Table of Contents:

Abstract

The concept of anxiety in Lacan is one of the most complicated and vast territories to cover. Lacan devoted his 10th Seminar to be entirely on this subject, and it has come to be one of the hardest seminars to study in the corpus of early Lacan. This paper–and the presentation given from it–would be an attempt to approach this difficult concept from a more comprehensive account and give the readers some basis on which they can improve their further understanding of Lacanian anxiety. Apart from introducing the main concept, one of my specific goals is also to try and cleanly explain the relationship of anxiety to fantasy and desire, two of the other vast domains of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The nature of the paper is neither to get drowned in obscure theory nor ignore theoretical considerations for the clinic, but rather the approach tries to use however many examples needed to get the theory straight and then use a clinical vignette to give a taste of how some of this might look like in the clinic of a (contemporary) Lacanian.

What We Missed in Freud

Retracing Anxiety in Freud’s Oeuvre

Last time in my presentation on Kleinian anxiety¹ I started with a historical account of where anxiety is situated in Freud and Abraham and where is it that Klein picked up from them and incorporated certain things for her own theoretical development. To quickly review that, we remind the reader that for a long time in Freud’s works anxiety was considered as a product of libidinal fixation. That worked for Freud from 1884 to 1925, and much of his analysis of neurotic anxiety is mostly a “transformation” of libido that hasn’t been cathected (or “discharged”) elsewhere. Apart from this Freud also talked about hysterical anxiety (also “phobia”) and the most clear example of this is in the Little Hans case². It wasn’t until 1926 with the publication of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety that Freud started rethinking about his theory of both neurotic anxiety and phobia. Among many things, some of the important things that Freud realized was:

(i) “Ego is the seat of anxiety.”³

(ii) Its not repression that causes anxiety but rather anxiety that causes repression.⁴

(iii) Anxiety is a determinant of losing the object’s love.⁵

(iv) Anxiety as an affective signal of danger.⁶

There are many other conclusions one can cite from this seminal monograph that I haven’t mentioned, such as that of “separation anxiety” and its relation to mourning. Some of these conclusions would go on to become central in the works of Klein, Bowlby, Winnicott and other British psychoanalysts but not as relevant to the work of Lacan.

What We Missed

In the last subsection we covered most of the things that Freud “officially” designated under his metapsychology of anxiety in neurosis, phobia and others but there’s another work in Freud which is often ignored when considering his metapsychology. This is the 1919 paper titled “The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche)”⁷ which is oddly enough a paper around anthropology of aesthetics⁸. But this paper is central in Lacan’s discussion of Anxiety⁹, along with the conclusions we summarized from Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.

This paper has a special position in Freud’s oeuvre as this publication was situated just after the Papers on Technique (1904-1919), Papers on Metapsychology (1915-1917) and the famous “Wolf-Man” case (1918) but just before the publication of the seminal Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920¹⁰. This might give us the “context” surrounding this work, and thus it doesn’t come to us surprising that in this paper Freud introduces the concept of “compulsion to repeat” also famously known as repetition compulsion which would go on to become the major theme of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

The ‘uncanny’, as Freud admits, is not a really definable feeling, he says:

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.¹¹

Freud further continues that this is not the entirety of what the ‘uncanny’ consists of, he claims there’s a “special core” to this term and he tries to find this in two ways: (1) etymology of unheimlich; (2) “properties of persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness”¹². He tells us beforehand that both of these routed end up with the following conclusion:

I will say at once that both the courses lead to the same result: the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.

He explains it later by adding the aspect of repression to how the uncanny is really the recurring of something (an affect) that has been repressed, and moreover it doesn’t matter if the original affect that was repressed was actually frightening but rather the affect gets turned into anxiety through repression and then recurs. Thus he explains the weird relationship between unheimlich and heimlich:

if this indeed is the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.¹³

Before this section ends, I’d like to pull out another conclusion Freud makes towards the later half of this paper when he says an uncanny effect happens when there’s a blurring of reality and imagination or as he says:

when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality.¹⁴

This blurring of boundaries between imagination reality, is also a characteristic of the famous object petit a in Lacan’s work, as we will see soon, it is not an object in the way a chair is an object. It exists precisely in this blurring space between imagination and reality and functions as the arbiter of desire while also being that whose proximity produces anxiety.¹⁵

The paper nonetheless has further claims, and considerations that are mostly towards the field of aesthetics which aren’t of our direct concerns.

That Which Deceives: Lacan and Affects

Everybody knows that one of the strongest affects (coloqually the same as “emotions”) humans experience is that of anxiety. In one way or another, it almost seems obvious to most regarding what anxiety is, based on how they feel. Lacan doesn’t stand on such grounds, he questions what an affect¹⁶ itself is, and then goes on to claim that anxiety is the only affect which is not deceptive¹⁷. Since Freud there has been an (apparent) opposition between affects and ideas. In the 1915 paper The Unconscious, Freud devoted a section titled “Unconscious Emotions” where he takes up the question of whether emotions or affects can become unconscious during the vicissitudes that instinct (Trieb) goes through. He nonetheless makes the conclusion that:

…there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas.

