5
The Objet Petit a

IN CHAPTER 4, I MADE BRIEF REFERENCE TO THE CONCEPT OF THE OBJET petit a (object small a) in describing the fantasy structure underlying important enactments. Here, I further develop this idea in relation to the theme of sustaining a subjective identity—of having a separate life. Like many of Lacan's concepts, the objet petit a is elusive in its meaning and referent and seems to take on different functions over the course of his work. My purpose is not to attempt to resolve or explicate these difficulties through a comprehensive account of Lacanian theory but rather to explore whether this notion in some of the ways it has been understood can be applied advantageously to clinical problems and practice. In its most common definition, the objet petit a represents a quasimathematical symbol for a hypothetical or virtual construct, namely the ephemeral, unrealizable something in the object that makes it especially desirable. Lacan speaks of it as the "cause" of the subject's desire. In this sense, it does not refer to some hitherto unknown psychic function discovered by Lacan (although he considered it his only new contribution to Freud's work), but simply fills in a logically necessary step in the subject's response to his objects.

However one evaluates Lacan's argumentation or methods of reasoning in the seminars (at times they are infuriating), his concept of desire, structured around a hypothetical cause of desire, offers a way of understanding common clinical phenomena. As Van Haute (2002) aptly remarked, a purely object-centered conception of desire (based on attributes of the desired object) would mean that many partners possessing these features would be equally interchangeable. Likewise, if desire were simply a matter of instinctual drives, one passionate interest could easily substitute for another. Because sexual choice is so variable in human beings, Freud saw fit to lay his emphasis on a certain mobility of libidinal drive energy, but it seems just as useful to focus on the nature of the underlying fantasy structure, which selects the object as the key to this problem. The concept of the objet petit a describes this idiosyncratic unconscious source of subjective motivation that, Lacan insists, has no realizable aim or goal, analogous to Freud's characterization of childhood sexuality. Lacan argued that aims and goals, even in adult sexual behavior, are inadequate to satisfy desire, a leftover part of which always remains operative. Although the fantasy driving desire is unconscious and unrelated to symbolic reality, it can be attached to concrete objectives like sexual pleasure and social and material accomplishments, which can be pursued and enjoyed within the limitations of the pleasure and reality principles. Because of these constraints of the symbolic order, these goals always fall short of providing the total satisfaction or jouissance sought by the fantasy, leaving a constant remainder of unsatisfied desire as an intrinsic aspect of the human condition. Under some circumstances, however, the insistent pressure of desire can be short-circuited into inhibitions, actions, or symptom formation, which interfere with the constant investments that make living pleasurable.

Many persons seeking psychotherapy, as we saw in the histories of Mr. L and Ms. G, lack access to desire and report feeling flat, dull, and not fully alive. Not being able to feel love is a common complaint. On the other hand, it should be obvious that actual loving relationships between partners cannot be explained by an abstract concept like the objet petit a any more than by the Freudian notion of libido. Both terms are basically metapsychological constructs attempting to bridge the impossible gap between biological and psychological existence. For Lacan, as we have seen, subjective experience in man is dependent entirely on language. For him, the capacity to use symbols, including identifying pronouns, and the ability to employ proper names is what makes us human. This is what he means when he repeats in many ways that the subject is an effect of the signifies There is thus a break from the biological real created by the symbolic order, which in a way captures and restructures the organic basis of life. The body, for example, is conceptualized and organized by labels and categories that stand in the way of any unmediated experience of its reality. As Erik Erikson wisely theorized, the body is carved up into erogenous zones that have social and personal significance beyond simple sensitivity to stimulation. Our experience is always filtered through language and the spread of meanings through associations. As the philosopher Hillary Putnam (1981) has stated, we have no access to such a thing as a language independent reality, or, in Lacan's (1972-1973) idiom, there is "no prediscursive reality" (p. 72).

On the other hand, the symbolic order always falls short of totally capturing lived experience, inevitably excluding a part of the real in which we are rooted. This insufficiency is attributable to the very nature of symbols, which are structured inherently around missing or absent objects. A symbol, after all, represents an absent object or, put differently, signifies an abstract concept, and language can only allude to a concrete external referent without totally capturing it. For Lacan, the inability of the symbolic to totally encompass its referents or to represent fully what has been lost creates a constant gradient of desire, a perpetual reaching out for the pure reality beyond representation. In the Lacanian formula, desire "insists" in the signifying chain, with its Bellowesque¹ "I want, I want" pushing us unceasingly toward dimly perceived goals and the deferred promise of complete satisfaction. Because such goals are impossible to realize, we substitute fantasies of sexual, romantic, narcissistic, or material accomplishment, which stitch desire to the fabric of social reality. We convince ourselves (or are manipulated to believe²) that we will be satisfied by realizing these ends. Desire thus becomes "libidinized" and diverted to existing symbolic objects. Such is the Lacanian vision of the world.

