Conversely, desire presents itself as what, in the demand for love, rebels against being reduced to a need, because in reality it satisfies nothing other than itself (362).
As Lacan formulates it here, the signifier related to this beyond—this dimension of what the Other desires and what, for the subject, rebels against being reduced to a need—is the phallus. The phallus is
the signifier that is the mark of what the Other desires insofar as it itself, as a real, human Other, is, in its economy of being, marked by the signifier (345).
So to paraphrase, it’s because there is a reciprocity in the dialectic of demand, whereby some part of need is diverted and lost through the operation of speech, and wherein the “beyond” of desire is opened, both in the subject and in the Other, that the signification of the phallus emerges.
Or, to say it differently, the signification of the phallus is an effect, produced by the cause of reciprocity in the dialectic of demand, which opens the “beyond” of desire (for the subject as well as in the field of the Other).
Castration, then, is “a particular relationship to the signifier phallus” (345).
Part 2—A Tale of Two Butchers
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Every relation to desire, Lacan says, has some relation to hysteria, though sometimes in a more elaborate and less straightforward fashion. As he formulates it, the hysteric “is suspended between the necessary split in demand and desire” (342). And in the hysteric something can be grasped both in relation to the suspension of this split, and also to the signification of the phallus that is its mark.
In these chapters he presents a brief discussion of Dora as well as of a series of dreams discussed by Freud. I’m going to leave aside the comments on Dora to focus on the dreams, which turn out to have a certain connection with the signifier “butcher.”
The first dream we come to is that of the butcher’s wife from The Interpretation of Dreams. This is the dream as Freud’s text presents it. The patient says:
I wanted to give a supper-party, but I had nothing in the house but a little smoked salmon. I thought I would go out and buy something, but remembered then that it was Sunday afternoon and all the shops would be shut. Next I tried to ring up some caterers, but the telephone was out of order. So I had to abandon my wish to give a supper-party.
To recall what’s revealed in Freud’s analysis of this dream, the patient (the butcher’s wife) has a friend who evidently fancies her husband, but this friend is quite thin and the butcher likes fuller figures. In the course of having met with the friend on the previous day, the wife had been asked when she’d invite this friend around for dinner once more because she (the wife) “always feeds one so well.”
As Freud interprets it, it’s just as if the wife has said to herself when she heard her friend’s suggestion, “‘Of course I’ll invite you so that you can eat plenty at my house, get fat, and be even more attractive to my husband. I’d rather never give a dinner party again.’” The dream thus, on the one hand, fulfils the wish not to contribute anything to the filling out of the friend’s figure.
This, however, is only one of the dream’s meanings. In the course of the analysis, the patient also reveals that she has often wished for a caviar sandwich in the mornings but grudges the expense. Though her husband would of course give her the caviar at once if she asked for it, she instead tells him he must not give it to her so that she can go on teasing him about it.
The question that arises for Freud is this: she evidently needs to create an unfulfilled wish for herself in waking life, but why does she want an unfulfilled wish?
In Lacan’s reading,
What we effectively read in the dream is the satisfaction of a wish, a wish to have an unsatisfied desire (342).
The wife desires caviar, and what she wants is not to be given caviar. (The friend, by comparison, desires smoked salmon, which is named as her favourite food, and in the dream, though there’s some of it on hand, there’s also none of it to be had.)
There’s a two-part dynamic at work here, Lacan tells us. First, the hysteric must desire “something else,” and it’s precisely in desiring it that she finds something satisfying in the relationship of love. And second, the “something else” in question can only fulfil its task so long as “one doesn’t give it to her.”
These paired operations are the hysteric’s solution to the problematic of the reciprocity of demand: they’re one method for working the dialectic and constituting an Other who’s not wholly caught in a loop of reciprocity. The subject in this case accomplishes its differentiation by situating desire as just that “something else” that’s never fully captured, never fully answered by the Other’s speech (demand).
What’s foregrounded in hysteria, which Lacan calls a “primordial structure,” is “desire as lying beyond all demand, that is, as having to occupy its function in the name of a refused desire” (344).
So in the place where demand is addressed, there is a desire unsatisfied. But what of the place from which the address is made—the place of the subject?
The hysteric, Lacan writes, is a subject who
finds it difficult to establish a relation—one that enables her to retain her place as a subject—with the constitution of the Other as big Other and bearer of the spoken sign. In a word, the hysteric, man or woman, is so open to suggestion through speech that there must be something in it (343).
