A Feminine Affliction
For a certain time, if we have been listening to the voices of doctors as well as statistics, we have been hearing the news that, in modern civilization, women are more depressed than men. Whether true or false, this little mystery is worth being explored.
There is a quarrel over depression. It involves a larger quarrel between psychoanalysis and psychiatry; the latter, in the name of an approach that claims to be scientific, proceeds more and more by foreclosing the subject. This quarrel has already been going on for some time. Against a psychiatry that believes that it is as modern as its pharmacopoeia, owes its allegiance to an outmoded empiricism, and short-circuits the dimension of the subject whenever that is what is in question, we can rightly denounce both the “conceptual misappropriation” of the term “depression” and the inconsistency of the phenomena that it is supposed to subsume.
This conclusion has been reached so unanimously by so many studies that I will take it as established: depression, in the singular, simply does not exist. Depressive states certainly exist and can be described and inventoried, but their degrees and variations defy any unification of the concept. We can say “psychosis as such,” “obsession as such,” “hysteria as such,” but we cannot say “depression as such.” We cannot even say “depressions,” as we would say “perversions,” since we cannot describe the types that would give the term its consistency. At most, we can isolate, in a variety of phenomena, the consistency of melancholic psychosis, but on the condition that we do not reduce it to the mood of sadness.
Some new data must, nevertheless, be taken into account. As Lacan affirmed, facts do not exist outside language. On this account, we cannot doubt that the facts of depression are being multiplied in the discontents of civilization. We may deplore and denounce this, but it remains the case. The “we” that I am mentioning is that of the multitude, which is always nostalgic, and which dreams of other, more heroic or more stoic, or in any case more thrilling ages. Yet the fact remains in the complaints of subjects and in the diagnosis made for everything by physicians and psychiatrists. This new vogue of depression has already been criticized, but such criticism, unfortunately, has no chance of putting an end to the phenomenon. The psychoanalyst himself is concerned, for the complaint addressed to him is formulated ever more frequently in the vocabulary of depression, which both motivates the demand for an analysis and which often objects to the rule of being well-spoken (bien-dire).
We can insist that people are making this new reference to depression because they have been influenced to do so. The argument is pertinent—the more we diagnose depressed patients in the name of the physician’s supposed knowledge, the more there will be subjects who say that they are depressed—but it is also empty and undiscriminating. Isn’t this what usually happens? Except for the specific inventions of particular subjects, doesn’t everyone speak a language (une langue) that comes from this Other, which he has been influenced into using, since from this Other he receives “his own message in an inverted form”?
What is true is that, as psychoanalysts, we can no longer speak the language of today’s psychiatrists, even if our diagnostic categories come to us from classical psychiatry.
The types of symptoms that we continue to talk about, following Freud’s and Lacan’s examples—hysteria, phobia, perversions, paranoia, schizophrenia, melancholia, mania—were described for us by the psychiatry of the beginning of the century. Neither Freud nor Lacan challenged their pertinence, and both of them recognized the consistency of these types. Freud, at the end of Chapter 17 of the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, entitled “The Meaning of Symptoms,” is clearly instructive on this point. Beyond interpretation by historical and singular meaning, he wonders about the interpretation that is to be given to the fact that there are types of symptoms. He sees only a recourse to the typical experiences of humanity—phylogenesis—to explain them. What makes this obscure reference superfluous is the bringing to light of structure, which was mentioned in another introduction, that of the German edition of the Ecrits, where Lacan posits that the clinical types, although they were set forth before the appearance of analytic discourse, participate in its structure. Only this reference to structure allows us to conceive both of the consistency of the phenomena described by classical psychiatry, and of something else, which has also been noticed: that symptoms change, and have changed, and that they are, as Lacan says with a calculated neologism, “hystorical.” They are historical in their manifestations because they are a function of the language (langue) and the discourse of the time, but are transhistorical in their structure; this fact alone saves us from having to remake our vocabulary at each turning point in history; it also shows us the importance of recognizing the same structure beneath its changing pictures.
This inconsistency of the notion of depression should obviously not discourage us from thinking about depressive phenomena. They are to be included in the composite whole of the sufferings that are addressed to the psychoanalyst. We find them again in transference, when there is a lack of progress in the analysis, and up to its final phase. Both Freud and Lacan testify to this: Freud, by stumbling upon the serious depressions of certain feminine subjects at the end of the treatment; Lacan, by assimilating the moment of the pass to a depressive position. Neither recoiled from the phenomenon, but the problem in confronting it is to know, in each of its occurrences, to what causal structure it refers.1
The question of what the phenomenon owes to our age has been raised. Our period has certainly registered a rise of new discourses about depression. The multiplication of depressed people is its major theme, one that is diagnosed as a sign of the times, a costly symptom that leads, in Freud’s terms, to a hemorrhage of energy and money, burdening society and challenging health policies.
