Obsession

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (365)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.26

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that psychoanalytic change operates through the putting-into-words of the unspeakable rather than through understanding or meaning-making; understanding and meaning serve ego rationalization and resist analytic transformation, so the analyst's task is to dismantle meaning and bring the unconscious to speech without providing mastery.

   In doing so—in a way fitting for one so obsessive, even if the 'stuff' on the shower floor was whitish, not brown

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.36

   AGAINST UNDERSTANDING

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that analytic technique must resist popular-psychological labels (like "abuse") that exonerate the analysand and foreclose the discovery of unconscious guilt displacement, submissive agency, and deeper Oedipal crime; conscious understanding through the observing ego is insufficient and may even obstruct the treatment's real work.

   his general tendency was to blame himself alone for all the early childhood sexual activity he had ever engaged in, with children older or younger than himself, never attributing any blame whatsoever to the other party

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.58

   **Language Is Ambiguous**

   Theoretical move: The differential relation between signifier and signified in neurosis versus psychosis is clinically operative: neurotics can hear homophonic slippage as meaningful (erect/"a wreck"), while psychotics take words as things, blocking the polysemy that makes such interventions possible. The crucial diagnostic distinction is not "concreteness" but the capacity to sustain multiple meanings within a single signifier.

   we should never underestimate the importance, in obsession, of another man's desire in the selection of the object of the obsessive's affections

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.81

   **Notes**

   Theoretical move: This notes section anchors several theoretical moves: the distinction between repression and repudiation in hysteria, the topology of desire's distance from its object, the role of the subject's own loss as the first object in the demand/desire dialectic, and the obsessive's use of superego command in the service of desire.

   the oftentimes compulsive nature of the obsessive's actions: he or she remains paralyzed 99 percent of the time, but when he or she finally acts, it is impulsive, brutal

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.98

   *True Speech versus True Discourse*

   Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes Lacan's concepts of "true speech" (mutual recognition of subjects) from "true discourse" (correspondence to the thing / knowledge of reality), arguing that each undermines the other, and that both analysand and analyst are compelled to navigate an "intermediate discourse" that holds both in tension — a tension that is clinically productive when the analyst learns to hear authentic speech within it.

   still served as true speech by hitting and dismantling a cross-generational chain (of events and signifiers) responsible for the Rat Man's obsession

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.124

   **The Unconventional Logic of the Text**

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacanian psychoanalytic practice and textual interpretation share a common methodological principle: both require the analyst/reader to presuppose an unconventional, highly personal logic in the material (patient's discourse or Lacan's text) rather than replacing it with a standard or external logic, illustrating this via a mistranslation in Sheridan's rendering of the Graph of Desire passage where desire's relation to fantasy is at stake.

   There is only one true logic—a rather obsessive, capitalistic logic, as it turns out

7. #07

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.188

   <span id="page-186-0"></span>[SEXUAL ANXIETIES](#page-8-0)

   Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of "Slater," Fink demonstrates how obsessional neurosis structures sexuality around fantasy as a mediating distance that both enables jouissance and defends against its annihilating excess, while the "real sex" with the original object remains a traumatic touchstone that subsequent relations only approximate.

   The case that I will briefly discuss today is one of an obsessive neurotic in his thirties who reported that, in all his relations with a girl whom he had been involved with at around the age of 20

8. #08

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.223

   **Demand and Desire Are Not One and the Same**

   Theoretical move: The passage uses the clinical structure of hysteria to argue for a radical split between demand (the explicit request) and desire (the underlying want), demonstrating that responding only to the first level of demand systematically misses the second level of desire, with hysterics characteristically engineering situations where their stated demands are met while their desire remains structurally unsatisfied.

   Just as obsessive men have a tendency of turning their partners into mother figures, hysterics have a tendency of transforming their partners into doting father figures.

9. #09

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.226

   *"After You Get What You Want You Don't Want It"*

   Theoretical move: Desire is structurally unsatisfiable because its aim is not to reach an object but to perpetuate itself; the passage argues that the status of a wish as demand or desire is determined relationally by how it is responded to, and that desire requires the partner to create new desires rather than satisfy existing ones.

   Most men (obsessive in structure) tend to be primarily concerned with maintaining the status quo in their love relationships, abhorring anything that might rock the boat or shake things up a bit.

10. #10

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.229

    **Surplus Sexuality: Freud's Early Work on Hysteria and Obsession**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurotic structure (hysteria vs. obsession) originates in a primordial traumatic encounter with surplus sexuality, and that the clinical presentations of each neurosis paradoxically invert the expected reactions to that encounter; it then reformulates the distinction in terms of three registers—love, desire, and jouissance—anchored by the assertion that love covers over the sexual non-relation.

    Obsession involves the endeavor to silence (or eliminate) desire and the avoidance of jouissance.

11. #11

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.232

    **Notes**

    Theoretical move: This passage is a set of endnotes providing bibliographic, clinical, and parenthetical clarifications for an essay on hysteria and obsession; it contains no substantive theoretical argument of its own.

    Obsession thus seems to bear a certain affinity to Buddhism, which calls for the elimination of all desire (even that for Nirvana).

12. #12

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.14

    AGAINST UNDERSTANDING, VOLUME 2 > **What Is a Case Study?**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that case studies are structurally motivated by the clinician's drive to demonstrate mastery—of theory, technique, and diagnosis—and that genuine clinical honesty is only possible outside institutional power relations, a critique that operates as a meta-theoretical reflection on the epistemological conditions of psychoanalytic knowledge production.

    such and such features of the case inclined them to think of psychosis, whereas others inclined them to think of obsession

13. #13

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.29

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>ANALYSAND AND ANALYST IN THE [GLOBAL ECONOMY, OR WHY ANYONE](#page-7-0) IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD PAY FOR AN ANALYSIS > **Three Clinical Vignettes** > *Making the Other Pay*

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical vignette of Jeffrey, Fink demonstrates how desire is constituted by and against the Other's desire/prohibition: Jeffrey's drive collapses once paternal opposition is removed, revealing that his desire was entirely structured by the need to antagonize and provoke the father-as-Other. The accompanying "depression" is reframed not as melancholy but as unacknowledged hatred—of others and of oneself.

    to be sure that he was really and truly thumbing his nose in just the right way, he needed to ensure that his actions truly annoyed his father

14. #14

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.32

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>ANALYSAND AND ANALYST IN THE [GLOBAL ECONOMY, OR WHY ANYONE](#page-7-0) IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD PAY FOR AN ANALYSIS > **Three Clinical Vignettes** > *Tucking Some Away*

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical vignette of "George," Fink demonstrates how the obsessional's characteristic posture—self-blame and conspicuous hard work in analysis—functions as a resistance to the non-goal-directed associative work psychoanalysis requires, while the inherited money operates simultaneously as the enabling condition for treatment and as a symptomatic object that condenses the analysand's entire conflicted relation to his family and his intellectual project.

    being far more obsessive than hysteric. In other words, he is quite willing to admit that he has played a role in bringing about his own misery, but this does not mean he wants to see precisely what that role is or what it does for him.

