(Source: zizekbadioujam)
Love, the love of the person who desires to be loved, is essentially an attempt to capture the other in oneself, in oneself as object…
The desire to be loved is the desire that the loving object should be taken as such, caught up, enslaved to the absolute particularity of oneself as object. The person who aspires to be loved is not at all satisfied, as is well known with being loved for his attributes. He demands to be loved as far as the complete subversion of the subject into a particularity can go, and into whatever may be most opaque, most unthinkable in this particularity. One wants to be loved for everything –not only for one’s ego, as Descartes says, but for the colour of one’s hair, for one’s idiosyncrasies, for one’s weaknesses, for everything.
"(Source: sublimehysteric, via empirevalley)
Women, women in love, are anxious. They are anxious about their man’s desire. Following Lacan’s comment after his quotation of one of his women analysands, this would be the definition of feminine love.
What did this woman say ? She told her analyst that she didn’t mind her husband desiring her « as long as he desired no other » ! « Qu’elle y tienne, c’est ça l’amour » (1)was Lacan’s comment on these words . She cared for her husband’s desire and prized it. This caring for and prizing the desire of the Other, which may be expressed in English by ‘being anxious’, is love.
Now, what does such a definition of a woman’s love have to do with anxiety, or with anguish ? In French, apparently nothing. Because ‘y tenir’ only means caring for and prizing something.
But the English ‘being anxious’ allows the question to be raised. Not only does this expression acknowledge a close relation to anxiety. It reveals moreover, beyond its worry and unease, a being ‘earnestly desirous’ … desirous of the Other’s desire ! (And then, why not remember here the Freudian point of view ? Freud explicitly linked anxiety and love in women by stating that castration anxiety can certainly find no place in them, but that its place is taken by that of loss of love.)
So we may consider that this English translation of the definition of feminine love points out the Lacanian connection between Angst and desire : what a subject is concerned with in anxiety is desire, the desire of the Other. Lacan would have better said it in English !
Women are not subject to castration but they are subject to anxiety and anguish. In a different way than men. In his seminar on anxiety, Lacan underlines women’s ease concerning the desire of the Other, which often gives them more freedom in the handling of the transference. This ease has to do with their not lacking anything and thus not depending on the object for their own jouissance. That is why, When lovely woman stoops to folly/and paces about her room again alone/She smoothes her hair with automatic hand/ and puts the record on the gramophone (2).
Nevertheless anguish does get a hold of them. Whenever they discover themselves as being nothing more than a. That is to say, either when they experience themselves as really being at the centre of the Other’s desire. Or when, being in love, the desire they so earnestly desire really turns away from them.
1. Lacan, Seminar on anxiety, 20 March 1963.
2. T.S.Eliot quoted by Lacan, 29 May 1963.
By Sol Aparicio.
And they succeed. They make good employees. Thats what the strong ego is. You obviously have to have a resistant ego to be a good employee. They do it at every level, at the level of patients, and then at the level of psychoanalysts.
Even so you have to ask yourself if the ideal end of the psychoanalytic cure really is to get some gentleman to earn a little bit more money than before and, when it comes to his sex life, to supplement the moderate help he asks from his conjugal partner with the help he gets from his secretary. When a guy had had a few problems in that domain, or was just leading a hellish life, or had some of those little inhibitions you can have at various levels, in the office, at work and even - why not? - in bed, that was usually considered to be a good outcome.
When all that has been removed, when the ego is strong and at peace, when the obsession with tits and bums has signed its little peace treaty with the superego, as they say, and when the itch isn’t too bad, well, everything is fine."
(Source: circulationwithinmyskull)
(Source: circulationwithinmyskull)
(via velvetrobots)
A clinical introduction to Lacanian … - Google Books
I’m finally reading a book about Lacanian psychoanalysis that makes sense to me. :) Thank you circulationwithinmyskull. I wouldn’t have found it without your suggestion.
(Source: , via circulationwithinmyskull)
![When we say symptom, repetition is always found on the horizon.[…] Lacan talked about surprise as a structural trait of the unconscious. The symptom as “et cetera” is the opposite of surprise. When we say, “That’s him all right” or “That’s just like her,” that’s the “et cetera” of someone. A person’s symptom is his or her true identity. Lacan said that the symptom of certain persons could be the most real thing they possess. This illuminates for us how the symptom is associated with the real. […] Lacan placed the symptom very precisely at the level of the necessary: the symptom doesn’t stop writing itself. (J-A Miller)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lbvq01BTrw1qcu4nxo1_250.jpg)
When we say symptom, repetition is always found on the horizon.[…] Lacan talked about surprise as a structural trait of the unconscious. The symptom as “et cetera” is the opposite of surprise. When we say, “That’s him all right” or “That’s just like her,” that’s the “et cetera” of someone. A person’s symptom is his or her true identity. Lacan said that the symptom of certain persons could be the most real thing they possess. This illuminates for us how the symptom is associated with the real. […] Lacan placed the symptom very precisely at the level of the necessary: the symptom doesn’t stop writing itself. (J-A Miller)
(via fuckyeahmentalhealth)