The subject, in other words, finds some stabilising equilibrium through recognising itself in some exterior point of identification—in an object, in the mask, in the little other who is the subject’s semblable, in what becomes an “other ego”. This process of identification is indispensable to the hysteric who “makes his/her own” the symptom of an other on the basis of perceiving a resemblance with the cause suggested by speech. As Freud put it, for the hysteric “If a cause like this can produce an attack like this, I may have the same kind of attack….”
The question that remains is what the “something else” of the hysteric’s desire has to do with the phallus, which Lacan here calls “the signifier that is the mark of what the Other desires insofar as it itself, as a real, human Other, is, in its economy of being, marked by the signifier” (345).
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A pair of dreams, from another hysteric patient of Freud’s helps to clarify this. One:
She dreamt she was going to the market with her cook, who was carrying the basket. After she had asked for something, the butcher said to her: ‘That's not obtainable any longer’, and offered her something else, adding ‘This is good too.’ She rejected it and went on to the woman who sells vegetables, who tried to get her to buy a peculiar vegetable that was tied up in bundles but was of a black colour. She said: ‘I don't recognise that; I won't take it.’
In Freud’s text, he proposes the connection between this dream and a colloquialism of his time: “The door of your butcher's shop, is open” [Du hast deine Fleischbank offen] which meant that a man had forgotten to do up the front of his trousers. This is not, Freud says, a phrase that the patient used, but he suggests that “she may have avoided using it.”
The butcher’s line “That’s not obtainable any longer” in the dream, Freud interprets as related to his having recently told this patient that the early experiences of childhood are not obtainable any longer, but were replaced in analysis by transferences and dreams. So the reference in the first part of the dream, Freud says, is to him, while the second part, with the bundle of vegetables that the patient describes as black radish or asparagus-shaped, along with a homophony in the German between “I won’t take it” and “behave yourself” confirms a meaning in the dream that’s “far from innocent.”
This, Lacan says, is again a case of desire being marked somewhere (and somewhere unfulfilled) but in this instance, we see, in particular, the relationship to the phallic signifier. In the first dream, desire was external to the subject, rejected from the subject’s own demand (for caviar) and only accepted as the Other’s desire (in the form of the dreamer’s friend who desires the smoked salmon).
In this dream, by contrast, there’s a “hypothesis” related to the phallic signifier. The phallus makes its appearance in the phrase “that’s not obtainable any longer,” which is a signifying articulation of lack.
The same patient has another dream:
Her husband asked her: “Don't you think we ought to have the piano tuned?” And she replied: “It's not worth while [‘Es lohnt nicht’ – which means something like, ‘it's not worth it’]; the hammers need reconditioning in any case.”
The words “it’s not worth while” are derived, Freud tells us, from a visit the woman paid to her friend the previous day. The friend had invited her to take off her jacket to which she had replied “Thank you, but it’s not worth while, I can only stay a minute.” At which point Freud recalls how, during the previous day’s analysis, the patient’s hand had at some point reached for her jacket, the button of which had come undone. What Freud says, in a footnote, is concealed in the dream is a fantasy of his own improper, sexually provocative conduct which the patient puts up a defence against.
So there’s the desire for an improper advance, but not so that the advance can be accomplished; instead, so that the advance can be turned aside.
What enters here is the notion of a veil or a mask, and the question of what is behind it—what is veiled or disguised. This is the phallus, but not the object phallus. The phallus is not a thing that’s hidden beneath the veil. “It’s the signifier of desire insofar as desire is articulated as the Other’s desire” (358).
In other words, to dream of the Other’s advance, is to dream about the place to which the Other’s desire aims—the field which it advances towards. The key thing is that the veil not be pulled aside, and hence the subject’s wish is on the side of that operation by which the unveiling never takes place. This is a mode of desiring that prevents or defers an encounter with what’s really a structural impossibility: there’s nothing there under the veil, no object that can be revealed by taking the mask or the sheet away.
That’s why, for the hysteric, desire is in a place that’s beyond the defence the subject raises:
it is something that is presented behind the veil but which can't be found there either. It's not worthwhile unbuttoning my jacket, because you will not find the phallus there, but if I place my hand on my jacket, it is so that you desire, inside my blouse, the phallus, which is the signifier of desire (360).
#Freud #Lacan #dreams #desire #demand #hysteria #Seminar5
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