15. #15

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.64

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Theoretical Backdrop of the Fundamental Fantasy**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that the fundamental fantasy is not a single discrete phase but a triadic unit — using Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten" as a test case — and that all three phases (primal wish, maximally repressed form, and jouissance-laden surface presentation) jointly constitute the structure through which the subject relates to the Other, situating the entire Oedipal scenario within it and linking it to the obsessive's L Schema dynamics.

    illustrating Lacan's comments about obsessive neurosis in several texts from Écrits… the obsessive puts on a show or 'arrang[es] circus games' between himself as ego and his mother as little other, or a´, for a spectator

16. #16

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.68

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Fantasy is the Other's Desire**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that the fundamental fantasy is best understood as an interpretation of the Other's desire, showing how the obsessive constructs a flattering, self-consistent reading of both parents' desires that forecloses the full installation of the phallus as signifier — and how this construction produces the obsessive's characteristic symptom of desiring impossibility.

    such subjects generally avoid putting the mother's desire to the test… the obsessive's desire is for impossibility… for a situation in which a woman remains inaccessible.

17. #17

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.69

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Fundamental Fantasy as (S/ ◊***a***)**

    Theoretical move: By reading two clinical-autobiographical accounts, Fink demonstrates how Lacan's matheme (S/◊a) can be concretely applied to isolate the fundamental fantasy in both obsessional and hysterical structures, showing that the specific avatar of object a (here, the gaze) organises the subject's relation to the Other's desire and to their own emergence as a subject.

    As an obsessive, he is inclined to imagine the worst, and he fades in the presence of that gaze.

18. #18

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.85

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-83-0"></span>[A Few Refl ections on Diagnosis](#page-7-0)

    Theoretical move: The clinical distinction between neurosis and psychosis is not merely diagnostic but is ethically and technically decisive: applying neurotic interpretive technique (splitting, ambiguity, interpretation) to a psychotic subject risks triggering psychotic breaks, meaning that differential diagnosis is a precondition for doing no harm in directing the treatment.

    a girl Federn erroneously took to be obsessive developed erotomania, began hallucinating, and ended up committing suicide

19. #19

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.106

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **The Formulas of Sexuation**

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's formulas of sexuation emerge from the logic of collectivization: "Woman does not exist" means no universal characteristic grounds a set of all women (giving the *pas-toute*/*not-all*), while "Man" is constituted only insofar as he is subsumed under the phallic function as everyman (∀xФx), with both sides of the formula grounded in mythological (Totem and Taboo / Don Juan) rather than biological or anatomical foundations.

    This is clearly something we come across in our clinical work with obsessives, and it seems to be the obsessive's rather unique way of collectivizing all women—for him they are all off-limits insofar as they all belong to the father!

20. #20

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.112

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-110-0"></span>[LACAN ON PERSONALITY FROM](#page-7-0) THE 1930s TO THE 1950s

    Theoretical move: Fink reconstructs Lacan's early (1932 dissertation) theory of personality as a diachronic, psychogenic, and dialectically developing structure of the psyche—deployed polemically against biogenic/constitutional accounts of psychosis—tracing how this conception anticipates Lacan's later multilayered psychic topology (L schema) and his clinical differentiation of structures.

    Constipation, for example, is not intrinsically linked to obsession and can be found in virtually every other structural category at one time or another.

21. #21

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.126

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Adorno's Critique of "Science" and "Reason"**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Adorno's critique of Kant and Sade anticipates Lacan's own position in "Kant avec Sade": both thinkers see Sade as completing rather than opposing Kant's project, exposing the totalitarian logic latent in Kantian universality and scientific rationality, which Lacan further formalizes by recasting the categorical imperative in cybernetic terms.

    Adorno's account could be translated psychoanalytically as taxing Sade with severe obsessive neurosis where nothing can be left to chance, where one has to have a system for everything—even 'leisure.'

22. #22

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.149

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Notes**

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/commentary section providing bibliographic and clarificatory footnotes for the preceding chapter; it contains scattered theoretical asides but no sustained independent argument.

    They cannot grant status to their desire except as unsatisfied by them [hysteric] or impossible [obsessive]

23. #23

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.153

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Narcissism and Love**

    Theoretical move: Fink maps Freud's libido-economy of narcissism and object-choice onto Lacan's RSI registers, arguing that anaclitic object-choice is oriented toward the Real, narcissistic object-choice toward the Imaginary, while the ego-ideal introduces a Symbolic dimension—thereby showing that Freud's theory of love implicitly prefigures Lacanian structural distinctions but remains caught within a closed-economy (constant-libido) model foreign to Lacan.

    That would seem to be the obsessive's unwitting goal. He loves them because he can rest assured that they will not love him back... He cannot then be overwhelmed by their love, something the obsessive is often likely to be.

24. #24

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.156

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Love Triangles**

    Theoretical move: Fink reads Freud's 1910 paper on male object-choice to argue that what drives this "obsessive love" is not the particular woman but the structural/symbolic triangle (Oedipal rivalry), and then raises unresolved questions about the libido economy — whether the Madonna/whore fall triggers a redistribution between object-libido and ego-libido — that push beyond Freud's own formulation.

    Freud outlines a specific type of obsessive 'male love' (as opposed to 'normal love') in which a father-like rival must be present

25. #25

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.181

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-179-0"></span>[A Case of Obsession from a Lacanian Perspective](#page-8-0)

    Theoretical move: The passage introduces a clinical case of obsession through the narration of a pivotal traumatic event — a mother's psychotic murder of her daughter — establishing the methodological premise that such an event retroactively organizes the subject's history, while flagging an apparent paradox: the events may prove less traumatically constitutive than they initially appear.

    The case I will be presenting today is that of the youngest son, whom I will refer to as Wesley.

26. #26

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.187

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Relations with His Sister and Other Women**

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case, Fink demonstrates how the traumatic primal scene (mother's murder of the sister) structures the patient's entire erotic and aggressive life, binding sexuality irreversibly to death, dismemberment, and castration anxiety, while his obsessional neurosis channels violence into fantasy and inhibition rather than act.

    This concern with being observed during the sexual act and not measuring up to a father's standards is not uncommon in obsessional neurosis, in my experience.