Something interferes with this process of desiring for many people, or, it might be more accurate to say, something is always interfering with desire for everyone. Desire, after all, can be uncomfortable, even dangerous, so that short-circuiting its insistent flow into symptoms is a universal human propensity. In order to understand this twist in the Lacanian story, we need to introduce his important notion of jouissance (literally, "enjoyment"), mentioned earlier in relation to a "beyond" of the pleasure principle. Jouissance refers basically to the full satisfaction that we unconsciously pursue. Because such satisfaction is by the nature of our symbolic existence impossible, attempts to approach it breach the boundary of the symbolic and the limits of the pleasure principle, which is constrained by what we can "enjoy" (without unpleasure or harm) in the world of symbolic reality. Jouissance is therefore "beyond the pleasure principle" and definitely not conventionally "enjoyable." Rather, it has a deadly aspect in that it operates without regard for the welfare of the subject, including her personal meaning, pleasures, and symbolic identity, and when approached is accompanied by pain and distress. This creates a tension in Lacanian theory between desire, the property uniquely belonging to human subjects, who live "suspended" from the symbolic order by signifiers (by abstract indications of meanings, identifying marks, and social coordinates—the ensemble of social rules and beliefs), and jouissance, the unconscious desubjectifying pull away from the symbolic order. Lacan's subject is thus split in her very essence by an unconscious that obeys its own rules, alien to the rational order of conscious experience, and is condemned to a state of dissatisfaction.

Lacan raises the question of what it is about an object that gives it (a person, idea, or physical thing) the mysterious property of evoking intense desire. For example, let us take the case of an unknown man who is attractive to a woman. Initially, her interest might be aroused by his conformity to social criteria of physical beauty, by a pleasing manner of speaking, an aura of wealth and power, unusual intelligence, and so forth. Some kind of imaginary screening process is no doubt at work, along with symbolic factors that render the man a potentially eligible partner. If nothing happens to negate this initial impression, the woman may experience desire for the man, which might even become intense very quickly. She might be uncomfortable with this feeling and fend it off, not being sure about the person or even in what her interest actually consisted. The feeling of desire itself might be pleasant or disturbing to her; she could try to ignore it or talk herself out of it, although this seems difficult for most people. Supposing everything works in favor of the attraction and she pursues her inclinations to enter into a romantic relationship, how might she explain her choice to friends or family? Certainly she cannot claim that she is falling in love with this man for his wonderful personality, his aura of success, or his brilliance without sounding defensive or disingenuous. Although such locutions are sometimes employed by people, they are usually understood either as euphemisms for conveying high regard and appreciation or else as incomplete, evasive answers that disguise deeper feelings. After all, the woman probably has met other handsome, smart, pleasant men before without falling in love. Surely this one is not the first to come along, and, even if he were, the glamor attached to his novelty would rapidly wear thin. The point is that listing all the fine or materially impressive qualities of the love object does not satisfactorily explain why that particular person is so special or has aroused the unique feeling of desire with which almost everyone is familiar (which is why our hypothetical woman is not likely to be asked such a naive question).

No one, after all, is obliged to account tor why he or she loves anything or anybody, and the same goes, of course, for other kinds of passionate interest—Beethoven sonatas, Hitchcock films, a sport—that some people pursue at great cost and with enormous devotion. In general, this type of powerful emotional imperative that seizes us all is accepted as part of the human condition, provided that the response remains within the bounds of symbolic reality, which means that the subject accepts responsibility for his choice as a personal construction and respects the autonomy of the object and her own place in the social network. When it comes to relationships between people, passion is valued, but unwelcome pursuit is disapproved of. Stalking violates the law. We could say that although a beloved person represents in part, in Winnicott's (1953) terms, a subjective object, "created" by the lover, he also possesses independent reality as another subject. This distinction is less clear in the case of purely symbolic or inanimate objects, which are more analogous to Winnicott's transitional object. In the latter case, we do not pose the question of whether the intense feeling for a special object being pursued is "real" or entirely created by the subject. Winnicott observes that the unquestioned illusion of a unique transitional object evolves over time into the contents of a shared cultural space that provides constraints and structure to what might otherwise be purely idiosyncratic choices. This realistic anchoring of desire is most obvious in the case of the love object. Here is the point where narcissism as a motivation for object choice is limited by one's place in a symbolic and intersubjective field. Although the choice of another person as a love object may similarly be taken as "real" by the subject, as if that special object alone could fulfill his or her desire (it is more accurately an entirely imaginary construction of the subject), there is a boundary of symbolic reality that may not be crossed without agreement of the other. That is, a man must accept that his fantasies of love and passion are his own invention and that, even when such fantasies and passions seem mutually shared, there remains a gap between these private feelings and the reality of the other person. One might even propose that acknowledgment of this discrepancy is a necessary step for symbolic love to proceed.³ If this boundary is crossed and the fantasy object of desire is taken as congruent with the real object, as though the other could totally satisfy the fantasy, the subject enters the realm of perversion or psychosis.

