(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
What does psychoanalysis actually entail? What separates psykoanalysens object from the objects of other sciences? These are the questions Jacques Lacan explores in the present lectures. His answer can be briefly summarized as that psychoanalysis is a science of lusta. But what is desire really? Here we encounter the challenge. Desire, according to Lacan, is impossible to grasp. The object of psychoanalysis evades any attempt at definition. But this is also the definition of the object of psychoanalysis.
Just as the jar cannot hold the water, neither can the language contain the desire.
What can be defined belongs to what Lacan calls the symbolic sphere. This is the reality of language, expectations and norms, which is also called the world of philosophers. Here, the philosophers' constructed reality is considered a virtual sphere that evades the sphere of desire. Despite the virtual nature of the symbolic sphere, each of us must define ourselves within it and find a way to adapt to a normative and linguistic identity.
For Lacan, the child's mother is the first introduction to this symbolic reality. She is the one who first responds to the child's primitive behavior and thus assigns a specific meaning to the behavior. She seeks to offer the child's emotional life a meaningful context by responding to its expression. But in the longer term, Lacan believes, this will be in vain. The child realizes that symbolic reality cannot articulate and define everything. A fundamental dissatisfaction persists. It always remains an imperfection that cannot be defined, and this eternal lack is the object of psychoanalysis.
Jars with holes
Why, Lacan wonders to his students, have people from ancient times been found who were buried together with jars with holes? Jars with holes? It is an enigmatic way of thinking that Lacan puts forward, which may seem obscure at first glance. But as always, he is able to lead the discourse towards one central insight: that the object in psychoanalysis suggests an inexpressibility in language. He compares language in its inadequacy in 'catching' desire to a leaking jar. Just like jarn can't hold the water, nor can language contain the desire.
Lacan does not claim that this is because our desire is unfulfilled, so that everything would be resolved if we only got what we want. Rather, desire seems to be unattainable in itself. We can never fully achieve our desires; the grass always seems to be greener on the other side. Lacan believes that this is something that few people understand. Let's take an example.
The first lecture in this publication is given in November 1968. It is quite close to the extensive '68 riots that took place a few months before – which were particularly violent in Paris, where these lectures were also given. What does Lacan say about the riots? He notices in the auditorium that the students expect a statement on the matter.
Instead of praising the will to resist in the student uprising, Lacan appears here as one conservative father. He compares the struggle of the 68 rebellions to 'smoking a bit of tobacco'. What many considered a time when revolution could break out, Lacan sees as a temporary joy in the belief that something actual should happen. But this faith, these hopes, are in vain. Nothing will happen the way the revolutionaries expect. One's desire will always be fleeting, regardless of whether the society is communist or fascist.
Instead of praising the will to resist in the students' rebellion, Lacan appears here as a conservative father.
In another reflection, he introduces a thought reminiscent of Hegel when discussing the riots: There is a difference between 'the truth of idiocy' and 'the idiocy of truth'. The first indicates that even the truth can sometimes appear banal or ridiculous, while the second suggests that even in the apparently foolish there may be a kernel of truth. The rebellions of 68 belong to the category that can be described as 'the truth of the idiocy', where the rebels, despite their foolhardy character, nevertheless reveal important insights into human nature and behavioral patterns.
Pascal's wager
Lacan's approach throughout all the lectures is to justify psychoanalysis as a field. Without this, he believes that there will be no purpose in studying the subject. The same point permeates all the examples he uses, which each time show us a new dimension of the way of thinking he believes is special to psychoanalysis. The examples are many, so I stick to something well-known he comments on – Pascal's Wager:
The French mathematician Blaise Pascal was a contradictory figure: He was one of the most important mathematicians and scientists of all time, but at the same time a rather strict and dogmatic Catholic. By dogmatic is mainly meant that he emphasized a clear distinction between faith and knowledge. Where abstract mathematics assisted with a clear form of knowledge, faith in God was ultimately a bet Pascal argued that one had to take in God's favor.
A bet on faith in God? It is difficult to see how Lacan will again link this to his discussion of what kind of discipline psychoanalysis is. But he can do it.
Pascal's wager, writes Lacan, is a bet between choosing pleasure in this life or in the next. It is therefore about choosing between an earthly life where the life you live is the only one you have, or to be convinced that there is another, more perfect life beyond the earthly.
You can't be happy, so just hope to be happy another time, somewhere else, in another life.
If this point is to be linked to what has already been said about the jar with holes and the 68s, we again see that Lacan interprets Pascal's wager as something that tells us something fundamental about the possibility of achieving a happy state: our desire will always be somewhere else, never attainable in this life. Pascal's Wager shows that the bet leans towards an afterlife and belief in God, since happiness will forever be an elusive fantasy. In other words: You can't be happy, so just hope to be happy another time, somewhere else, in another life. Since desire can never be satisfied, it is necessary to believe in another life – this is how Lacan interprets Pascal's wager.
Man as imperfect
So what is the object of psychoanalysis, and what does it have to do with jars, 68s and Pascal's Wager? The is something that constantly eludes definition. Lacan is concerned with that which evades it symbolic the grip of the sphere. Like his French contemporaries, Lacan wants to say something about what everyday thought has difficulty grasping. For him, the fundamental truth of life is that desire is always somewhere else, and that we will forever be restless and imperfect. But it is precisely in this understanding of man as imperfect that Lacan presents his complete understanding of man and his desire – and which it is the task of psychoanalysis to study.
