Reading
Lacan is far from easy and without any serious problems. His highly personal
style is hermetic, too often surrealistic. The logic of his thinking is rather
idiosyncratic, lucid and original, but not easy to follow.

One
of the most important characteristics of Lacan’s way of doing and thinking
psychoanalysis was something that we could really name as the authentic
speculativity of his thought. Or, in another words, there were no easy (no
self-evident) solutions for him. During his famous seminars he articulated
something that today we could call his
own style of reading and understanding Freud himself and psychoanalysis in
general. Historically speaking, he was one of the most controversial
figures in all the history of the psychoanalysis. Doctrinally speaking, he was
one of the most productive authors. During last decade his influence had spread
all over the world. His opus is no more just one of most bizarre and most
autistic representatives of French (surrealistic and post-surrealistic) style.

A
great many of Lacan’s theories and conceptions, his ideas and his
interpretations, for us today are problematic (or even unacceptable), but, of
course, there is also (I believe) something that is still firm, valid and
potentially fruitful. There are many,
maybe too many, possible ways to understand Lacan. But, if we really want to be
honest with him (Roberto Harari would, I suppose so, be in absolute agreement
with me), first of all we must seriously think
and re-think (as much as it is
possible) all of epistemological and heuristic extensions of classical
psychoanalytic doctrine that he had made. Just think of his (today we could say
very inspiring and productive) starting the dialogue between psychoanalysis and
philosophy, linguistic, literature and even with the special kind of nonmetric
(highly speculative) geometry – topology.

Lacan’s
psychoanalysis is not Freud’s. Heuristically speaking, their doctrines are
fundamentally different. Maybe that we could accept that both of them share
something like the same basic experience (analytic experience, experience of
the analytic subject), but their doctrinal elaborations are quite different.
Freud is almost always thinking in the categories of the science of 19^th
century, on the contrary, Lacan in almost always (with more or less success)
truing to free psychoanalysis – not just its language, but also its categorial
apparatus – from all of the metaphysical and the physical that she inherited from the same 19^th
century. That is why he needed Hiedegger and Hegel, De Sausire and Jakobson,
set theory and topology.

Thinking
about anxiety presupposes highly elaborated theory of the subject, a subject
that is (or that could be) anxious. Because of that, the question of anxiety
was one of mostly important, and very often neuralgic, points in psychoanalytic
theory and practice. Freud himself, as we know, had great many problems in his
successive attempts to make this phenomenon coherently understood and explained
by his own psychoanalytic discourse. There was always something that was
missing. He knew quite well that anxiety (Angst)
is not fear (Furht), that there must
be something that makes this difference possible and actual. But, it was always
a question – and this question was far away from being an easy one – what it
is. So, every possible modification of theory and of practice had its
(explicite or implicite) consequences for understanding and for dealing with
the anxiety.

Lacan
had considered this important question, the question of anxiety, in wider
context of his ambitious and far reaching project of return to Freud. Moreover, one of his world-famous seminars was
dedicated to it. Lacan’s seminar On
Anxiety had happened during 1962-63, and it was his tenth seminar. So it
could be really understood only in the framework of all other Lacan’s seminars,
especially his seminar no. 9, seminar entitled L’identification. Tehnically speaking, there is at least one big
problem in our possible understanding of this seminar. Still we don’t have an
official edition of its text. We could only read various (more or less complete
and more or less corrupted) unofficial versions.

Roberto
Harari had made heroic attempt to re-examine
to re-elaborate the basic and mostly
important theoretical structure of this Lacan’s seminar. He is not just
retelling us a story. No, his explicit intention was to clarify and to re-articulate
Lacan’s own structure of thinking, his logic of discourse, while dealing with
this problem, problem of the anxiety. The book is written clearly and well
documented; the author’s style is logically coherent but not always easy to
follow. For readers that are not familiar with Lacan’s topological
considerations – or, at last, for the readers who didn’t have opportunity to read Lacan’s L’identification seminar – there could
be some serious problems in understanding great many of Lacan’s topological
schema that Harari is discussing in his book. May be that some the further edition
of this important book could be much more improved with one introducing
chapter, the chapter that would be concerned with the fundamentals of Lacanian
topology.

For
Lacan anxiety is a correlate of imaginary
structured Ego. It is not simply a matter of a fear. Between the lines of
Harari’s text there is one (I think) very important intuition. Anything in
Lacan’s discourse (and of course, his interpretation of anxiety) could be
understood only in the relation with his well-known conception of the mirror stage. The phenomena of
anxiety could not be reduced to categories of drive theory. It is not a matter
of repression. So, confronting Freud with Lacan, Charles Shepherdsoon (author
of a very extensive forward to this book) writes:

And
yet, in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and
Anxiety, when Freud distinguishes between anxiety and fear, he links
anxiety to the future, nothing that whereas fear has an object (in the present,
one might say), anxiety has no object, but is rather a mode of waiting or
distressed anticipation, a form of ‘anxious expectation’ – as though the threat
were impending from the future. A
double structure is thus opened by the problem of anxiety: on the one hand a
temporal structure, a matter of memory (both
repetition and anticipation) which may well shape the time of anxiety in a
distinctive way (in contrast, for example, to the time of desire); and on the
other hand a peculiar form of a relation
to the object, since anxiety is distinguished from fear in having no
object, and being rather a relation to ‘the nothing’… In this respect,
Lacan’s account takes a step forward in relation to Freud: defiantly claiming
that Freud was mistaken in believing that anxiety has no object, Lacan
announces that anxiety indeed has an object, and that a proper articulation of
the ‘object a’ will allow us to be more precise than philosophical tradition,
which is lost in the abstractions of 
‘being’ and ‘nothingness’ and is
consequently unable to clarify the clinical aspects of the body’s relation to
this void.