An illustration of this distinction is provided in Almodovar's film, "Talk to Her" (Hable con Ella). In the film, two men are in love with comatose women and develop a friendship based on this identification, but there the similarity ends. Marco, the more experienced, tragic figure, is grief-stricken over the fatal wounding of his lover, a female toreador, only to learn that she had decided to return to her former partner just before her accident. His choice of object, occurring when she was in good health, was typically neurotic and oedipal—he rescued her in a futile repetition of an earlier lost love. His counterpart, Benigno, while also falling in love with a normal woman, Alicia, has never actually known her, only gazed at her from a window—a purely imaginary relationship that followed the loss of his mother, who was his sole previous object. Benigno becomes Alicia's nurse after an accident has left her too in a coma, and she becomes the passion of his existence, to the point of his confiding to Marco that he wants to marry her. Marco is appalled, but this scene of confrontation is only a prelude to the more shocking revelation that Benigno, after viewing a silent science fiction film in which a miniaturized man enters the vagina of his beloved and joins her body, has impregnated Alicia. The consequences for him, of course, are drastic, and he eventually dies in a failed attempt to join her in her unconscious state by taking an overdose.

Benigno illustrates certain aspects of the objet petit a to which we will return, notably its relation to an "enjoyment" (jouissance) beyond the pleasure principle that is linked to the register of the real in Lacan. His talking about marriage to Marco could be considered an acting-out, in Lacanian terms, because it confronts his friend with a message about the nature of his interest in Alicia. It draws attention to the external presence or imaginary actualization of the objet petit a in an insistent form. Something in Alicia that has nothing to do with her individual personality or unique personal life has drawn Benigno. No doubt this desire has at first attached itself to a sexual fantasy, as we can see in his sensual attention to the care of her skin earlier in the film. According to Lacan, there is a further possible step, which he calls passage á l'acte (passing to action or "acting out"), in which the subject identifies with and moves to join the objet petit a.⁴ This occurs when he attempts to move beyond the fantasy of a forbidden pleasure toward a total enjoyment of jouissance, which in Benigno's case seems to involve merger or a return to the womb as a "presubject." Here his life is literally placed in danger by a desire to go "beyond the pleasure principle" of ordinary sexuality.

Benigno's story underlines the impossible nature of the objet petit a (unsymbolizable and unimaginable), its unattainability and pure virtuality, as something that "exists" in the object only by inference. It is thus unassimilable to a bodily pleasure that could be obtained or represented in the symbolic dimension. We could say that Benigno wanted something from Alicia that could not be put into words. Subtracting all the various sexual and romantic wishes he might have expressed still leaves a remainder, the unknown residue that is the "true" cause of desire. To describe it, Lacan (1960-1961) used the metaphor of the algama, the hidden treasure or small deity that Socrates evoked in Plato's Symposium, whose theme is precisely the definition of the ingredient making the beloved desirable to the lover. The objet petit a, of course, is a creation of the subject. It is Benigno's objet petit a that he thinks he has found in his beloved (but perhaps this person does unwittingly carry a signifier of this treasure object, some feature that is linked to an unconscious fantasy of the object petit a). It is something in Alicia that is more than her, but that she supports.

In Kundera's (1984) novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the author refers to a character's love for the woman inside his wife, for he truly cannot stand her actual personality and appearance. Kundera asks who is this hidden woman and interprets that it is his mother. For Lacan, the answer is a deeper one that refers neither to the imago or fantasy of the mother "herself," which might be "cathected" in Freudian terms (which seems to be Kundera's take on Franz's devotion to Marie-Claude), nor to part of a more abstract relational unit in a self- psychological sense, but rather to a nonimaged, nonsymbolized "remainder" of his mother that has been carried from his infancy and childhood, long after the subject has come to see her as a separate adult. With Klein, perhaps, Lacan would not see this enduring desire of Kundera's character as directed toward the whole object, but to a part, perhaps like a part-object that remains as a trace of the imaginary link between his body and his mother's. Yet this "object" is not a body part but a virtual object of a fantasy established retrospectively, after the child has assumed his differential position in the social order. This again is the objet petit a, to which Lacan in either a stroke of genius or sophistry gave his quasialgebraic nomenclature, placing it at the heart of human motivation (the pursuit of non-utilitarian, irrational, even nonlibidinal desires).

The references to Klein's notion of a part-object and to Winnicott's transitional object seem to locate the objet petit a in a developmental context, and, at times, Lacan does give the impression of wanting to identify it as a vestige of completion or full connection with the earliest object that will be lost, the breast. Of course, Lacan everywhere eschews developmental references, which he sees as a form of psychologizing or biologizing of a maturational process that does not exist as such. For him, the so-called early stages (oral, anal, phallic) only take their significance retroactively, via the effect of castration. Castration was conceived by him as the "presence" of a lack or of an inherent incompleteness in the human subject that produces a sequence of virtual objets petit a: the breast, feces, the gaze, and the voice. Lacan (1972-1973) spells this out in his discussion of envy in Seminar XX, where he once again recounts the scene described by Augustine of the pale and envious child observing his nursing sibling. Here, he says that for this child the baby at the breast has the a, referring to "the kernel of what I called Ding (the thing)"⁵ (p. 100).