And he continues to give the reason why this is the case:

..The whole difference arises from the fact that ideas are cathexes–basically of memory-traces–whilst affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are perceived as feelings.

Lacan has been heavily accused of ignoring the aspect of affects in psychoanalysis¹⁸. But early enough since Seminar I¹⁹, Lacan had showed that the dichotomy of affects and ideas itself is a false dichotomy.

But what does it mean when Lacan says “anxiety is that which deceives not”²⁰? The answer, as Colette Soler puts it neatly, is that:

..unlike all other affects, anguish [anxiety] is not displaceable–it remains moored to what produces it.

This Lacan gives some reasoning for this on how anxiety remains “moored”, when he says:

The effort that doubt expends is exerted merely to combat anxiety, and precisely through lures, to the extent that what it strives to avoid is what holds firm in anxiety with dreadful certainty.²¹

This holding firmly is anxiety being moored to its cause, which doubt is trying to exert effort and avoid, by means of lures. This is also why anxiety in Lacan is considered the affect which takes you in the “Direction of the Treatment”. But a fair question to ask is : why so much fuss about being deceived? What actually does this deceiving mean and how does anxiety save the day for the analyst? This is again related to Lacan’s problematic relationship with affects, even though as most would say, psychoanalysis itself is centered around affects. Lacan says what we do actually can always be done in a deceitful manner, he explains this cleanly in the following quote:

People don’t realize that everything over which the conquest of our discourse extends always boils down to showing it to be a great deception. Mastering the phenomenon by thought always amounts to showing how it can be redone in a deceitful way, it amounts to being able to reproduce it, that is, to being able to turn it into a signifier²². A signifier of what? The subject, in reproducing it, can tamper with the books, which shouldn’t surprise us …. the signifier is the subject’s trace in the course of the world. Only, if we believe we can keep up this game for anxiety, well, we’re sure to fail, for anxiety precisely escapes this game.²³

The Affect With a Weird Object : Anxiety and Object a

So, affects are always deceiving for Lacan but most affects have an object and its been told since Freud that anxiety is an affect without an object. But this explanation isn’t satisfactory for Lacan:

Anxiety, it is said, is an affect without object but we have to know where this lack of object is: it is on my side. The affect of anxiety is in effect connoted by a want of object, but not by a want of reality.²⁴

Now we are in a position to introduce the famous object petit a, this is the object of anxiety. Lacan called this his “sole invention”, and clinically, the analyst should attempt to occupy the place of the “semblance of the object a”²⁵. The catch is this object is not just another usual object, because it doesn’t exist!²⁶ So, what is this special kind of object a then? Colette Soler tries to define it as:

What has no image or signifier, and thus can be neither seen nor deciphered, and consequently has to do with a real that is impossible to grasp by either the imaginary or the symbolic, but which nevertheless operates as the cause of everything that is said and done? It is this strange object that Lacan writes with a letter.²⁷

Object petit a is what is always been missing, like the feeling of the missing piece that is usually expressed by people, except Lacan does it linguistically, “it is the portion of life that is lost because of language”. As Soler tells us again, in an eloquent manner: “object a is that what is missing and what all the objects that are not missing from reality seek to make us forget”. The object petit a is not to be confused with a primordially lost object that is then found in other places as the “missing piece”. Its the opposite, there was never a complete and whole subject holding the object a to its bosom or, to make it more Lacanian, there was never a state of perfect jouissance²⁸, it is only retroactively seen in this manner once restrictions to our jouissance has been imposed by the Law. So, the very moment you have an encounter with the object a its rendered as the primordially lost object, and retroactively creating the illusion that I just explained. This is amazingly explained by Sean Homer in Jacques Lacan:

The object a is not, therefore, an object we have lost, because then we would be able to find it and satisfy our desire. It is rather the constant sense we have, as subjects, that something is lacking or missing from our lives. We are always searching for fullfilment, for knowledge, for possessions, for love, and whenever we achieve these goals there is always something more we desire; we cannot quite pinpoint it but we know it is there. […] The object a is both the void, the gap, and whatever object momentarily comes to fill that gap in our symbolic reality. What is important to keep in mind here is that the object is not the object itself but the function of masking that lack.²⁹

This throws at us a few more things that we need to explain for the relation of object a with anxiety, namely: desire, fantasy, and the Lack in the subject that makes all this happen.