27. #27

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.192

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Relations with His Father**

    Theoretical move: Through the detailed clinical unfolding of Wesley's case, Fink demonstrates how an obsessional neurotic structure pre-exists and shapes the impact of a traumatic event, and how repressed aggression toward the father—displaced onto the mother, the self, and eventually the transference—is progressively worked through in analysis, with somatic, oneiric, and parapraxic material serving as privileged evidence.

    traumatic events that occurred when Wesley was ten impacted an already established obsessive structure. They gave it a form that might easily be misrecognized by some, but its main outlines have become ever clearer as the trauma at age ten has been progressively worked through

28. #28

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.193

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Words, Words, Words**

    Theoretical move: Through the detailed clinical case of Wesley, Fink demonstrates how the inability to name "the lack in the Other"—particularly the lack constitutive of sexual difference—structures both an obsessional neurosis and a broader symptomatic relation to language, writing, and women, showing how analytic work on sexual significations can open a gap in the Other that enables desire and speech.

    These anal connections obviously fit quite well with the notion of a fully formed obsessional neurosis prior to age ten.

29. #29

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.196

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Excursus on Gaps**

    Theoretical move: Through a clinical case (Wesley), the passage theorizes the analytic function of the gap/lack as the condition of possibility for subject formation, metonymic desire, and retroactive subjectification, showing how the absence of a tile (signifier) in a structure enables movement, slippage, and the emergence of the subject between signifiers.

    he spent a couple of sessions talking about his 'obsession with UNIX,' the computer operating system. When I indicated that the sound of the word could be spelled differently, like eunuchs, he laughed hysterically

30. #30

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.197

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Features of Obsession**

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical vignette (Wesley), Fink illustrates the structural features of obsession: the subjective strategy of "playing dead" to preserve desire from actualization, the need for an inaccessible object to sustain impossible desire, the annulling of the Other, the ripping away of object a, and the pervasive feeling of being "always already late" — all read through Lacanian coordinates.

    His interest in inaccessible women (and his 'perception' of anger in a woman rendered her inaccessible) allowed him to maintain an impossible desire; it kept his desire alive and yet simultaneously preserved it from any chance of appearing on the stage of life

31. #31

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.205

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Identity**

    Theoretical move: Through the detailed case of "George," Fink demonstrates that identity construction is not a coherent or intentional process but is structured by contradictory self-images, displaced desires, and a dialectic in which the subject achieves its goal (popularity, recognition, domination) only by ostensibly renouncing it—illustrating how identity is constituted through the logic of fantasy, symptom, and the neurotic subject's relationship to desire and the Other.

    his obsession with his identity began at a crucial turning point for many students in the United States: the passage from elementary (or primary) school to junior high (or middle) school

32. #32

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.210

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Semblance**

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys Lacan's concept of semblance to analyze how culturally specific ideological systems (American individualism, Amish conformity, Communist-era Romania) constitute the material of identity construction, showing that semblance is not simply 'false ideology' but the very fabric through which subjects align themselves with or against normative ideals—with obsessional neurosis serving as the clinical lens for reading George's case.

    George is obviously a product of the stereotypically American ideal of the self-made man, having the classic obsessive wish to be influenced by no one, to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, to prove he is a man by not having to accept money or support from anyone

33. #33

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.231

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Ensuring the Other's Jouissance**

    Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates, through a clinical case, how the fundamental fantasy serves the dual function of ensuring the Other's jouissance (satisfying the contradictory desires of both parents) while simultaneously sustaining the subject's own desire by maintaining it in a state of irreducible impossibility—thus preventing the "deflation" of desire that follows satisfaction and the consequent fading/aphanisis of the subject.

    a situation that often leads to depression in obsessives, due to what we might call a 'deflation' of desire. Should the obsessive occasionally achieve what he wants—accidentally or through no fault of his own—he is threatened with the fading of his desire

34. #34

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.232

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Misrecognition**

    Theoretical move: Through the clinical illustration of a repeated parapraxis, Fink argues that misrecognition of one's clinical structure (preferring to identify as hysteric rather than obsessive) is betrayed by slips of the tongue that enact the very obsessional logic the analysand disavows: the obsessive's need to neutralise the Other's desire by satisfying it, thereby keeping his own desire safely sequestered.

    To satisfy someone is, of course, one way the obsessive stops the Other from showing any sign of desire, it being the Other's desire that threatens to eclipse his own.

35. #35

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.237

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Notes**

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage deploys several load-bearing theoretical distinctions — neurosis vs. perversion in fantasy structure, the placement of minus-phi, and castration denial — to annotate a clinical case, while also touching on the fundamental fantasy, the barred subject, and the differential diagnosis between hysteria and obsession.

    there are, of course, always elements that incline one to think of hysteria in a case of obsession and vice versa, but the overall clinical picture (and above all, the fundamental fantasy) usually strongly suggests one rather than the other.

36. #36

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.247

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > *Inability to Express Anger Directly*

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case, Fink argues that the analyst's proper role is not to "lay down the law" in response to an analysand's appeal for punishment and prohibition, but rather to interpret that appeal as a symptom of the subject's conflicted relation to a superego already in place — thereby reframing the transference dynamics and the evolution of fantasy as the real site of analytic work.

    Here we might think of the 'impossible desire' typical of obsessive neurosis.

37. #37

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.251

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > *Diagnosis*

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that clinical diagnosis must be grounded in the predominant mechanism of negation (repression, disavowal, foreclosure) and structural criteria rather than surface behaviors, using Patrick's case to distinguish neurotic repetition compulsion from structural perversion/masochism, and to show how the analyst's own position can become the site where masochistic logic plays out.

    The predominance of guilt and self-recriminations, on the other hand, were more reminiscent of obsession.

38. #38

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.257

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Notes**

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of clinical and theoretical endnotes to a case study chapter, touching on Lacanian concepts such as the sexual non-relation underlying trauma, masochism's relation to the superego and Oedipus complex, and the analyst's desire as an alternative to legalistic conditions in treatment — but is primarily footnote material with limited standalone theoretical development.

    Consider the comment made by one of my clearly obsessive analysands to the effect that one must 'care enough about a kid to punish him.'

39. #39

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.285

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > [INDEX](#page-8-0)

    Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 285) from Bruce Fink's *Against Understanding, Volume 2*, listing key terms and page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but maps the conceptual terrain of the book including fantasy, fundamental fantasy, sexuation, Graph of Desire, and related Lacanian/Freudian concepts.

    in obsession case study 167, 169, 171, 178, 180

40. #40

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.226

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Beyond the Oedipal Triangle**

    Theoretical move: By reading the "Freud Man" case through Lacan's formula that "fantasy is the Other's desire," Fink argues that the analysand's static standoff fantasy stages his interpretation of his mother's unknowable (castrating) desire, locating the clinical structure of neurotic fantasy at the intersection of the preoedipal and the Oedipal and showing how identification with the father functions as a defence against — rather than resolution of — that fundamental fantasy.

    in classic obsessive fashion the Freud Man was saying, 'Yes, this is what is happening, but my desire is not really in play—it is on the sidelines.'