Or
in Harari’s own words: “The a, as we
have said, is the subjective correlate on
anxiety…” (p. 37) What does it mean?

The
object a, or just a, is Lacanian term that designates mirroring other, specular (or imaginary) matrix that constitutes
the Ego. It makes fundamentally problematic subject relation to the supposed
reality. The subject is not the Ego, the Ego is the place (topos) where subject alienates from himself. Genealogically
speaking, the Ego is an effect of imaginary (or, we could say, narcissistic)
identification, identification that happens between subject – subject that is still in statu nascendi – and other. 
Thanks to man’s specific premature birth, the infant does not have
overall sensorimotor co-ordination, and the main motor pathways leading to his
limbs do not mature (myelinate) until the second year. Infant is relatively
uncoordinated, helpless and dependent, leaving his first months of life in
anxiety, uneasiness and discomfort. At a certain point, around six months, when
the perceptual apparatus has reached a certain stage of development, the infant
becomes aware of his own body as (possible) totality. At the bottom of this
experience, at the bottom of subject’s own self, stands this imaginary
identification of infant with his perceptual Gestalt of the other. With object a.

So
we could say, in the context of Lacanian discourse, object a is the subjective
correlate of subjects own self. Any possible subject’s self-configuration is
deeply related to this object a. Or, speaking in other words, object a is
narcissistic garant of subject’s feeling of his own self-integrity. Possible
problems in this specular relations between subject and his object a brings us
back to our topic of anxiety. Anxiety is not just an emotion. For Lacan anxiety
is an affect, an affect of subject that is confronted with the trauma of
ultimate fragmentation and decomposition. Fragmentation and decomposition of
his own being. Of his own self. That’s why anxiety is not a question of
repression, but of the threat of decomposition
– decomposition of the self. Or, to put in the other words, the object of
anxiety is the object of stability or unstability of the self – that is object
a.

The
subject feels anxiety when his narcissistic, relationally founded – Lacan would
say imaginary, not real – sense of
his own identity and totality is under the question. Being anxious means being
in the state of acute suspension o the
borders that are developmentally situated between subject and other. The
object that provokes anxiety is desire of the other, the other (or Other) that
forcefully requires from the subject to erase his own borders. In Lacanian
discourse, anxiety must be understood in connection with the limits of
representation. Anxiety is not a symbolic phenomena. It could be not
symbolically articulated, so it happens in form of the acting-out. It is
situated at the border between imaginary and real – between phantasmatic
(narcissistic) and body.

Speaking
of body, Lacan is not thinking about biological body. The biological body is
not the realm of psychoanalytic experience. Anxiety is not biological
phenomena. Being anxious means being
human. Only human could be anxious. Psychoanalysis is not biology,
psychoanalysis is not natural science. It is a science of human… human that is
semantically opposed to natural. It
deals with the various symbolic and imaginary 
elaboration of the corporal reality. Human corporal reality. 

Originality
of Lacan’s approach to the phenomena of anxiety is out of question. Concerning
anxiety, he is (undoubtedly) original thinker. Harari’s expositions of Lacan’s
main ideas are correct and well systematized. His book is not easy to read but
it could be understood. His discourse is logical and coherent. He is obviously
well informed in Lacan’s opus and he is experienced in dealing with the
cryptograms of Lacan’s discourse. Especially are useful Harari’s references to
other actually important psychoanalytic authors: to Melanie. Klein, Green and
Winnicott. His book could be of great
help for those who intend to study not just theoretical (abstract, even
scholastic Lacan), but really practical, clinical Lacan. It could serve as the
good prolegomena for some other (much more critical, even polemical) reading of
Lacan’s seminar on anxiety. 

Someday
(sooner or later) Lacan’s seminar seminar no. X that is entitled L’angoisse will be officially published
and available to the wider public. Also (sooner or later) it will be translated
and published in English. Then will begin second phase of the reception of this
very interesting book.

 

© 2002 Petar Jevremovic
 

Petar Jevremovic:
Clinical psychologist and practicing psychotherapist, author of two books (Psychoanalysis
and Ontology, Lacan and Psychoanalysis), translator of Aristotle and
Maximus the Confessor, editor of the Serbian editions of selected works of
Heintz Kohut, Jacques Lacan and Melane Klein, author of various texts that are
concerned with psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature and theology. He lives in
Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Categories: Psychoanalysis