Lacan's fascination with the retroactive, nonchronologic moment of psychic birth through the agency of the signifier (the cut made by a system of differences into the unity of the real) had a metaphorical enactment in the story of his purchase of Courbet's famed painting, "L'Origine du Monde" (The Origin of the World), recounted by Roudinesco (1993). It is a portrayal of a nude woman's torso, exposing the genitals in what remains a shockingly realistic manner, which had been commissioned from Courbet for private viewing by a Turkish diplomat in 1866. Following in this tradition, Lacan kept the picture concealed behind a special cover painted by another artist. Courbet also painted a number of scenes around the same year depicting the subterranean source of the river Loue, in one of which the solitary figure of a fisherman seems to be casting his rod into the darkness of an enormous cave mouth from which the river emerges. These images evoke fascination and horror that have been commented upon by many art historians.⁶ The retroactive wish to return to the womb as an aftereffect of symbolic castration is mediated by the objet petit a. In this fantasy, rejoining the body of the mother will provide jouissance, total pleasure, and Lacan hypothesized that the child attributes this same desire to the mother.

For Lacan (1962-1963), the conception of an engulfing, reabsorbing mother—a "crocodile mother"—played an important part in his later theories of anxiety. He proposed that the subject is drawn to participate in the supposed "jouissance of the Other," meaning the ultimate enjoyment that belongs in fantasy to the mother. The objet petit a, in a sense, functions protectively as an intermediary target of desire that indicates a lack in the Other (the virtual part-object or link with the presymbolized mother that has fallen away with primal separation).⁷ It thereby represents and confirms the occurrence of separation and protects against a wish for fusion.

One wonders to what extent Almadovar was explicitly restaging this fantasy of jouissance in his silent film within a film, in which a woman scientist discovers her miniature former lover, who has drunk her weight loss potion and shrunk to Tom Thumb size. Clearly enchanted, she brings him to her home, where he seizes the opportunity to explore her sleeping body, ultimately standing before a huge vaginal opening into which he will plunge, recalling Courbet's tiny angler before the gaping source of the Loue.⁸ Lacan would say that it is her jouissance which the little man seeks to participate in or produce, a point echoed by Benigno's incredible devotion to the unconscious Alicia, whom he wants to join beyond any possible symbolic, intersubjective relationship in a total union. For the neurotic person, to the contrary, jouissance is clearly barred, as the symbolic order does not include the possibility of completion or wholeness, but constantly redirects desire within the limits of the pleasure principle.

Clinical complaints of apathy, lack of motivation, loss of sexual interest, or inability to love may all be related to a difficulty in assuming one's desire as a subject or as agent of this desire. At one level of meaning, this difficulty implies a failure to pass through an oedipal position, which involves acceptance of loss and separateness, a capacity to tolerate guilt for transgressive wishes, and management of fears of retaliation or punishment. In the Lacanian framework, assumption of desire presupposes symbolic castration, which means renouncing identification with an ideal ego image (the goal of perfection of an ideal self) and the fantasy of forming a complete unity with the object (of being able to fulfill all the desires of the object). Neither the self nor the object can be complete, and, in the first instance, this lesson is taught by the mother's desire for a third party, usually the father. Lacan's model debiologizes human development by dispensing with a pseudophysiology of libidinal stages and the concrete threat of castration as a motivator. Instead, it emphasizes an anthropological, structural determinant in the social reality of the child's insertion into a network of relationships that sharply limit and define her possibilities (age, gender, birth order, and so forth). Lacan's terms phallus and castration are thus lifted for better or worse out of their customary psychoanalytic context to serve abstract structural functions. He redefined the familiar Freudian castration complex as an imaginary fear based on fantasies of the perfect phallus satisfying the mother, which might be an indication of psychosis for Lacan (which is not to say that neurotic castration fears do not interfere with desire). At the same time, Lacanian theory avoids the post-Freudian danger of a saccharinized family love story in which empathy for the child's irrational and exhibitionistic wishes smooths a path toward joyous initiative. Neither a libidinal, bodily model of development nor one driven by affect and intersubjectivity works for Lacan, and steering clear of these alternatives, which were in the air at the time Lacan worked, provided the novelty and insight as well as the limitations of his conception.

Lacanian theory eschews a developmental model (although I do not believe that, in the end, that model can be successfully ignored) in favor of a nonlinear picture of recursive restructuring upon entry into the symbolic order (which is a post-facto, non-chronological moment). The child's assumption of her place in the symbolic entails a sacrifice of the pre-lapsarian⁹ fantasy object of jouissance and of total satisfaction in the real, which, however, does not cease to exercise its attraction. In another way, however, this step could be said to create retroactively the lost object as a "beyond" existing outside the fabric of the pleasure principle, a remainder of the real precipitated when the symbolic framework congealed around the nascent subject. This remainder of the real, of course, is another definition of the objet petit a. In other terms, the ultimate treasure object of our desire is defined as beyond what we can see, know, or symbolize. It can be regarded as an expression of the real (because it has real effects on behavior and even upon the body), but is graspable only in retrospect as what has always eluded our knowledge of ourselves. So we say that our hypothetical lover did not willfully choose her beloved but discovered that choice only after it happened.

The Case of Wendy

At this point, it may be useful to bring in clinical material to explore the application of these concepts. Wendy was a young woman referred to me by a female therapist with whom she had worked for several years on problems of self-esteem, binge eating, and substance abuse. Much progress had been made, but one crucial difficulty had not been resolved. Although desperately hoping to marry and have children, she had never sustained a relationship with a man, having a history of only brief sexual encounters. Over the telephone, she sounded intelligent and thoughtful and spoke with a certain poise. Her therapist had suggested, Wendy informed me, that she might make more progress at this point with a male analyst, and she was eager to try this option.