41. #41

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.223

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **A Child Is Being Molested or Abused**

    Theoretical move: Through extended clinical illustration, Fink argues that child-abuse fantasies, intrusive thoughts, and dreams must be interpreted within the larger Oedipal drama and clinical structure rather than reduced to a formulaic diagnosis (e.g., "sadism"); in the Freud Man case, these fantasies are shown to be structured around the question of the mother's love (the Lacanian operation of separation) and the obsessional staging of imaginary circus games between ego and mother for the father-as-Other to witness.

    this would seem to confirm the diagnosis of obsession—suggested by so many other features of the analysand's discourse and daily landscape—the obsessive analysand staging 'circus games' between himself and his mother (a and a´) for the father (Other) to observe

42. #42

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: This passage is largely non-substantive editorial and prefatory material — translation notes, edition prefaces by Freud, and a translator's preface by Brill — with only incidental theoretical content touching on the dream as paradigm for psychopathology and the role of the unconscious in dream-work.

    the hysterical phobia, the obsession, and the delusion must, for practical reasons, claim the interest of the physician.

43. #43

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: This passage, drawn from A. A. Brill's translator's preface and Freud's opening chapter of *The Interpretation of Dreams*, establishes the scientific and clinical stakes of dream interpretation: dreams are meaningful psychological structures whose interpretation is indispensable to psychoanalytic technique and the treatment of psychopathological conditions, while also surveying the unresolved contradiction in the literature between dreams as isolated from waking life and dreams as continuous with it.

    The dream does not only reveal to us the cryptic mechanisms of hallucinations, delusions, phobias, obsessions, and other psychopathological conditions, but it is also the most potent instrument in the removal of these.

44. #44

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

    Theoretical move: Freud surveys the clinical and analogical relations between dream life and mental disturbances, positioning wish-fulfilment as the shared key to a psychological theory of both, and arguing that elucidating the dream is simultaneously an elucidation of the psychosis.

    actions of a pathological character (based on delusions, obsessive impulses) had their origin in dreams

45. #45

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream***

    Theoretical move: Freud establishes dream interpretation as a legitimate scientific procedure by arguing that dreams, like hysterical symptoms, have a hidden meaning recoverable through a method of free, uncritical self-observation — thereby positioning the dream as a psychic formation continuous with pathological symptoms rather than a mere somatic process.

    psychopathological structures in hysterical phobias, compulsive ideas, and the like

46. #46

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud uses the analysis of "typical dreams" (especially nakedness/exhibition dreams) to argue that such dreams are universal because they draw on shared infantile sources—specifically childhood exhibitionism preceding the acquisition of shame—and that the dream-work's distortion through wish-fulfilment and repression explains their characteristic structure, including the contradictory indifference of spectators.

    in the development of the obsessions and phobias similar misunderstandings, likewise within the same psychic personality, play a leading part

47. #47

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) TYPICAL DREAMS**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that death-wishes toward parents and siblings in dreams originate in childhood sexuality and rivalry, and that the Oedipus Complex—the boy's desire for the mother and rivalry with the father, and vice versa for the girl—is the universal operative factor behind this typical dream pattern, with the unconscious managing these wishes through dreams, symptoms, and hysterical counter-reactions.

    a compulsion-neurosis made life almost unendurable, so that he could not go on the street, because he was harassed by the obsession that he would kill every one he met

48. #48

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) MEANS OF REPRESENTATION IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically catalogues the dream-work's representational techniques—identification, condensation into composite images, inversion (of content and temporal sequence), and the "transvaluation of psychic values"—demonstrating that the formal properties of dream representation are determined by the logic of the dream-thoughts rather than by the perceptual or sensory qualities of the dreaming state.

    in the dream of a young patient suffering from a compulsion neurosis, the memory of an infantile death-wish against a dreaded father was hidden behind the following words

49. #49

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(D) REGARD FOR PRESENTABILITY**

    Theoretical move: Freud introduces 'regard for presentability' (Darstellbarkeit) as a third factor in dream-work alongside condensation and displacement, arguing that abstract dream-thoughts are systematically recast into visual/figurative language to enable dramatisation, with word-play and verbal ambiguity serving both condensation and censorship evasion, and that this symbolic-substitutive mechanism is shared across dreams, neuroses, and cultural/mythic tradition.

    neuroses (obsessions, phobias) take advantage of the conveniences which words offer for the purposes of condensation and disguise quite as readily as the dream

50. #50

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) ABSURD DREAMS—INTELLECTUAL PERFORMANCES IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that acts of judgment, astonishment, and explanatory thought appearing within dreams are not independent intellectual performances but are repetitions or displacements of prototypes already present in the dream-thoughts — the dream-work copies reasoning from waking material (including from a patient's neurotic logic) rather than generating it spontaneously.

    a highly cultured and, in conduct, kind-hearted man, who began, shortly after the death of his parents, to accuse himself of murderous inclinations, and who suffered because of the precautionary measures he had to take

51. #51

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(G) THE AFFECTS IN THE DREAM**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that affects in dreams are not distorted by the dream-work the way presentation contents are — affects remain intact while ideas undergo displacement and substitution — and that this dissociation between affect and idea is the key to understanding the apparent incongruity of emotions in dreams, a logic that equally governs psychoneurotic symptoms.

    the patient with compulsive ideas is astonished that he develops such painful self-reproach out of a nonentity

52. #52

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES—REGRESSION**

    Theoretical move: Freud synthesizes competing theories of dream formation by subordinating them to his unified framework of wish-fulfilment and dream-work, then advances the argument by distinguishing the preconscious stream of thought from the unconscious wish that energizes it—establishing that the most complex mental operations occur without consciousness, and that regression and the primary process are the hallmarks of the dream-work proper.

    which we have already learned independently from every psychoanalysis of persons suffering from hysteria or obsessions

53. #53

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.58

    [The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Symbolic debt

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Rat Man case as paradigmatic for a structural, transgenerational theory of neurotic etiology: symptoms are encrypted testimonies to symbolically transmitted family debts (signifiers), not to brute biological instincts, and the proper telos of analysis is not happiness/success but the analysand's confrontation with the contingent, factical nonsense—the Freudian Thing—that underpins apparent meaning, achieved by weakening the Imaginary ego to let the Symbolic unconscious speak.

    His obsessional neurotic symptoms can be read as encrypted testimonies to his father's past monetary and amorous sins

54. #54

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.87

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Neurosis and the imaginary

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) must be understood structurally through the subject's alienation in language and symbolic castration—not through behavioral or biological reductions—and that the neurotic's behavior constitutes a symbolic response to the facticity of the subject's contingent existence within the symbolic order.

    it is the alienation of the subject in language, so closely tied to the father, and not early weaning or actual neglect, that incites the Rat Man's anger and anxiety, and that allows for his obsessional neurosis.

