In Seminar X, Lacan sets out to examine the vicissitudes of anxiety, and the various modes of attenuation that the subject employs to maintain and defend its existence between the contradictory forces with which it is inevitably forced to contend. As noted in Chapter 1, Lacan succinctly defines the paradoxical peculiarity of the relation
between the subject and the ego thus:
What he desires presents itself to him as what he does not want – a form assumed by negation in which misrecognition is inserted in a very odd way, the
misrecognition, of which he himself is unaware, by which he transfers the
permanence of his desire to an ego that is nevertheless obviously intermittent, and, inversely, protects himself from his desire by attributing to it these very
intermittences. (E, p.691)
The torsion between the subject of unconscious desire and the narcissistic identification of the ego is precisely the point of internal division and disjuncture where anxiety
irrupts. In the first lecture of Seminar X, Lacan reiterates the importance of the torsion of anxiety that irrupts between the two levels of the graph of desire (between the inner circuit of the upper level, →d, and the lower level, m→i(a)):
It is in the operation of the dialectic which links these two levels so closely that we are going to see there being introduced the function of anxiety, not that it is in itself the mainspring of it, but that it is by the phases of its appearance what allows us to orientate ourselves in it. (SX, 14.11.62, p.3)
If, as previously asserted, analysis in the Lacanian orientation involves the restructuring
to the movement of the subject within structure insofar as it designates moments of knotting and unknotting. These moments, incidentally, can be associated with the two alternating movements Freud nominated as Eros (founded upon the pleasure principle and a lessening of tension towards homeostasis) and Thanatos (the death drive that is distinguished by the increase of tension towards jouissance).
The ego is involved in the movement of knotting together and coherence. In order to achieve synthesis, however, the ego relies upon repression to eliminate contradiction, and utilises the repertoire of Imaginary and Symbolic substitutions (founded on the stage of the fundamental fantasy) to fill in the gaps thus created. For Lacan, the ego is an Imaginary construction; a montage of sensory reflections and spectral images that are cohered by the anchoring points de capiton provided by the Symbolic. However, as the graph of desire illustrates, there is always a remainder produced in the process of signification that escapes capture in the Imaginary and Symbolic registers of experience:
The specular relationship is precisely linked to the relationship with the big Other
…. This cathexis of the specular image is a fundamental moment of the imaginary relationship, fundamental in the fact that there is a limit and the fact that the whole of libidinal cathexis does not pass through the specular image. There is a
remainder. (SX, 28.11.62, p.9)
It is this remainder that paradoxically underpins the suturing of the points de caption, identified in the discourse of the analysand through parapraxes, jokes and free
association. As knots that facilitate the matrix of elements that constitute meaning, the
points de capiton are buttressed by the fundamental fantasy and the operation of objet a. Anxiety arises when the suturing points are disturbed, and it is the residue or remainder
– nominated by Lacan as objet a– that provides the lever for the process of unknotting as it subtends the Symbolic at the level of enunciation (the upper level of the graph).For Lacan, the various phases of anxiety provide a reliable material guide towards the productive moments in analysis, where the technique of punctuation and interpretation will disturb the stability of the underpinning fantasy structure.
The vicissitudes of anxiety, and the various symptomatic defences mounted against it, thus provide the guiding thread that the analyst follows through the maze of the transference relationship; and as Lacan is at pains to point out in the first session of Seminar X, anxiety is the crucial affect with which the analyst needs to attain expertise and must handle with great care (SX, 14.11.62, pp.1-11). Not only does the analyst need to be aware of the limits that the analysand can bear, but the analyst must also be attuned to his or her own anxiety. This last point refers to the ethic of maintaining ‘the desire of
the analyst’ which Lacan, from the mid-1960s, equates with the assumption (or
‘semblance’) of the position of objet a. After establishing the transference relationship –
where the analyst masquerades as ‘the subject supposed to know’ – the analyst proceeds from the position of what Lacan later formulates as the discourse of the master to the
discourse of the analyst.31 As a semblance of objet a, the analyst acts as a ‘silent’
provocateur who lures the analysand into an encounter with their unconscious desire, and the deconstructive and reconstructive analytic work of unknotting and re-knotting
the signifiers that secure the analysand’s subjective position. It involves a savoir faire
through which the analysteffects a subversion of the position of the subject, an
unmooring of the anchors that stabilise the subject within the structure of the social bond of discourse in which the analysand is enmeshed through the auspices of the
fundamental fantasy (Nobus, 2000, pp.136-40).
The experience of Lacanian analysis is one where the analysand encounters a state of subjective destitution; an encounter with , the lack in the Other. The anchoring points (points de capiton) that secure the analysand’s subject position are
loosened to the extent that a recalibration becomes possible. In this respect, analysis is a creative process that operates with signifying material through the trans-subjective medium of speech, and purposefully induces and subverts the double effects of voice
and gaze;a point to which we shall will return in detail. At no point does this analytic process employ the master discourse that provides unequivocal responses and solutions for the analysand. Nor does Lacan make claims that analysis guarantees any kind of
31
In Seminar XVII –The Other Side of Psychoanalysis– Lacan reconceptualises the social bond along the axes of the four discourses: the discourse of the master, the discourse university, the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst. For further explanation see Fink (2000, pp.29-47); and Verhaeghe (2001, pp.17-34).