At our first meeting, however, Wendy arrived in a highly anxious and disorganized state. After the initial formalities, she launched into telling a dream of the previous night that had greatly disturbed her. In the dream, she had come to my office, which turned out to be a large room containing an unmade queen-size bed, where I greeted her in pajamas. The incongruity between office setup and bedroom was troubling to her, but she could not say much about it except that she had felt confused about why she was supposed to be there.

My immediate interpretation of the dream (which I kept to myself) was that her therapist had referred her with the objective of helping her find a man—a sexual love object—and that in her unconscious, she had taken a shortcut and equated that person with me. In other words, I was the object of her desire, but a forbidden, transgressive one as a professional person, paternal symbol, and oedipalized partner to her former therapist. From this perspective, her classic hysterical problem was one of guilt and perhaps fear of retaliation by her mother, on whom she presumably depended consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, she went on to recount a history of a very poor relationship with a volatile mother, whom she portrayed as always critical of everyone. Conversely, she ascribed her progress in the prior treatment to the positive feelings about herself engendered by the warmer and more accepting therapist, as well as to her ability to translate that experience into an improved relationship with her mother. She felt able to understand her mother better and to be more tolerant of her moods, and mother had responded with greater empathy about some of the painful episodes of Wendy's childhood. Also in the picture was a highly idealized father, who was viewed as having been a more involved and, in his way, affectionate parent.

My obvious interpretation of the dream certainly influenced my relationship with Wendy and led me to explore her deep love for her father and the enduring wish to capture more of his attention with diminished shame and guilt. He was a dynamic man who enjoyed outdoor sports, adventure, and discovery of the world, radiating an enthusiasm that attracted many people. Wendy had been his sidekick, tagging along on trips and learning the skills he valued so that she could keep up as she got older, an achievement that had carried over onto her current friendships with men who shared similar active interests. Her mother, needless to say, wanted no part of this type of pastime, but preferred more artistic pursuits, not too subtly disdaining the stereotypic male posture of her husband. Without getting into the details of this part of the treatment, it seemed clear enough that this was not the ideal loving parental couple inspiring normal desires of a child to take the mother's place, but an unhappy situation in which there was not enough love and acceptance to go around. For whatever reasons, there had been a failure of the parents to fulfill their symbolic roles, a blurring of boundaries, and the generation of considerable fantasy of the "she (or he) would love me more if. . ." variety. The familiar clinical reconstruction was one of a depressed child seeking stimulation in a derivative way as a substitute for missing symbolic nourishment.

Over time, I became able to perceive another dynamic in Wendy's relationship with her father, one in which she had occupied an important place in his life. Early in childhood, she had noticed his pride and happiness when impressing friends on their outings and, unconsciously (it seemed implicit, but out of her awareness), she realized that her mother did not provide this mirroring admiration he seemed to crave. Wendy did enjoy their activities, but their entire purpose, she came painfully to realize, had to do with him, who planned, organized, and carried them out, sometimes with her in a purely spectator role. She watched him perform and attended him appreciatively, delighted when his pleasure spilled over onto her in the form of an open smile or affectionate names and jokes, making her feel important. In some of her adult relationships, she had evidenced a similar pattern, attracted to athletic men who were happy to have her company, although rarely bestowing father's special look upon her. These men were frustrating to Wendy because, in the end, she was not important to them, except for brief moments when she might make herself useful to their purposes.

Out of all the complex elements of this analysis, I wish to highlight a question that began to emerge from Wendy's account of these relationships—namely, in its initial version, the query, "What do I have to do to be desired by these guys?" Later it became refined as, "What would or does a man want from me?" Of course, for Lacan, this is the fundamental question of the child, often discussed in the form of che vuoi posed to the Other. "What is my purpose here? You, the Other, must have some use for me."¹⁰ It is the crucial dynamic that revolves around Lacan's notion of symbolic castration—the incompleteness of the Other and of the self. In her childhood, Wendy had stepped into the role of object of her father's desire, or, more accurately, we could hypothesize that she unwittingly represented the objet petit a sought by him in the form of her admiring gaze. She was there in her existence in this unhappy family, finally, for him, attempting to provide an ingredient he sought in his emotional life, hoping, no doubt, that it was her as a person he wanted (that she was truly the object of his desire). When we began to explore what she was seeking from him, however, the picture changed, and we entered a phase of disappointment, hurt, and bitterness. Her father was generous, and he was fun to be with, but when Wendy had tried to gain his attention about her unhappiness and her struggles to find herself as an adolescent young woman, he could not remain attentive, minimizing or papering over the painful issues of her childhood. If she tried to protest or confront him with her experience, he grew angry, accusing her of blaming her problems on him or of being too self-indulgent. In short, speaking of her own desires was out of bounds, seemingly a threat to his own self-image.