Not the Object of Desire, but the Object-Cause of Desire

Even though anxiety is not without an object and its object is the mysterious object a, this is not the case for desire in Lacan. To put it in a somewhat cryptic manner: desire desires to keep desiring, i.e it has no object, its only “goal” is its perpetual continuation. And for this reason, it would be totally justifiable to say that the worst thing one can do to one’s desire is to attempt to satisfy it, something that runs much in contrast to how people think about desire and satisfaction normally. This is partly why we said in the last section that in psychoanalysis the analyst must occupy the place of semblance of object a, if the analyst gives the analysand whatever he/she desires, the analysis can no longer take place since there’s no space left for desire³⁰. Thus it is the object a which sets desire into motion. And this in accordance with what we said before makes object a the object cause of desire, it is that which causes desire than what desire aims to attain, which is nothing other than its own continuation.

When It Gets Too Close

Now, how is this object a related to anxiety? Its through the “lack”. As we said earlier, object a stands for this illusory object of fullfilment for a lack that we feel ourselves to have. We think that once we have the object a, our desire will be satisfied and the lack will be filled. Shouldn’t this be the antidote to anything close to anxiety? Not so, Lacan says. Its the opposite, for Lacan we experience anxiety precisely when this mysterious object seems to manifest itself in the most striking manner. This is where Lacan borrows from Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety the fact that, at the very least, anxiety is a signal. He says:

The most striking manifestation of this object a, the signal that it is intervening, is anxiety.³¹

So in this manner anxiety is like a feeling which arises when the proximity with this object seems to be weirdly close. This shouldn’t be as surprising with what we learnt from Freud about the Unheimliche. But what exactly is it that makes the proximity of object a lead to anxiety? Well, when it gets too close, it stops being the mysterious object of desire. In essence, you stop desiring as a subject because the a getting close means that you’re closer to being “satisfied”. And this is when we understand another famous aphorism from Lacan about anxiety: it is when lack happens to be lacking. Now your lack which is something again related to the object a, seems to be lacking or at least is threatened to be lacking. This is what Lacan referred to as “minus-phi” or $- \phi$ which he represented as castration³². To bring it back to Freud’s uncanny one can look at the following quote from Lacan:

The Unheimliche is what appears at the place where the minus phi should be. Indeed, everything starts with imaginary castration, because there is no image of lack, and with good reason. When something does appear there, it is…because lack happens to be lacking³³.

So one can see immediately how Lacan’s anxiety is rendered by the over-presence of something than its absence, as its normally thought to be. Its rather the possibility of absence which is inherent to the insisting presence of the thing. This is the most clear in the following excerpt:

Don’t you know that it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is everything that announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back onto the lap. It is not, contrary to what is said, the rhythm of the mother’s alternating presence and absence. The proof of this is that the infant revels in repeating this game of presence and absence. The security of presence is the possibility of absence. The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while, and especially when she’s wiping his backside.³⁴

This isn’t too far from Freud’s discovery of the fact that Unheimliche and Heimliche share a common meaning. Lacan also notices this and relates it to what he calls as the “frame of anxiety”³⁵. He explains that the “Unheim is posed in the Heim”³⁶, the Unheimliche is presented through “little windows”³⁷ and the field of anxiety is what’s framed through these windows. And this is immediately connected by Lacan to what one feels on stage when he says:

You’ll always find the sate that presents itself in its own specific dimension and which allows for the emergence in the world of that which may not be said.³⁸

This is precisely why one feels this brief impasse of anxiety when one goes to the theatre, its what we always expect when the curtain is about to be unveiled and what lies behind it. And finally we see how Lacan reformulates Freud’s Heimliche with Unheimliche:

The phenomenon of anxiety is the sudden appearance of the Heimliche within the frame..³⁹

Doesn’t this sound exactly what Freud said in his paper on The Uncanny?

What Does the Other Want?

In this last I’d just like to explain a bit on how anxiety is so badly related to the Other (like a lot of other things!). Why does Lacan name object petit a the way he did? What’s the a? In French, Autre is the word for “Other” and the object we’re talking about is actually a “little object of the Other”. We’ve said how its the object of desire, but if one goes by the famous Lacanian aphorism that “desire is always the desire of the Other” then this object a is precisely where the Other’s desire is formulated as such. This is explained by Lacan twice by his famous reference to the female praying mantis⁴⁰. This is why object a is both the cause of one’s desire and the fantasy to answer the question of “What does the Other want from me?” This is seen best in Zizek’s explanation of fantasy:

One should always bear in mind that the desire ‘realized’ (staged) in fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the other’s desire: fantasy, phantasmic formation, is an answer to the enigma of Che vuoi? — ‘You’re saying this, but what do you really mean by saying it?’ — which established the subject’s primordial, constitutive position. The original question of desire is not directly ‘What do I want?, but ‘What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?’ A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations; he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him: his father, mother, brothers and sisters, and so on, fight their battles around him, the mother sending a message to the father through her care for the son. While he is well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom what object, precisely, he is to others, what the exact nature of the games they are playing with him is, and fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am to my others.⁴¹

Where’s the catch? Turns out, the Other actually doesn’t desire anything from you!