These new patients have not been generated spontaneously. It is obvious and even common today to locate the first cause of the modern subject’s fate in our civilization: one conditioned by the discourse of science and the globalization of liberal capitalism that follows from it. Reality, indeed, has changed: the superegoistic standardization and anonymity of lifestyles, the deterioration of social bonds, world catastrophes, and so on.
For subjects, the experience of the death, dereliction, and anxiety of the Other leaves them lacking not only in the great causes of the past but in their former beliefs. Thus we see on the literary scene, from Kafka to Beckett and passing by Pessoa and many others, the new figures of nonsense, the laughable characters who grope through situations in which they have lost their way, and who thereby reveal the hidden side of the expansive, inspired, and conquering vitality of Walt Whitman, in the last century.
No ethics that is supposed to be contractual will succeed in quenching the protest over this abandonment, hilflosigkeit, as Freud said. As a good logician, our age will surely not write “Gödel and Heidegger with Habermas,” as Lacan could write “Kant with Sade.” In this crisis of semblances—the most important of which is that of the father—the subject is distraught, and seeks a new desire that will lift him up from the lonely, taciturn satisfactions of the drive. God is no longer part of the business, nor are the masters of knowledge. We can doubtless wager on the return of the little gods and their cults, if hysteria is going to play its part, for the hysteric does not go without the Other. While waiting for all of this, however, we can see its logic in a world in which people have ceased to raise their eyebrows about anything; in our age, indeed, all the scales have fallen from people’s eyes and the result is that all values have fallen under the suspicion of being fake. In such a world, the old utilitarianism of Bentham, as Lacan reread it, has regained its vigor and the general cynicism of jouissance is reigning as master. In this age, it is logical that neurotics, who always have a bit of a “beautiful soul,” are depressed; indeed, a long analysis does not always succeed in making them look directly at what Lacan designated as the “cynical balance” of any elaboration by means of language.
It is obvious that these new tests have been accompanied, perhaps as a compensation, by new places to which one can turn as a resort. Since the right to good health has been extended to the psyche, a growing legitimation of subjective complaints has made itself recognized. Psychoanalysis has contributed in large part to this legitimation, although it is not the only practice that collects sighs. One could believe that much has thus been gained in the struggle against the foreclosure of the dimension that is specific to the subject in scientific civilization. Yet as if by the cunning of pseudo-scientific civilization, with the category of depression we have refused to accept the meaning of the complaint that has been addressed to us. When subjects deplore their pain, we do not know how to read what they are saying about their intimate experience of the end or of loss, and therefore we reduce their complaints to the supposed dysfunctionings of illness.
What strikes me is that nothing in current discourse allows a humanly positive value to be attributed to depression. Other ages knew how to give a meaning, even at the price of what appears to us as an illusion, to the various ways of putting life in question. The theme of faith and the call to God sheltered many mortifying aspirations, and piety sublimated a disgust with the world. (See Donne’s Biathanatos.) Romantic idealization knew how to absolve the self-absorption of a broken man as the despairs of love, and even to make them into a seductive pose. As to the morbid, Baudelairian taste of spleen, wasn’t it authorized by a supposed protest against stupidity? These are only a few dispersed examples, borrowed from the field of religious or literary sublimation, but they allow us to measure how much—and how curiously—contemporary discourse dislikes depression, even while talking so much about it.
Incapable of elaborating it in sublimated forms, this discourse considers it as a deficit and never as a value. It is a defect in relation to health when the physician is speaking, but it is also a fault, and it is not only the psychoanalyst who takes it in this way. It is certainly a modern fault, in the eyes of our civilization’s obscure imperative to optimism, against the commandment to “face up to things.” Subjects themselves perceive it as a giving up and often refer to it as a renunciation of the fight.