‘cure’, other than its efficacy as a process that brings about change due to a shift in orientation towards the structure of subjectivity in which all speaking beings are necessarily and irrevocably embedded. For Lacan, the analytic task is to set the analysand to work in the process of restructuring; a reconstructive process that
necessarily involves an encounter with uncertainty and anxiety, and which might best be described as the encounter with drive and the various modalities of its orientations and operation. There is no possibility of the type of transformation of subjectivity that augurs lasting change without the encounter with anxiety and contingency. As such, anxiety is not of the order of either the Imaginary or Symbolic registers, but belongs to an
encounter with the register of the Real (Harari, 2001).
The preceding portrayal of the practice of Lacanian analysis – as it is outlined in the first session of Seminar X – is a process that is both contingent and without
guaranteed outcomes; a far cry from any psychotherapy or ego psychology that protects
and reinforces the ego to the point of ‘self’ affirmation, coherence and harmonious certainty. According to Lacan, these strategies merely reinforce the narcissistic illusions and cohesion that the pleasure principle facilitates, working in the opposite direction of separation and transformative change. For Lacan, anxiety is an exemplary and pivotal affect that is distinct from the deceptive emotions characteristic of imaginary ego relations (Evans, 2003, p.11).
Anxiety –‘that which does not deceive’ (SXI, p.41) – thus serves as a guide through the perilous analytic journey, a journey that Lacan asserts must not be
undertaken lightly. In Seminar XI (1963-64), Lacan summarises the necessary caution thus:
It is always dangerous to disturb anything in that zone of shades, and perhaps it is part of the analyst’s role, if the analyst is performing it properly, to be besieged – I mean really – by those in whom he has invoked this world of shades, without always being able to bring them up to the light of day. One can never be sure that one says on this matter will have no harmful effect – even what I have been able to say about it over the last ten years owes some of its impact to this fact. It is not
touching them at what Freud calls the navel –the navel of dreams–… to designate their untimely unknown centre … the gap of which I have already spoken …. Believe me, I myself never re-open it without great care. (p.23)
After establishing the pivotal importance of anxiety – and it is important to note that he attributes it as having an effect on the collective level of public speech – Lacan sets out over the following sessions to enumerate its vicissitudes with precision. To do this, he locates it on a matricial diagram on the dual co-ordinates of movement and difficulty. Although it is beyond the scope of the present chapter to examine this in detail, the
following summary will serve to demonstrate Lacan’s formulation on the basis of Freud’s text, Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety.
The anxiety matrix.
The first apposite reflection that Lacan makes with respect to Freud’s text,
Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety, is that although Freud writes at length about inhibition and the symptom, his analysis of anxiety is not fully developed. In a somewhat obscure passage, Lacan proclaims that anxiety is not to be located in any positive way, but emerges at the point where there is a void, a discernable gap:
Today I am not going to go into the text of Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. Because as you have seen from the beginning I have decided today to work without a net, and there is no subject where the net of the Freudian discourse is closer, in short, to giving us a false sense of security; because, precisely, when we go into this text, you will see what is to be seen in connection with anxiety, that there is no net, because precisely as regards anxiety, each mesh, as I might
appropriately put it, has no meaning except precisely by leaving the void in which anxiety is. (SX, 14.11.62, p.6)
Lacan proceeds to address this apparent omission with a detailed delineation of anxiety in relation to inhibition and symptom. To do this, he depicts the three Freudian elements
– inhibition, symptom and anxiety – as three different levels on a matrix governed by two co-ordinate vectors: the horizontal axis [→] which he labels as difficulty, and the
vertical axis [↓] which he labels as movement (Figure 7).
Difficulty
Movem
ent
Inhibition Impediment Embarrassment
Emotion Symptom
Dismay Anxiety
Figure 7: The anxiety matrix (I)
Note. From Lacan, J. SX, 14.11.61, p.8.
On the horizontal axis of difficulty, Lacan extrapolates inhibition towards
impediment and embarrassment. He likens this to being caught in the trap of narcissistic capture. On the vertical axis of movement, Lacan extrapolates that inhibition– which is movement in its most difficult dimension as ‘the stopping of movement’– progresses towards emotion and finally dismay,where dismay is the movement of emotion to the
level of a profound disturbance. On this account, Lacan’s matrix clearly articulates that
anxiety is an affect that is quite distinct from emotion:
What is anxiety? We have ruled out its being an emotion. And to introduce it, I would say it is an affect …. On occasion I have tried to say what affect is not: it is not Being given in its immediacy, nor is it the subject in some sort of raw form
something Freud says just like me. It is unmoored, it goes with the drift ….What is repressed are the signifiers that moor it. (SX, 14.11.62, p.10)
Lacan achieves this matrix of associations through an ingenious virtuoso performance of linguistic references to the complexities of the etymology of each term.32 When
considered in Lacan’s native French, the homophony evident demonstrates the elusive
slippage and ambiguity involved in the process of constructing meaning from sound images; an important point which the discussion of Freud’s Uncanny (Das
Unheimliche), below, will return to. The difficulty Lacan is attempting to resolve is the clear differentiation and clarification of anxiety and its function from a range of other emotions, affects, inhibitions, impediments, symptoms and actions. To this end, he
posits the question: ‘after all … what is not related to anxiety? It is a matter of precisely
knowing when it really is anxiety’ (SX,14.11.62, p.8) (Figure 8).