55. #55

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The imaginary in neurosis and object relations

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurotic impasses (hysterical and obsessional) are constituted entirely within the imaginary register—between little others and ego-images—and therefore cannot be resolved from within that register; the hysteric perpetuates an alienated desire mediated through the other's image while the obsessive deploys his ego as a puppet to stave off death, both strategies ultimately annulling desire and blocking genuine subjective engagement.

    The obsessive staves off death. He deploys a new version of the 'other,' his own ego, which is distinct from the subject, as a 'prop' or a kind of puppet, with which he attempts to show, 'through the challenge of a thousand feats' that he has successfully tricked death.

56. #56

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.91

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Approaching neurosis in the imaginary vs. the symbolic

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the IPA's ego-strengthening approach to neurosis deepens alienation by keeping the subject in the imaginary register, and that only orienting analysis through the symbolic Other—rather than the imaginary other of identification—can treat neurosis as a genuine question rather than a lure; this critique extends to all empiricist, biologistic, and behaviorist appropriations of psychoanalysis that destroy its symbolic foundation.

    the obsessive is always fooling, but never confronting, death, and becomes increasingly alienated from his subjectivity as it comes to represent death to him

57. #57

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.112

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Mirages and other narcissistic extravagances

    Theoretical move: Lacan's satirical critique of mid-century psychoanalytic institutionalism — its narcissistic 'good object' ideology, fetishization of technique, and anal-stage ritualism — is shown to ultimately serve his core theoretical claim that the unconscious is structured like a language, grounding rhetorical tropes as defenses and linking style to the Real beyond meaning.

    The reference to anality leads him on a humorous detour... The deification of defecation and fetishization of the treatment frame meets a willing partner in the deadening tendencies of the obsessional neurotic whose 'unconscious' will zealously adjust to any formalized ritual.

58. #58

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.180

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's 'return to Freud' culminates in a formal, symbolic account of the unconscious as the Other's discourse, articulated through the L-schema and R-schema, which positions subjectivity as constituted by signifiers at the level of the Other rather than by imaginary ego-dynamics—thereby decisively separating psychoanalysis from both Cartesian consciousness-philosophy and Jungian imaginary interpretation.

    or on the issue of being versus not being, which is typical of obsessional neurosis

59. #59

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.188

    [On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that paternity is constituted not by imaginary or biological reality but by the signifier — the paternal metaphor — and that this symbolic dimension grounds both paternity and the concept of death, a connection that becomes especially legible in obsessional neurosis (as in Freud's Rat Man).

    This connection becomes particularly clear in obsessional neurosis

60. #60

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > II. What is the place of interpretation?

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Rat Man and Ernst Kris cases to demonstrate that correct analytic interpretation operates through the Symbolic frame (the signifier, the Other, the paternal function) rather than through ego-level defense analysis; the ego-analysts' surface-to-depth model systematically misses desire by subordinating it to drives and defenses, requiring instead a topology that locates desire at the level of speech and the signifier.

    Freud's intuition regarding the function of the Other in obsessional neurosis. The position of the Other in obsessional neurosis is occupied by a dead man

61. #61

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.224

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > III. Where do we stand regarding transference?

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "central defect" of post-Freudian theories of transference (genetic/ego-psychological, object-relational, and intersubjective-introjective) is their reduction of the analytic situation to a dual, imaginary relationship, thereby neglecting the symbolic order and the constitutive impasse of desire; against these, Lacan insists that the direction of treatment must be oriented by the patient's signifiers rather than any normalizing ideal of adaptation or harmonious object-love.

    He also considers this notion of oblation as a form of moralism ... and relates it to the obsessional's fantasy instead of some kind of genital love.

62. #62

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.241

    [The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

    Theoretical move: Through close reading of the 'witty hysteric' dream, Lacan articulates that desire is structurally constituted as the interval between need and demand, that man's desire is the Other's desire, and that the phallus is the privileged signifier of the metonymical lack that sustains this structure — a conclusion illustrated both by hysterical identification and an obsessional clinical case.

    Lacan discusses one of his own cases, an obsessional man in the last phase of his analysis… The obsessive's way of relating to the Other/others, marked by quick shifts and contrasts, aims at side-lining his own desire.

63. #63

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic cure works by progressively exposing object *a* as the cause of the subject's desire and fading, thereby enabling the analysand to traverse their fundamental fantasy, reduce ego-ideal identifications, and face the irreducible aporia of castration as the proper terminus of analysis.

    the focus of his seminars in the late 1950s and early 1960s shifted to the relation of desire to signifiers… as unsatisfied or impossible, in hysteria and obsessive neurosis respectively

64. #64

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    <span id="ch18.xhtml_page_289"></span>[Index](#ch05.xhtml_tocindex-001)

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section (letters L–O) from a book on Lacan's Écrits, listing terms and their page references without advancing any theoretical argument.

    obsessional neurosis [57]–[58], [87], [111], [180], [188], [219]–[220], [225]

65. #65

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.23

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship

    Theoretical move: By reading Freud's 1907 "compromise formation" theory of the obsessional symptom through a Lacanian lens, the passage argues that religious ritual is structurally identical to neurotic symptom-formation: it is simultaneously repressive and gratifying of primitive drives, and this double function—not wish-fulfillment or superego guilt—is the deepest psychoanalytic account of the stubborn attachment underlying religious practice.

    In effect, obsessional neurosis is 'a private religion.' Both cases, neurosis and religion, display a conspicuous attention to detail in which objects are handled with extreme care and actions adhere to a precise order and execution.

66. #66

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.26

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship > Lacanian Heresy

    Theoretical move: By introducing the three Lacanian registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) through a rereading of the Rat Man case, the passage argues that the RSI triad constitutes a comprehensive rewriting of psychoanalytic theory: the Imaginary grounds ego-formation and alienation, the Symbolic structures the unconscious through signifying excess, and the Real names the traumatic, impossible kernel that ordinary reality functions to ward off.

    These dynamics are readily observable in the Rat Man's 'great obsessive fear.' The horrifying fantasy of rats chewing their way into the victim's anus is first of all a scenario of bodily violation that implies a rupture of the ego.

67. #67

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.30

    Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship > Rethinking Religion

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Lacan, despite offering no explicit theory of religion, provides uniquely suited resources for interpreting worship; the passage surveys two dominant approaches—identifying God with the Real or with the Symbolic—before proposing that the key to a Lacanian theory of religion lies in the relationship between the big Other and the little other.