Of course, there is always, especially thanks to hysteria, a special empathy for the subject who no longer succeeds in something. We may admire or envy the joyous and dynamic man, but it is rare for him really to arouse sympathy. On the contrary, we give in more willingly to the contagion of the beaten man’s sadness, and compassion always lends itself to devotion and support for him. Nevertheless, among us today, the “blues” do not unify us, and a civilization that valorizes competitiveness and conquest—even if, in the final analysis, it is only that of the market—cannot love its depressed people. It fails to love them even while it is engendering more and more of them as the illness of the capitalist discourse. The empathy that I mentioned is, furthermore, very often mitigated, for the subject who does not give up on his/her depression irritates us and sometimes makes us run away. (Winnicott would tell us that we do so under the influence of a maniacal defense!) It is not only that this subject brings even the most devoted efforts to nothing. What s/he does is to make us experience something else: beyond the impotence of arguments and the inadequacy of the attempts at persuasion—whether the cognitivist likes this or not—s/he unveils the reasonlessness of our attachment to the world. Such a reasonlessness is not, however, without its cause: S(Ⱥ). Testifying to the radical contingency of what we believe to be the meaning of life, she solicits in us what Lacan called the “inmost juncture of the subject’s sense of life.”2
The depressed person disquiets us because, by her very existence, she threatens the social bond. Thus there is condemnation. It is not new, but today it is unanimous, although it has many different motivations. The ages of religious fervor could read it as an insult to faith, an attack on the bond with the divine Other, and made it into a sin. The modern age sees it as both an illness and a surrender. When Lacan situates sadness as a moral cowardice, relying on references from the age that preceded science—Saint Thomas, Dante, and Spinoza—he is certainly in a state of rupture with everything that has been said about it elsewhere, but he is judging sadness no less than the others did. Thus it becomes necessary to grasp what distinguishes the verdict of psychoanalysis from that of common discourse.
Psychoanalysts are acquainted with subjects’ depression only through what their patients say about it. The practicing analyst knows only what is confided to him/her about what it is like either now or in the past. This path leaves an entire clinical space on its margins, for it does not encounter those who have passed over to the other side of the wall of language, and who are received by the psychiatrist. I am referring to the melancholic states in which the subject is frozen in silence or in petrified pain, and is inaccessible to any appeal from a fellow person. Like both Freud and Lacan, the psychoanalyst must learn about these extreme cases, and can even throw light on them with his knowledge, but they remain outside the grasp of the analytic process; the latter cannot receive those who, walled in by pain and wordless petrification, refuse to exercise speech. At this point, one could wonder whether, between psychoanalysis and the consistency of the depressive states—to the extent that such a consistency exists and supposing that the expression has a meaning—there is not a relation of mutual exclusion. Where depression is spoken, however, let us trust what is said of it, both inside and outside psychoanalysis.
It seems to me that the depressive state is reduced too easily to the affect of sadness. Perhaps we make this reduction because we are approaching sadness with Lacan’s verdict on it: it is moral cowardice. Yet the depressive state is not reduced to this affect as a feeling. Whoever says, “I am depressed” certainly implies pain and sadness here, to the point that a happy depressed person would be nearly a contradiction, but the reciprocal is not true. The unhappy subject is not always depressed, and a depressed person can be indifferent to his feelings. As proof of this, one can speak of a subject who has never been depressed, but one cannot imagine a person for whom the word “sadness” would have no meaning and who could not refer any of his own experience to it. There is, indeed, a generic sadness, which means that it is virtually inevitable, even universal, for it is connected with the status of the speakingbeing. Freud situates it in this way, as the normal result of certain avatars of the libido—even if it has pathological forms.3 As effect of language, the subject is saturnine in essence.4 Lacan’s thesis that sadness, in the context of a psychoanalytic ethics, is a form of cowardice does not contradict this. He makes this affect into the specific fate of the one who resigns from his duty “to find one’s way in dealing with the unconscious.”5 Sadness is thus a fault, a sin, “which is situated only in thought,” but as is the case elsewhere, no one can find himself completely in the unconscious, and consequently a place is given over to what is structurally irreducible in the sin of sadness.