Naturally, this theme emerged in the transference. In truth, it had been there the first day, had I been able to see it. Wendy's dream was a way of posing her question, "What is this man going to want from me?" Frequently, she was surprised that a man would desire her sexually, as she considered herself unattractive, and the man, she usually thought, could have more appealing women. At other times, she simply felt exploited, as she had happened to be around when the man needed sex, and, for this reason, rarely got pleasure from the act. Only on a few occasions, when she was intoxicated and took a more active part, picking up a man (usually someone who posed no threat of rejection), did she experience orgasm. On the other hand, she spoke consistently about enjoying the experience of being desired by the man (the admired, idealized object). Somehow this near-perfect being needed her!

The dream staged her perennial confusion about what a man could possibly be seeking from her; it situated her in the structure of the other's desire. Her own desires blocked from symbolic elaboration were symptomatically tied to the jouissance of symptoms—eating and substance abuse—which were "pleasurably painful" or painfully pleasurable, beyond the enjoyment of the pleasure principle and even, in much earlier days, posing a threat to her life. It was true that she loved her father, was drawn to him despite the frustrations of their relationship, and, as she said, saw something in him at his work and in his treatment of her at privileged moments that made him a special person. Sometimes she fleetingly recaptured this special feeling with one of the men whom she befriended. That unique indescribable something was the objet petit a, the cause of her desire, the lost part of herself she sought to regain in him.

Further developing this formulation, Wendy's effort to please father and fulfill his desire may have represented an attempt (or her insistent wish) to identify with the objet petit a, which could fill the lack in him, restoring him as the complete, ideal object she sought. In that way she might realize her desire to participate in the jouissance of the Other, a form of denial of separation and loss. Žižek (1989) writes in this context that "the problem for the hysterical subject is that he always needs to have recourse to another subject to organize his desire . . . hysterical desire is the desire of the other" (p. 187). We can see here an acting out, an attempt to actualize a fantasy that was painful to her for many reasons. Certainly it led to constant frustration and disappointment. More important, perhaps, seeking to become the object of her father's desire transgressed the law of the symbolic order and was fundamentally unacceptable, dangerously close to an incestuous love, hence evoking guilt and self-punitive wishes. Beyond this standard oedipal interpretation, however, her fantasy of filling the gap in the other meant throwing herself away as a subject, negating herself as a separate subject.

The imaginary nature of Wendy's identification as the admiring, helpless female, inept on her own and longing to be rescued by a strong generous man, was played out in other relationships, as became clear in the analysis of a series of these liaisons. With these men, she alternated between complaining bitterly of how, in the end, she was only there for them, as the "nothing sidekick" along for the ride, while, conversely, insisting on her love and admiration. Her efforts to become the object of their desires left her in the position of always hoping to be loved by an ideal father who could provide everything she lacked or had lost. Her investment in this ideal ego, an essentially narcissistic position, left her always feeling inadequate and overwhelmed by the unattainability of the men she pursued.

On the other hand, her identification with an invidious but common female stereotype may in some ways have anchored Wendy to the social-symbolic world as a compromise solution to her true subjective dilemma of finding her own desire. That is, through her role as sidekick, she gained the semblance of a "cohesive self," as suggested by a decrease in symptoms of eating or use of drugs during periods when these relationships were most active.

Alongside these "imaginary" relations, there were abundant indications of a complementary symbolic identification with her father. For example, in her career and friendships Wendy displayed aspects of the expansive, competent, and adventurous men she admired. She took charge of others easily, could function as a leader when called upon, and many of her friends apparently looked up to her for the strength and assertiveness she could display. Why had this identification not led to a stronger sense of self-esteem and confidence, as one might expect? Her identification with her father was noticed by family members (who said she "took after" him), and this was a positive feature in the eyes of their community, where he was a respected figure. Indeed, I had many occasions to comment upon aspects of her that were similar to admired traits of her father and to wonder why she did not value herself for them. Following Lacan (1960-1961), these features could have functioned as signs, marking the einziger Zug of symbolic identification (see footnote 2, chapter 4). Instead, she had turned to self-defeating relationships, which enacted her fantasies of union, and to symptomatic binges, both of which risked evolving, in Lacan's terms, into a passage à l'acte, when she had come close at times to a fatal accident or courted suicidal feelings after rejection—in short, a deadly jouissance.

In terms of the issue just discussed of the protective nature of the symptom against the pull toward jouissance, Lacan placed his emphasis on whether the objet petit a was situated externally or was identified with. When the cause of desire is external, it maintains the incompleteness of the subject (symbolic castration), and the condition of metonymic desire can then perpetuate itself in the unending, signifying chain of thoughts and actions. The lack in the subject turns unceasingly toward object-related fantasies expressed symbolically, which is the normal, neurotic state of affairs. The "I want" is never satisfied, always looking for something more, especially so for those whose symbolic links to ideals are weak or who belong to fragmented social settings. In my interpretation, the social context provides the points de caption (in the form of shared narratives, for example) where signifiers of desire can be quilted down to consensual "reality," stabilizing the endless "I want."¹¹ In contrast, imaginary identification attempts to deny lack by pursuing wholeness through symptomatic behavior. At a further stage, Lacan proposed that acting-out (passage à l'acte) stages reunion with the lost partial object and hence carries the subject beyond the pleasure principle (to a break with reality and, ultimately, to death, in Benigno's case). We could translate this distinction between imaginary and symbolic identification into the opposition between a narcissistic, private reality that is unbounded and insensitive to the otherness of the object and an intersubjective reality that accepts limitation, lack, and difference.