    Worshipful Obsession, Obsessional Worship

68. #68

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.137

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Living with the Law— the God Symptom

    Theoretical move: Judaic monotheism's unprecedented proximity to *das Ding* is argued to generate anxiety that is structurally managed through a symptomatic displacement into obsessive legal observance (halacha), which simultaneously creates distance from and intimacy with the terrifying Other; this symptom formation is socially stabilized not by verified conformity but by a collective suppositional regime—what Pfaller calls "interpassivity"—in which the big Other's authority rests on the fiction that everyone else obeys.

    The dynamics involved retrace the ground lines of obsessive neurosis. The obsessive's anxiety-ridden fussing with details functions to protect him from a much more primitive and destabilizing anxiety.

69. #69

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.140

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's provocative claim that Christianity is "the one true religion" as a pivot to interrogate the relationship between religion, meaning-production, and psychoanalytic concepts: it contrasts Judaism's lack-driven, interpretively open relation to the sacred text (anticipating Lacanian theory of das Ding and the signifier) with Christianity's capacity to "secrete meaning" in response to the real, setting up the theoretical question of what Christianity adds to Lacan's framework that Judaism cannot.

    the Jewish worship of the law can readily appear to be not only deeply obsessive but also conspicuously fetishistic

70. #70

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.213

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Chapter 1

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 1 of Boothby's book, listing scholarly references on Lacanian theory and religion, Freud, Nietzsche, and related works. It is non-substantive in theoretical terms but signals key intertextual engagements.

    Freud, 'Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,' 9:118.

71. #71

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.218

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Notes > Chapter 2

    Theoretical move: This notes section maps the theoretical genealogy of *das Ding* and *objet petit a* across Lacan's seminars, documenting the Thing's partial eclipse by the object a while tracing its persistent appearances and its structural relationships to the Other, the subject, fantasy, sublimation, and the paternal metaphor.

    One thinks here of the Rat Man's grin, which Freud attributed to a 'horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware.'

72. #72

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.70

    I > 2 > Th e Secret of the Symptom

    Theoretical move: The symptom is not a barrier to enjoyment but its very source and foundation: psychoanalytic intervention works not by eliminating the symptom but by transforming the subject's relationship to the satisfaction it already obtains through symptomatic disruption, and desire itself is a fundamental misrecognition of the death drive.

    Instead, with the aid of psychoanalysis, the obsessional who views insomnia as the barrier to a satisfying life comes to recognize the satisfaction that it actually offers.

73. #73

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.324

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 5. Changing the World

    Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section (notes 1–36 for chapter "Changing the World") providing bibliographic references and parenthetical theoretical glosses on ideology, normality, fantasy, jouissance, obsession, hysteria, and the political stakes of psychoanalysis; it is substantive insofar as it deploys several load-bearing concepts in the glosses, but its primary function is citational scaffolding.

    the one disorder that no one celebrates for its potential political power is obsession. With its hypervigilance to the public law as a way of preserving its private enjoyment, obsession bespeaks a fundamental conservatism

74. #74

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_194"></span>**Structure**

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically traces Lacan's evolving concept of 'structure' from early social/affective relations through Saussurean linguistics and structuralism to topology, while establishing Clinical Structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion) as the definitive nosographic framework grounded in discrete subject-positions relative to the Other rather than collections of symptoms.

    within the clinical structure of neurosis, he distinguishes two kinds of neurosis (obsessional neurosis and hysteria)

75. #75

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_ncx_77"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part17.xhtml_page_0096"></span>***G***

    Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary traces the theoretical development of several key Lacanian concepts—gap, gaze, genital stage, gestalt, and graph of desire—showing how Lacan progressively distinguishes his positions from Freudian ego-psychology, Sartrean phenomenology, and object-relations theory through a consistent emphasis on constitutive division, the non-relation, and the structured duplicity of desire.

    the formula of oblativity—'everything for the other'—shows that it is a fantasy of the obsessional neurotic (S8, 241).

76. #76

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_ncx_83"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part18.xhtml_page_0102"></span>***H***

    Theoretical move: This passage (from Evans's introductory dictionary) articulates three interconnected Lacanian theoretical moves: (1) hallucination as the return of the foreclosed Name-of-the-Father in the Real; (2) helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) as grounding both the subject's constitutive dependence on language and the end of analysis as subjective destitution; and (3) hysteria redefined as a clinical structure organised around the question of sexual position and the desire of the Other, distinct from mere symptomatology.

    the structure of a neurosis is that of a question... Whereas obsessional neurosis concerns the question of the subject's existence, hysteria concerns the question of the subject's sexual position.

77. #77

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_137"></span>**obsessional neurosis**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reframes obsessional neurosis not as a cluster of symptoms but as an underlying clinical structure organized around an existential question about death and being, distinguishing it from hysteria while preserving Freud's diagnostic inheritance.

    Lacan argues that obsessional neurosis designates not a set of symptoms but an underlying STRUCTURE which may or may not manifest itself in the symptoms typically associated with it.

78. #78

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_201"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0229"></span>**Symptom**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of the symptom across his work: from a linguistic conception (symptom as signifier, signification, metaphor, message) grounded in the unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis, through to a post-1962 shift toward the symptom as pure jouissance culminating in the concept of the sinthome — while consistently distinguishing symptom from clinical structure as the proper focus of psychoanalytic diagnosis and treatment.

    the analyst will not diagnose a patient as obsessional simply because the patient presents typical obsessional symptoms (ritual actions, compulsive behaviour, etc.).

79. #79

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_68"></span>**fantasy**

    Theoretical move: Fantasy is not opposed to reality but is a discursively constituted, structurally fixed defence against castration and the lack in the Other; its mathemic formalisation ($ ◇ a) places it within a signifying structure that the analysand must ultimately traverse in the course of treatment.

    Lacan also provides more specific formulas for the fantasy of the hysteric and that of the obsessional neurotic (S8, 295).

80. #80

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_151"></span>**phobia**

    Theoretical move: Lacan retheorises phobia not as a clinical structure but as a "revolving junction" (plaque tournante): the phobic object functions as a signifier without univocal sense, enabling the subject to work through the impossibilities blocking passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, and phobia thereby occupies a gateway position between the two great neurotic structures and perversion.

    Usually, Lacan distinguishes only two neurotic structures (hysteria and obsessional neurosis), and describes phobia as a symptom rather than a structure (S4, 285).