When someone affirms that s/he is depressed, there is, in fact, always more than the sole dimension of affect: the subject speaks of it as a loss of interest or capacity, and uses formulas such as, “I no longer have any…strength, courage, vigor, and so on”; sometimes it is life itself that seems to him/her to have no more meaning or taste. This is more than sadness, which uses different words. This is something that touches on the subject’s very animation and that has unmistakable repercussions, at the level of what s/he undertakes, in effects of inertia; beyond the coloring of the feelings, these effects touch the very principle of interest and action. We would be tempted to conclude that one speaks of depression when sadness has passed to the act, to the act of inhibiting the dynamism of the will; to say this, however, would be to fail to recognize that sadness is itself only an effect, and that we must seek elsewhere the cause of the libidinal deflation that leaves the subject not only sad, but as if s/he had “no motivation.” With this expression, doesn’t lalangue record an implicit reference to the cause? I have found the same reference in a subject, who, when emerging from a depression that could rightly be called melancholic, testified with remarkable accuracy: “I wasn’t suffering, but I no longer had my commandment,” and insisted that he could not say it in any other way than with this expression, which he devised himself. Such expressions are in astonishing harmony with Lacan’s statement that the melancholic subject attempts to reach the object a, “whose command escapes him.”6
In fact, in common parlance, the depressive state is formulated in bodily metaphors. It is enumerated in images of the body as arrested, immobilized, a body that “doesn’t work any more,” which “can’t face anything.” Isn’t pain evoked in an image of petrification and of impeded movement, as Lacan noted in his seminar on anxiety? All these expressions, which have been deposited in the language (langue), are only scraps of subjective experiences, but as degraded as their metaphorical power may be, they still leave a trace. The last recourse of the laziness that cannot speak well, they are generally supplanted by the words that each subject draws from his stock, in order to say both the vacuousness and the inertia, since the statements of depression always designate an intersection where sadness is combined with inhibition.
Today’s psychiatry attaches great importance to this dimension of inhibition, which allows it to misunderstand the subjective touch in favor of a supposed deficit of the ego. We do not understand it in this way, but that is no reason to minimize this dimension. Freud himself saw in it an effect of the division of the subject, and imputed it either to the paralyzing defense against the return of the repressed or to the punitive prohibitions of the ego and the distribution of the investments commanded by the two.7 He had clearly already recognized it as a subjective phenomenon and he connected it explicitly with depression. It is true that in his celebrated triad, inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety, as well as in Lacan’s discussion of it in his seminar on anxiety, the term “depression” shines by its absence and its difference. Depressive sadness, indeed, is not anxiety, the typical affect of a relation to a real that cannot be assimilated. It is, on the contrary, a “sentiment,”8 which deceives concerning the cause; it is also not a symptom—it has neither structure nor consistency—but rather a state of the subject, which can undergo fluctuations and is compatible with different clinical structures.
Neither a structure nor an affect of the real, depression participates, however, in the figures of inhibition. This is the way that Freud understood it, when, speaking of the latter at the end of his first chapter, he specifies that in “the depressive states,” inhibition is “general,”9 freezing the whole of the libidinal functions. From this, it appears that the depressive states, as varied and fluctuating as they are, can all be located within a unitary formula. I will call it the suspension of the cause of desire; the apathetic and painful lack of appetite that can be called depression finds its structural condition in the fall of the effectiveness of the cause of desire. Thus, to speak of depression is nothing other than to approach this cause of desire inside out, by means of its failures and vacillations.
I will note, moreover, that this thesis immediately explains what I will call the antidepressive effect of psychoanalysis. As limited as it may be, this effect is no less obvious, and derives its power from the fact that from beginning to end, psychoanalysis operates through the cause of desire. At the beginning of an analysis, first of all, it introduces the subject into a temporality of expectation that sustains or restores the vector of desire; the conclusion, if it has taken place, marks out what is beyond the depressive position.10
This formula is valid for all the structures: it is true for both the vacillations of the cause in the neuroses and for the sidelining of the cause in melancholic psychosis. On the one hand, the foreclosure specific to psychosis and its correlate of an overflowing of jouissance explains the sidelining of the cause. This may take multiple forms, which are not always spectacular or pathetic: the most unobtrusive indifference, apathy, and apragmatism—which can sometimes be confused with the “normal”—up to the most extreme paroxysms of pain and melancholic inertia. On the other hand, with the neuroses there are also numerous occasions in which what Lacan called “the power of pure loss” fails for a time.11 This expression, which summons up the vital effectiveness that Freud himself located in the lost object, indicates quite well that it is “death as it is actualized in the signifying sequence”12; this power presides just as much over the feeling of life and its dynamisms as over its depressive consequences. As a result, the latter are a matter of more contingent conjunctures, which are situated at the joint of the relation with the object.
If one asks, “Are we depressed by what is intolerable in castration?” the answer can only be negative. Castration, if this is the name that we give to the loss, engendered by language, of the thing, may always be implied in the depressive affect; if castration is its condition, it is far, however, from being its cause. The opposite thesis can even be accentuated: the cause of desire only takes on its function from the effectiveness of castration, which is what Lacan’s expression “the power of pure loss” means. What is this power, if not what impels and maintains the dynamisms of all orders, their conquests, and their undertakings? What is it, if not what gives to the subject, who has already been killed by the signifier, the anomalous and paradoxical vitality of a decisive desire?