Although I cannot fully answer the question of why Wendy had remained dominated so long by her imaginary identification (which occurs in many patients in similar situations and poses a version of Freud's query about the repetition compulsion), I present two explanations relevant to my central theme of the consolidation of symbolic identity. Throughout this work, I emphasized that the ego ideal functions as a support for the lived sense of subjective cohesion or, in more Lacanian terms, as a support for the metonymic chain of discourse enabling participation in the intersubjective exchanges of ordinary life. I see it as a vital link between private experience and communicable affect. In this regard, symbolic identification is impaired by trauma. Wendy's early traumatic experiences were primarily due to the absence of adequate parental holding and presence. We knew from independent sources that her mother was depressed and angry for specific reasons at the time of her birth and had turned to her own career out of conscious resentment at resuming a parental role with her daughter. As an older child, Wendy sought to stimulate herself through eating, immersion in video games, intense daydreams, and, later, masturbation and drug use. Her father's involvement with her sounded intermittent, until she was old enough to accompany him on trips. As an example of mother's loss of interest, Wendy contrasted her older siblings' library of beloved children's books, which her mother had enjoyed reading to them, with her own paltry collection. They had also attended a Sunday school where mother volunteered, which she had been spared. Finally, Wendy told many stories of waiting alone at home with her games or food, only to be criticized harshly upon mother's return. These seem like the conditions cited by Bromberg (1998) as predisposing toward dissociation and lack of integration of parts of self.

Symbolic identification may also have been impaired by father's grandiosity and pseudo self-sufficiency, especially during a period of schism in the marriage, which coincided with his greatest use of Wendy as a substitute love object. To the extent that he may have turned to her as a support for his ideal ego, in effect to serve as his objet petit a, she may have been caught between two imaginary subjective positions: as the "nothing sidekick" to father, which he reinforced by including her in his specialness, and as the self-indulgent, greedy daughter, where she attempted to fill her inner emptiness and need for love with a culturally designated fantasy ("get high," and "enjoy yourself"). In neither was she a subject of her own desire.

After becoming more aware of her tendency to repeat these positions in her outside relationships, Wendy began to recognize their appearance in the analysis. She noticed that her relationship with me also involved her old desire to please and wondered about her need to persist in this self-defeating pattern. She stopped confessing her inadequacy as a patient (not interesting enough, couldn't possibly understand deep psychoanalytic issues, and the like) and dared to express criticisms of the therapy. She took to heart my interpretation that she kept looking for what I wanted from her and never spoke about what she wanted. In fact, I had made this genre of intervention numerous times without much result. She had rationalized that she needed to learn from me how to use the treatment, which of her many issues were most relevant, whether she was doing well as a patient, and so on. We often seemed to get caught in circular exchanges about her wishing for approval, acceptance, and praise from me by meeting my expectations, which fundamentally reinforced (mirrored) her core imaginary fantasy that I held the key to solving her problems.

A change in the process seemed to occur at a point when I had become annoyed that Wendy had failed to pursue what seemed like important dream material and reverted to her more helpless posture. This irritation was detectable in my comment that she was ignoring the dream content, which may have indicated, paradoxically, that I was not omniscient and did indeed want something of her. She was struck first by my disapproval. "I know you won't be interested in having me as your patient if I don't interpret my dreams," she explained. "Maybe I can't, so it's hopeless." Then, after a pause, she laughed, "This is what I do with all those guys. 'Nothing me,' waiting to be told what to do. Well, maybe I don't know what I want. Maybe I don't want anything, like I'm just a blob." Her hearty laughter continued and then she made a truly insightful comment, "The kids I work with are like that with me."

Indeed, in her work, Wendy was much more clearly identified with her father's style and profession than her mother's. Unconsciously, however, to give up her imaginary relationship with him for a symbolic one would have meant to lose him (by losing the symptomatic fusional link to him as the objet a). A fantasy of oneness with her father seemed to stand in the way of being like him in some limited respect while remaining separate. In her associations, Wendy presented different representations of this loss. At a conscious level, she wouldn't need him anymore, and he would have no use for her in a new, independent role. This realization involved grieving. There was also the threat of arousing the anger of her mother and siblings (if she stopped being the problem child and thereby exposed the serious difficulties of the others). These fears began to emerge more explicitly, as well as a newly voiced homosexual concern, as she feared her caring for women might become sexualized. These latter anxieties also suggested earlier developmental deficits in the relationship with mother, which her identification with father may have served in part to patch over. In a similar way, Kohut might have seen the idealization of her father as an attempt to compensate for failures in early mirroring.