81. #81

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part24.xhtml_ncx_127"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part24.xhtml_page_0146"></span>***N***

    Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary provides canonical Lacanian definitions for five interconnected concepts — Name-of-the-Father, narcissism, nature, need, negation, and neurosis — showing how each is structured around the primacy of the symbolic order over biological/imaginary registers, and how Lacan transforms Freudian clinical categories into structural ones.

    the question of the obsessional neurotic ('To be or not to be?') relates to the contingency of one's own existence

82. #82

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_113"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_page_0132"></span>***M*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part23.xhtml_ncx_115"></span>**master**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's appropriation of Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic—via Kojève—through two distinct theoretical moments: first as a phenomenological illustration of intersubjective desire and aggression (1950s), and then as a structural formalization in the Discourse of the Master, where the dialectic's inherent failure of totalization is recast as the irreducible surplus that escapes the master signifier's attempt at complete representation.

    the slave who resignedly 'waits for the master's death' (E, 99) offers a good analogy of the obsessional neurotic, who is characterised by hesitation and procrastination

83. #83

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_44"></span>**death**

    Theoretical move: Death is a multi-dimensional concept in Lacan, functioning simultaneously as constitutive of the Symbolic order (the symbol murders the thing), as a topological limit (between-two-deaths), as a philosophical inheritance from Hegel and Heidegger, as an analytic stance (the analyst as 'dummy'/dead), and as the structuring question of obsessional neurosis.

    The question which constitutes the structure of OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS concerns death; it is the question 'Am I dead or alive?' (S3, 179–80)

84. #84

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_169"></span>**religion**

    Theoretical move: The passage maps Freud's and Lacan's shared atheist alignment of psychoanalysis with science against religion, while showing how Lacan reframes religion's theoretical content—redefining God as unconscious, as a metaphor for the big Other, and grounding the Name-of-the-Father and feminine jouissance in theological metaphors even as he argues for religion's structural opposition to psychoanalytic truth.

    described religion as 'a universal obsessional neurosis' (Freud, 1907b: SE IX, 126–7)

85. #85

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    8

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the sense of guilt—conceived as a topical variety of anxiety and the central cost of civilization—must be theorized through its mostly unconscious operation, its two-layered origin (fear of external then internal authority), and its privileged relationship to aggression rather than erotic drives, with repression converting libidinal elements into symptoms and aggressive components into guilt.

    In one of these disorders, obsessional neurosis, the sense of guilt forces itself stridently on the consciousness, dominating both the clinical picture and the patient's life.

86. #86

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter4.htm_page76"></span>Smiley’s Game: *Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy*

    Theoretical move: Fisher deploys psychoanalytic categories (obsessional neurosis, masochism, the impossible object, fantasy screens, jouissance) to argue that Smiley's character is misread by Alfredson's film, which imposes a neoliberal logic of consumerism and youth onto a figure whose allure depends on the baroque mechanisms of self-deception proper to obsessional neurosis and the organisation of enjoyment around an unattainable object.

    In psychoanalytic terms, Smiley is less a 'sadomasochist' than an obsessional neurotic. (Lacan in fact argues that the question posed by the obsessional is 'am I alive or am I dead?')

87. #87

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.95

    **5** > He continues:

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian mirror stage is always-already co-constituted by the Symbolic (signifiers, parental language) interpenetrating the Imaginary body-image, that the symbolic order as transsubjective big Other structurally exceeds any aggregation of individual needs, and that ego psychology's rejection of the unconscious operates via foreclosure/repudiation rather than repression—making it a collective psychosis rather than mere resistance.

    for obsessional neurotics, perverts, and psychotics…their bodies, in different ways both for each singular subject and for each psychopathological type, are caught up in and serve as bearers of chains of signifiers

88. #88

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.208

    **11**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's appeal to Freudian guilt in "The Locus of Speech" serves to establish the primacy of the Symbolic unconscious over Imaginary affect, and that post-Freudian analysts (ego psychologists, object-relations theorists) reverse this priority by reducing analysis to imaginary-affective phenomena, producing "general infantilization" and ideological distortion—culminating in analysts misidentifying themselves with the Subject Supposed to Know.

    Freud's groundbreaking analysis of 'the Rat Man' features prominently (obsessional-neurotic guilt looms large in this case)

89. #89

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.218

    **12**

    Theoretical move: Johnston reads Lacan's "Symbolic Debt" section of "The Freudian Thing" as arguing that neurotic symptomatology (paradigmatically the Rat Man's obsessional neurosis) is etiologically grounded in chains of transgenerationally transmitted signifiers — the Symbolic order — rather than in imaginary or real biological experience, and that this priority of the Symbolic over the Imaginary constitutes the core of Lacan's "return to Freud" against ego psychology.

    His obsessional neurotic symptoms, including feelings of guilt, intrusive trains of thought, and compulsive, convoluted courses of action, can be read as encrypted testimonies to his father's past monetary and amorous sins

90. #90

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.223

    **12**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural impossibility of paternity (the father always failing to embody the Symbolic Law) produces superegoic overcompensation, and that the proper telos of Lacanian analysis is not happiness but the weakening of the Imaginary ego so that the Symbolic unconscious can speak — with the parlêtre's symptom-knots loosened by letting the unconscious articulate its truths.

    if the father qua really existing person falls far too short of the role and responsibilities enshrined as the Symbolic place of the paternal figure, then neurosis (such as the Rat Man's obsessional one) or even psychosis can result.

91. #91

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.231

    **12**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian analysis works not by destroying the ego but by attuning consciousness to the Symbolic rather than the Imaginary register, such that the truth of the unconscious is revealed not as profound meaning but as opaque, material, contingent nonsense—an anti-hermeneutical conclusion where analytic endings are reductions to absurdity rather than arrivals at depth, grounded in the pure materiality of the signifier.

    'Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,' so pivotal for this section of 'The Freudian Thing,' is rife with such (potentially) humorous phenomena, with the Rat Man's obsessive thoughts and behaviors presenting a parade of absurdities and confusions

92. #92

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.96

    The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function

    Theoretical move: The mirror stage constitutes the Ego through identification with a specular gestalt that is primordially alienating: the subject's assumption of an image that anticipates bodily unity produces a fictional 'I' structured by méconnaissance, inaugurating the dialectic of desire mediated by the other and grounding aggressiveness in narcissistic libido—against which existentialism's 'self-sufficiency of consciousness' is shown to be an ideological dead-end.

    we find fortified structures constructed, the metaphors for which arise spontaneously, as if deriving from the subject's very symptoms, to designate the mechanisms of obsessive neurosis: inversion, isolation, reduplication, undoing what has been done, and displacement.

93. #93

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.103

    The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function > IOI Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that aggressiveness is constitutively subjective and operates through imagos of the fragmented body, and that analytic technique must systematically elicit the analysand's aggressiveness (negative transference) rather than suppress it, because these aggressive intentions are the inaugural knot of the analytic drama — a position that simultaneously critiques behaviourist reductions and grounds the analyst's deliberate self-effacement in the structure of the transference.

    I will mention here a dream recounted by one of my patients, whose aggressive drives manifested themselves in obsessive fantasies.