If there is an affect that belongs to castration, it is not depression but anxiety and even horror, which are quite different. Isn’t there a sad truth, as our language (la langue) suggests? Truth is not sad; it is horrible, inhuman, and horror does not depress us; instead, it awakens us. An analysis, far from resolving castration, reproduces it. (At one period, Lacan called it, in the vocabulary of the transformation of the subject, the “taking up of castration” and he later set it forth through the prepositional function ∀x.Φx, which rewrites castration in terms of the logic of set theory.) Thus it is conceived that an analysis resolves what can be called the temptations to depression and that it sometimes succeeds in reversing them into an effect of enthusiasm, without there being any need for exhortation or any other suggestion.
Depression is not produced directly by castration, which is perhaps our only universal, but rather by the singular solutions that each subject brings to it, which vary according to contingencies, but which always imply the ethical dimension. In this sense, the statement that the subject is “structurally depressed”—with the implication that this is because of castration—is imprecise. It would be more accurate to say “subject structurally to depression,” a depression that always arises in relation to the avatars of the junction with the object.
The clinic of the cause, inasmuch as it articulates the lack in castration with the object as surplus jouissance that responds to it, takes place between two boundaries. At one extreme, castration founds the desiring power, erecting the object in its agalmatic power. Alcibiades, the “epitome of desirousness,”13 a figure who is very far from us, illustrates this, since for him, castration is included in the object a/-φ. At the other extreme is the extinction of the fires, the loss of the relation with the world, the stasis of the melancholic’s petrified being, which itself becomes the rejected object, incarnating a jouissance outside the phallic reference: a/φ0.
Between the two are to be found all the ambiguous phenomena of neurosis. They are ambiguous because the neurotic subject’s depressive states are figures of desire as well. They are what remains of desire when, untangling itself from the drive, from what Lacan calls its heavy soul, it detaches itself from the “hardy offshoots of the wounded tendency,”14 and tends to reduce itself to the negative instance of the drive. In this case, one could say that such a subject has everything that could make him happy, but instead of being so, he challenges and denounces all the surplus jouissances that have been actualized. This is not the zero degree of desire, but its more or less achieved reduction to the foundation of the (-φ) of castration. The subject in this state gets jouissance from something, for his/her rejection of what life offers stirs up the empty utopia of the nothing—the nonexistent other thing—about which Paul Claudel, in Le soulier de satin (The Satin Shoe), makes the marvelous statement: “And is it nothing other than this nothing that delivers the all?” And, indeed, doesn’t it allow the subject to get off on the consistency, which can be called a-corporeal, of castration, and which can be written as (-φ≡a)?
From hysteria to obsession, the different forms do not exclude all kinds of combinations with the sad pleasures of autoeroticism or even the taciturn jouissances of the drive, but what is important here is the curve of the whole on which the phenomena are divided up. Such phenomena go from conquering desire to the melancholic’s abolished desire; they include the neurotic’s problematic or doubtful desire, object-love, self-hatred, and narcissistic self-investment. The relation between this desire and jouissance must be articulated: from the moment that desire itself becomes a defense, wherever it falls, jouissance rises. It is therefore exactly right to say also that the depressive state is a mode of jouissance, but this formula will only operate if we succeed, in each case, in giving it its singular coordinates.
Here I encounter once again the question of whether and why women are more frequently depressed. The most recent statistics claim to establish this, whereas for manic-depressive psychosis, there is no significant variation between men and women. This point is not astonishing if we consider that the empire of foreclosure knows no border between the sexes. As for the statistics on depression, psychoanalysts, who hardly trust statistics, could neglect them and see them only as an artifact. What is seen today as a distinguishing trait of depression is the complaint.
The propensity to complain, as well as the toleration of it, varies according to sex. If women complain more easily, it is because confessing the weaknesses of being, sadness, pain, discouragement, in short, everything that can reduce one’s vigor and combativeness, is more compatible with the standard images of femininity than with the ideals of manliness. In addition, the complaint itself is feminizing, so those located on man’s side learn to contain it, whereas on woman’s side, nothing objects to its use, and it can even become part of the art of pleasing.
A little air of doubt and melancholy,
You know, Ninon, makes you even prettier
as Musset said in an invitation.