The exploration of our transferential relationship enabled us to understand the resistances to change and the powerful attachment to the fantasy pleasures of the side-kick role. Her idealization of me as the all-knowing analyst was a piece of this dynamic, and we could both see ways in which I had been complicit in enjoying the admiring submission she had described with other men. Eventually, Wendy desired to be treated that way herself by a loving man. Of course, in summarizing in this manner, I am highlighting only one strand of an analytic process in which the concepts of desire and of the objet petit a seemed to have brought clarification and order. Others would certainly find other useful perspectives to illuminate a complex analytic experience. With this caveat in mind, I leap to the end of Wendy's analysis. This phase revolved essentially around her new object choice of a man as different as one could be from her father. In the Lacanian model, every subject is equally different from every other differentiated subject within the symbolic order. However, it may have not been happenstance that Wendy's lover had a significant physical deficit and could only but admire her physical prowess. Something felt right to her about this relationship, which seemed such a departure from the past, and she experienced a new desire to have a child by this man. One could hypothesize that the basis of her new love was, as Lacan insisted, perception of the lack in the other. This deficiency or vulnerability evokes the fantasy of the objet petit a (as the missing part, which, we recall, functions as cause of desire).

We might surmise that analysis helped Wendy to create and affirm her difference, rather than reenact another version of the same fantasy relation with her father. As we saw in chapter 2, the dual relationship in fantasy corresponds to Lacan's conception of the mirror transference. It is an attempt to avoid fragmentation by identification with an image. One way of understanding the change in Wendy from a Lacanian perspective is in terms of a shift away from this totalistic imaginary identification as one to a symbolic internalization as another (by a partial identification with a set of traits). This step leads to a different structural relationship with the objet petit a, which becomes external to the self and, thereby, falls away (the acceptance of incompleteness in the self and other placing the objet petit a outside, that is, a fantasy to be pursued along the normal paths of desire). By intervening at the level of her identification with her father rather than focusing on her unhappiness and acting out, or on her unmet needs for mothering, for example, I supported Wendy's symbolic identity against an imaginary one. She could then relinquish the fusional fantasy and own her own separate wishes and desires.

In the transference, I moved from reincarnating an imaginary mirror relationship with the father as an ideal self toward a position of sustaining the lack in the Other (by wanting, by not knowing, by being unable to gratify her). Our small contretemps about her passive stance toward associating in the session (and others like it, of course) restaged this configuration and brought home to us what was a stake in the side-kick bond. We had not developed a real relationship on a personal or social level, although something intense had transpired between us. A piece of the past had been restaged—a piece that had been presaged by her initial dream. By the end of the analysis there were significant shifts in her position (and, to some extent, my own), which enabled Wendy to let go of the jouissance of a repetition and freed her to be the subject of her own desire.

¹Referring to the unquenchable desire of the hero of Saul Bellow's (1953) novel, The Adventures of Augie March.

²This intuitive exploitation of unconscious desire by advertising that alludes to "more" or "extra" in a product is critiqued by Zizek (1989) in his analysis of the modern capitalist state.

³Lacan (1972-1973) emphasized the necessary failure of the sexual relationship to provide the satisfaction desired. "Isn't it owing only to the affect that results from this gap that something is encountered? . . . The substitution by the path of existence not of the sexual relationship but of the unconscious . . . which constitutes the destiny as well as the drama of love" (p. 145). In other words, love rises beyond the level of a narcissistic (sexual) fantasy through the encounter of two speaking beings.

⁴Lacan discussed this difference in his exceptionally difficult seminar on anxiety (1962-1963). Harari (2001) offers a reasonably lucid explication of this seminar.

⁵Das Ding as a philosophic concept carries a lot of freight, pointing to the real but unknowable object apart from our limited capacity to perceive and conceive it, as developed by Kant. Freud picked up this notion when he spoke of the unconscious as similarly unknowable, and Lacan developed it much further, using Das Ding as a metaphor for the preobjectal mother.

⁶An excellent review of this history is provided by Barzilai (1999).

⁷Harari (2001) presents one of Lacan's formulae for the objet petit a as: O (the mother in the first instance) minus S (the incipient subject) equals a. The entire thrust of Lacan's argument is toward a structure underlying the phenomenology of separation, much like Piaget's was toward the mathematical rules structuring the stages of reasoning. This helps explain why his text is so abstract and seems to ignore the actual experience of the child, as infant researchers, for example, attempt to reconstruct it. In my view, because the mathematics proposed by Lacan has in nearly every instance been shown to be fallacious or virtually meaningless (see Sokol and Bricmont, 1997), we need to rethink his hypotheses in relation to clinical and empirical psychoanalytic research.

⁸Freud's (1900) horrifying vision of Irma's oral cavity in his famous dream specimen may be another version of this compelling fantasy.

⁹Before the Fall.

¹⁰". . . all the child's whys reveal not so much an avidity for the reason of things as a testing of the adult, a "Why are you telling me this?" ever resuscitated from its base, which is the enigma of the adult's desire" (Lacan, 1964, p. 214).

¹¹In his seminar on the psychoses, Lacan (1955-1956) proposed that a certain minimum number of such points of insertion between the signifier and the signified, halting the perpetual sliding of meaning, was necessary for a subject to personalize (or subjectify) his own discourse. In my view, a similar link with socially given symbols of affective experience is necessary to stabilize a sense of existence and identity.