Difficulty
Movem
ent
Inhibition Impediment Embarrassment
Emotion Symptom Passage à l’acte
Dismay Acting out Anxiety
Figure 8: The anxiety matrix (II)
Note. From Lacan, J. SX, 26.6.63,p.1.
The remaining gaps in the matrix (left open here) are discussed further in the penultimate session of the seminar series (SX, 26.6.63), where acting out and passage à
32
l’acte are revealed as the last two defences mounted against anxiety on each axis. The most salient point to be made, however, is that the various dimensions through which anxiety is attenuated constitute a highly nuanced repertoire of defence mechanisms; hence Lacan’s assertion that the vicissitudes of anxiety can take many possible pathways. Lacan’s notion of the psychoanalytic act is something delineated from the
defences of acting out and passage à l’acte,which both remain within the purview of the fundamental fantasy. Such a traversal cannot be conceived without a close
examination of the vicissitudes of anxiety and its object cause that sustains the fundamental fantasy.
As the foregoing summary suggests, the attempt to clearly define anxiety as one symptom among others with a universal definition – particularly one grounded in phenomenological observation – is destined to miss the complexities involved. Similarly, the bio-medical treatment of anxiety disorders with pharmacological interventions that alleviate symptomatic responses represents a particularly blunt instrument that serves to mask the underlying intricacies and particularities of the transformations that occur between psyche and soma. According to Lacan, the locus of these points of fixity and their transformation are delineated by the affect of anxiety in its various vicissitudes. The psychoanalytic act that facilitates the restructuring of subjectivity relies not only upon an understanding of the theoretical importance of anxiety, but also on a savoir faire with respect to its utilisation as a guide in the analytic process. Even if Freud failed to resolve the conundrum of anxiety, what Lacan
emphasises is that the distinction between the symptom and anxiety was clearly made. Despite the discomfort provided by the symptom for which his patients sought relief, Freud recognised that they remained paradoxically reliant on the kernel of the symptom that both Freud and Lacan agreed remained resistant to analytic treatment.
Contrary to the expectation that Freud’s text, Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety
reveals the nuances of anxiety, Lacan claims that it is in another text, Das Unheimliche
(Freud’s essay on the phenomenon of the uncanny), that the finer distinctions that delineate anxiety can be discerned. Lacan is ever at pains to compel his audience to return to the Freudian text and read it in conjunction with his seminar. It is only with a careful reading and reappraisal of Freudian texts, that Lacan’s ‘returnto Freud’ can fully
be understood. Indeed, any understanding of Lacan’s work may be rendered superficial if not grounded in the texts that he implored his audience to read as preparation for his seminar. It is therefore not only appropriate, but entirely necessary to summarise Freud’s
essay on Das Unheimliche if the complexity and veracity of Lacan’s assertions,
variations and departures from Freud in Seminar X on anxiety are to be understood.
The Uncanny – Das Unheimliche
Freud’s essay on the uncanny –Das Unheimliche (1919) – was, by his own admission, an unusual psychoanalytic foray into the domain of aesthetics to address an issue that he believed to have been overlooked. At the time of its writing, Freud asserted that the domain of aesthetics had largely concerned itself with positive notions of beauty and the sublime to the exclusion of the category of experience that he dubbed the
uncanny; a paradoxical affective response that simultaneously combines the apparently opposing sensibilities of the familiar and the strange. The question that underpinned
Freud’s curiosity was the inadequacy of the conceptualisation of this category of
disquieting experience that was clearly of a different quality to the general affect of fear. The subject of the 'uncanny', he maintained:
is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as “uncanny” certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening. (SE, 17, p.219)
In his essay, Freud proceeds to sketch two paths of investigation. First, he pursues the etymology and linguistic usage of the German term heimlich (familiar, homely) and its relation to heimisch (native)and unheimlich (uncanny, eerie).Second,he analyses specific instances of the uncanny which entail the comparison between those
occurrences in actual experience and those that are invoked by literary or artistic means. Although presented in this sequence in the essay, Freud discloses that his research was
conducted in reverse order. He first examined ‘all those properties of persons, things,
sense-impressions, experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of
uncanniness’ with the view to then inferring ‘the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these examples have in common’(SE, 17, p.220). The result, in both cases,
became his initial definition of the uncanny as ‘that class of frightening which leads