One cannot forget that Freud himself, connecting women’s depression with their position toward castration, makes penis envy the predisposing factor. We know the fearsome feminine itinerary that he describes for us in light of his experience of transference: beginning with envy, it continued in the expectation of a substitute, and ended in serious depression, in despair before what is impossible. These three phases are not without an homology with the three moments of erotomania, which a certain psychiatry described shortly afterwards, and empirical findings do not contradict this itinerary. It even seems that we gladly admit that feelings of inferiority, of a negative value, a deficit in self-esteem, as people say today—feelings that are so propitious to the depressive state—are more frequent in women and are very much in harmony, indeed, with envy. Envy brings to life the experience of powerlessness, which each subject encounters in the register of devalorizing comparison, a register in which one imagines that others are less exposed to this experience than one is oneself.
The question is obviously not statistical. It is rather a matter of knowing what could found the dissymmetry between men and women in relation to depressive states. Why would the “holders of desire” be less subject to it than the “claimants of sex”15? Since it is a question of the cause of desire, let us seek the answer in the misfortunes of love, which could very well program for women a mourning that has no equivalent in men. I am referring to sexed love here, leaving aside what is addressed to the child. Motherhood also includes its share of worries, suffering, and renunciations, but I believe that it leads more to torments than to depression.
Love, as we have always known, is the spontaneous, almost natural treatment for sadness and despondency; the affects of plenitude and joy that it arouses are completely opposed to the feelings of unhappiness and vacuousness that characterize the depressive position. Here, there is, curiously, a dissymmetry between the sexes, one that is rather homologous to what is observed in homosexuality: men’s is connected with the impasses of desire, whereas women’s is engendered by the failure of love. I will take up this aspect of the problem.
Freud recognized the phallic value of love, since he posited an equivalence between men’s castration anxiety and women’s anxiety of losing love, but Lacan’s formulas, which distinguish being and having the phallus, allow us to formulate this value better. This is the dissymmetry: being the phallus, the only identification that sustains being a woman, takes sustenance from love. This is not the case for a man, whose virility is affirmed on the side of having, by sexual potency and its multiple metonymies. Being a woman is doubly sustained by love: inasmuch as “being loved” is equivalent to “being the phallus,” but also inasmuch as one only loves on the basis of one’s own lack. It can thus be said that love is feminine.
This is what led Lacan to affirm, in a formula that is as provocative as it is perfectly rigorous: when a man loves—which happens of course—it is as a woman. It is inasmuch as he is himself subject to lack, since, in terms of his being as man, he understands nothing of love—as everything indicates—because he “is sufficient in his jouissance.”16 Women love therefore, but because they call for love. Love is called for because it is a gift, whereas desire is “taken.” From this we can understand the antidepressive effect of encountering love, which, although it includes body-to-body contact, cannot be reduced to it, for love is addressed to saying (dire), thus bringing about the enigmatic recognition of two unconsciousnesses.
Love, unfortunately, is risky and ephemeral, as we have always known. This is why it aspires not to cease being written; it wants to elevate itself to the necessary. Exalting when one succeeds in encountering it, love is also depressing when it is lost. Placing the cause of desire in the Other, it leaves the subject at the mercy of the caprices of the Other’s response, and threatened with its absence. This alienation also operates in men, of course, except that their being is nourished by something other than love. Women more frequently make love into a cause, and when it is missing, either contingently or through the acts of civilization, which is in crisis today, they are left stranded. What is worse, love, when it does not disappear, can by its very presence overwhelm the subject with the weight of an Other; what makes the weight even more crushing is that the cause of desire is attributed to the Other. Freud recognized this, emphasizing that love and melancholia are two cases of being “crushed by the object.” Lacan does not recoil from saying in Seminar I that love is a kind of suicide. The elation, plenitude, and joy of love disguise the handing-over of oneself to the Other, the degrees of which are varied, but which can go to the extreme of voluntary self-abolition in certain kinds of mysticism. Thus, whether it lends itself or disappears, love always programs a bit of disenchantment, and by putting herself into its hands, each woman always becomes a bit of a widow! The consequences of this are varied: they include acute mourning—which is so frequent—a deflation, at the very least, of the joy of life, or unforeseeable metamorphoses, such as the typical reduction onto having, which, sometimes, in the course of time, transforms a young woman disappointed by love into a shrew. Well, who will tell us about the motive forces of certain kinds of feminine avarice, that, for example, of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet or Buñuel’s Tristana?
Until now, I have discussed the effects of love and its consequences only on the level of the phallic identification with being. They must, however, also be connected with the field of jouissance. Lacan marked out a precise articulation that connects, first, what is insatiable in love with the sexual nonrelation and, second, the properly feminine requirement with her status as absolute Other, a status that is not completely in the phallic function.
It is noteworthy that, concerning women, Lacan was never in complete agreement with Freud, and he brought something new concerning sexuation and its consequences. He maintains Freud’s accent on feminine lack by formulating that every subject as such is inscribed in the phallic function of castration; when it comes to situating difference, however, he recognizes it on the side of a jouissance that is supplementary and “not completely” phallic. This is a jouissance foreclosed from language, which the unconscious does not know, which cannot be assimilated, and which is rejected and expelled to the limit of the series, and thus segregated. It is in excess of the possible ways that it can be ciphered. We see the problem: if the remedy for sadness is to “refind oneself in the unconscious,” in its signs and its fictions, what will be the affect of the jouissance that is not inscribed there and for which woman, inasmuch as she is Other for herself, is responsible?17
Here we can return to the problem of guilt. Freud, as we know, connected it with the father of the Law, the dead father of Totem and Taboo, whose murder never ends: the father of monotheism. Obviously, this is only a myth, but it provides an irreducible knotting of guilt and the love for this dead father, who has become the Name-of-the-Father, and to whom we remain forever in debt. On this question, there is a perceptible gap between Freud and Lacan.
Lacan does not connect guilt with the father but with jouissance: to jouissance inasmuch as it ex-sists in relation to the symbolic and is marked by the symbolic. As for the first of these, it is the defect of the symbolic that makes jouissance at fault, a fault that includes existence and sex.18 Jouissance, however, can be said to be faulty not only because it does not exist, but also because it is wounded, even gored by the signifier. The original sin is double: because of both the jouissance that is there and of what is there no longer. In this respect, the Name-of-the-Father, whose “true function” is “to unite (and not to oppose) a desire to the Law,” far from engendering guilt, blots it out.19 This is the only thesis that really explains the fact that guilt is raised to delirious certainty only in the case of psychosis, precisely where the paternal mediation is lacking.
Furthermore, Freud’s thesis, which attributes melancholic guilt to an identification with the primal father, does not contradict this, if we recognize in the latter, not the Name-of-the-Father, but rather the father as jouisseur, from before the murder. I would like to direct your attention to Freud’s final remarks, nine in number, dating from June 1938, for they signal an approach that does not go by way of the father.20 The series itself indicates a gravitation in Freud’s thoughts, since four of them deal with feminine inferiority, guilt linked to unsatisfied love, inhibition, and mysticism. I will examine only inhibition, since as I have said, it is correlated to depression. He situates its first cause in infantile masturbation inasmuch as this jouissance is “unsatisfying…in itself.”21 This, it seems to me, is a way of saying that phallic jouissance, indeed, is unsatisfying. It is the jouissance “that shouldn’t be/could never fail”22; it is guilty by definition, and the depressed inhibition of it exposes and rejects its nonsense.
The being of the jouissance that is not identified by any signifier, not even the phallic signifier, can only be aimed at in discourse through the insult; the latter, which is “the first and last word of any dialogue,”23 is located at the edge of the ineffable. This brings me back to woman, who is defamed.24 This is not just because of mean-spiritedness, but because one cannot say her with the words of phallic jouissance. What is important here is that this ability to encompass her in words is also impossible for her as well as for a man, and as experience shows, she defames herself more often than men do. Let us recognize, in her trait of melancholy, an attempt to speak of herself as Other. Her jouissance is unciphered and goes beyond her because it does not pass into the unconscious; it is impossible for a woman to “find [her] way in dealing with the unconscious.”25 Thus a surplus of sadness is always possible, one that is “unmotivated,” if we wish to use the term that Guirault applies to certain murders, in which the subject aims straight at the kakon of being.
This has nothing to do with the feelings of insufficiency mentioned above: this trait and this affect may not exclude the experience of “inferiority,” but in themselves they refer to neither phallic lack nor jouissance, both of which instead generate anxiety and inhibition. The delirium of melancholic indignity—which is something else, of course—is revealing in this context: going to extremes, it shows that the rejection of the foreclosed jouissance in the insult aimed at oneself is the final verbal rampart before this jouissance is expelled in a suicidal passage to the act. More commonly—outside psychosis—the rejection into the insult is like the first degree of a paradoxical sublimation coming from this place of jouissance, the place “from which ‘the universe is a defect in the purity of “Non-Being” ’ is vociferated.”26
This status of jouissance gives meaning to the specifically feminine call for a chosen love. This requirement will not be able to resolve the disharmony of jouissances; rather it will repeat their disunion, which in bringing the sexes closer together, gives existence to the absolute Other, making woman always Other: Other to herself. Love therefore will not leave her alone with her heterity, but will at least be able to index it with the name of the lover: such is the case with Juliet, made eternal by Romeo, Iseult by Tristan, or Beatrice by Dante. What can be deduced from this is that for a woman, the loss of love exceeds the phallic dimension to which Freud reduced it, for what she loses in losing love is herself, in the form of the named Other. For Freud, the work of mourning always allows an irreducible kernel of “inconsolable” fixation on the lost being, a kernel that is all the more unforgettable since it is radically foreign and impossible to assimilate.27 Lacan, however, makes us perceive another side of the phenomenon, in which what is unforgettable for a woman is what love turns her into: the Other whom, by the same movement, it institutes and…rehabilitates. This is what the lesson of mystical loves teaches us.
Does psychoanalysis depress women, as Freud thought that it did? In fact, the question comes back in another form: To what extent can the ethics of the well-spoken (bien-dire), which is specific to psychoanalysis, lighten the subject’s burden of jouissance, especially the burden of those who are not wholly in phallic jouissance?
Psychoanalysis, which operates precisely by transference love, does not work for love. Instead, it takes the spontaneous solution offered by love and drives it to despair. It is amusing to note that Freud asked himself this question around 1914, in the texts that he devoted to transference, and hesitates over what should be accorded to love. His response, as we know, was categorically bad-tempered. Contrary to what one wants to expect from it, an analysis assures us of nothing about love.
The well-spoken will spare no one from being affected by the paradoxes of jouissance, in terms of both phallic limitation and the supplements that sometimes come back to women. Yet psychoanalysis is the only contemporary discourse to offer us a cause that is…other, and, if the subject is this “logical analysand” whom I mentioned in the past, there will be a gain in knowledge. Now this knowledge is not without both therapeutic and subjective effects; by elevating the incapacities that are experienced into structural constraints that transcend them, knowledge touches the very principle of the horror of castration, sometimes to the point of producing an effect of enthusiasm. Thus it can be concluded that the sadness that falls short of well-saying can legitimately be stigmatized as a fault. As for love, although none of its contingency is reduced, it will not be lost, and, if we are to believe Jacques Lacan, could even be made “more worthy than the proliferation of chattering that it has constituted up to today.”28
1. On the question of depressive phenomena in transference, see Serge Cottet’s article “La belle inertie,” Ornicar? 32.
2. Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Ecrits: A Selection, p. 191.
3. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, SE XV, pp. 215–216.
4. For the history of the notion, see Saturn and Melancholia: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Revised with the collaboration of Raymond Klibansky. London: Nelson, 1964.
5. Lacan, Television, p. 23.
6. Jacques Lacan, Anxiety, unpublished seminar, July 3, 1963.
7. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, trans. Alix Strachey. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. XX. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1959), pp. 89–90.
8. The author here makes an untranslatable pun. “Senti” means “heartfelt,” while “ment” is a form of the verb “mentir,” to lie. (Translator’s note.)
9. Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, p. 90.
10. See “Leçons cliniques de la passe,” drafted by Colette Soler for cartel A, 1990–1992 (Serge Cottet plus-one, Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, Herbert Wachsberger), in Comment finissent les analyses, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994, p. 181.
11. Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” p. 276.
12. Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment,” p. 253.
13. Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” Ecrits: A Selection, p. 310.
14. Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment,” p. 253.
15. “Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality,” p. 97.
16. Jacques Lacan, Seminar, Les non-dupes errent, the session of February 12, 1974.
17. This is the expression that Lacan uses in “Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire” for jouissance, “whose lack makes the Other inconsistent” (p. 305).
18. The references to this point are multiple. See especially, “Remarques sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache,” in the French edition of the Ecrits, pp. 666–667 and “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” in Ecrits: A Selection, p. 305.
19. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” p. 309.
20. Sigmund Freud, “Findings, Ideas, Problems.” SE XXIII (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1964), pp. 299–300.
21. Ibid., p. 300.
22. Lacan, Encore, p. 59.
23. Lacan, “L’étourdit,” p. 44.
24. Lacan, Encore, p. 85.
25. Television, p. 22.
26. “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” p. 305.
27. See Michael Turnheim, L’autre dans le même. Paris: Editions du Champ Lacanien, 2002.
28. Jacques Lacan, “Note aux italiens,” Ornicar? 25, p. 10.