94. #94

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.105

    The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function > IOI Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that aggressiveness is structurally correlated with narcissistic identification: the ego is constituted through an imaginary capture by the mirror image (the gestalt of one's own form), and this founding alienation generates an aggressive tension toward the semblable that pervades paranoia, transference, and the entire dialectic of human objectification.

    Such knots are, as we know, more difficult to untie in obsessive neurosis, precisely because of the well-known fact that its structure is particularly designed to camouflage, displace, deny, divide, and muffle aggressive intentions

95. #95

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.221

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > The Function and Field of Speech 237 and Language in Psychoanalysis > *Preface* > *Introduction* 242

    Theoretical move: Lacan diagnoses the deterioration of psychoanalytic discourse as a systematic abandonment of the foundation of speech and language, driven by imaginary and adaptive trends (especially in American ego psychology), and argues that Freudian concepts can only be properly grasped when oriented within a field of language and the function of speech.

    it has, in truth, assumed the appearance of a formalism that is taken to such ceremonial lengths that one might well suspect that it bears the same similarity to obsessive neurosis as Freud found so convincingly in the practice, if not the genesis, of religious rites.

96. #96

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.229

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*

    Theoretical move: Full speech—as distinct from empty speech—constitutes the subject's history by conferring necessity on past contingencies through its address to an Other, and it is this transindividual structure of concrete discourse that grounds Freud's discovery of the unconscious, not any individual psychophysiological fact.

    hysterical intersubjectivity to obsessive intrasubjectivity

97. #97

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.250

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the three paradoxes of speech and language in the subject—madness, neurotic symptom, and modern alienation—converge on the necessity of founding psychoanalysis as a science of the symbolic function, with linguistics and structural anthropology as its methodological guides, thereby recentering the human sciences around subjectivity rather than positivist objectification.

    labyrinths of Zwangsneurose [obsessive neurosis]; charms of impotence, enigmas of inhibition, and oracles of anxiety

98. #98

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.255

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis can achieve scientific rigor only by formalizing three essential dimensions—intersubjective logic, the temporality of the subject, and the historical theory of the symbol—drawing on mathematics, linguistics, and the liberal arts tradition rather than biologistic or phenomenological shortcuts.

    differentiate the effects characteristic of repression and the structure of the individual myth in obsessive neurosis.

99. #99

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.258

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic technique must return to speech and language as its foundations, demonstrating through the Rat Man case that Freud's success lay in mobilizing the symbolic resonances of speech rather than analyzing resistances objectively; interpretation operates through a "primary language" of symbols whose effects work without the subject's knowledge, and this symbolic operation must be grounded in the dialectic of self-consciousness (Socrates to Hegel) while decentering the subject from self-consciousness itself.

    the patient's painful narrative of the purported torture that supplied the theme of his obsession, that of the rat forced into the victim's anus

100. #100

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.266

     Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language is not a sign-system for transmitting information but a fundamentally intersubjective structure in which speech constitutes the subject—the sender receives the message back in inverted form—and thus the analyst's interpretive speech has a structuring (not merely informational) function that recognizes or abolishes the subject, a claim illustrated against bee-dance semiology and against ego-psychology's conflation of 'need' and 'demand'.

     non-analytic psychotherapies, and even utterly ordinary medical 'prescriptions,' have the precise impact of interventions that could be qualified as obsessive systems of suggestion

101. #101

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.267

     Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the intersubjective, dialectical character of psychoanalytic interpretation—anchored in speech and the subject's truth—is systematically degraded by ego-psychological "two-body psychology," which reduces analysis to an imaginary, objectifying relation; he demonstrates this through the Rat Man and Dora cases and mounts a critique of the analysis of defenses, countertransference misuse, and suggestion as pseudo-technique.

     The obsessive drags into the cage of his narcissism the objects in which his question reverberates in the multiplied alibi of deadly figures and, mastering their high-wire act, addresses his ambiguous homage toward the box in which he himself has his seat, that of the master who cannot be seen.

102. #102

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's interventions—including abstention, session length, and temporal punctuation—constitute the junction between the Symbolic and the Real, and that the variable-length session ("short sessions") has a precise dialectical function: by shattering discourse it brings forth genuine speech, countering the obsessive's strategy of working-through as seduction of the master.

     This is the intersubjective reason for both the doubt and procrastination that are obsessive character traits.

103. #103

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.481

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis > 77. *After Freud* > *III. With Freud*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that paternity is not an empirical but a purely symbolic function: the Name-of-the-Father operates as a signifier that conditions the attribution of procreation independently of observable reality, while the phallus—reduced by contemporary analysts to a part-object—is properly the pivot of the paternal metaphor through which the castration complex is completed in both sexes.

     the neurotic subject (especially the obsessive) manifests this affinity through the conjunction of their themes.

104. #104

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.517

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > /. *Who Analyses Today?* > *II. What Is the Place of Interpretation?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has inverted Freud's proper order of treatment—rectification of reality, transference development, then interpretation—by subordinating interpretation to transference management and ego-strengthening, a regression only overcome by grounding interpretation in the radical structure of the unconscious as language and the function of the signifier.

     in the case of the Rat Man, it is by a direct hit on the pact that presided over his parents' marriage... that Freud finds several conditions intermingled... of which the great compulsive scenario that led the patient to him seems to be the cryptographic copy.

105. #105

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.519

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > /. *Who Analyses Today?* > *II. What Is the Place of Interpretation?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close critical reading of Ernst Kris's case (the plagiarism case) to demonstrate that Ego Psychology's method of analyzing defense before drive—by privileging the surface/objective situation—misses desire's metonymic structure and produces acting out rather than subjective rectification; a different topology (not depth vs. surface) is required to locate desire.

     You treat the patient as if he were obsessed, but he throws you a line with his food fantasy, giving you the opportunity to be a quarter-of-an-hour ahead of the nosology of your time by providing a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa.

106. #106

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.526

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > 777. *Where Do We Stand Regarding Transference?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that reducing analytic technique to an imaginary object-relation ordered by "distance" — and its corollary, the collapse of the analytic situation into "reality" — produces conceptual impasses that force analysts toward the exercise of power rather than genuine engagement with the subject's being; only proper conceptualization of the symbolic register (signifier, phobic object, castration, transference) can prevent this decline.

     What such a conception owes to the specific conditions of obsessive neurosis is not to be ascribed entirely to the object.

107. #107

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.544

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > *IV. How to Act with One's Being* > 9. Let us nevertheless articulate what structures desire.

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is structurally the Other's desire—constituted in the gap opened by the signifying chain between need and demand—and that the phallus functions as the signifier of this desire, a thesis illustrated through a clinical vignette where a mistress's dream restores the obsessive patient's desire precisely by displaying what she lacks.

     he surmised his powerlessness to desire without destroying the Other, thus destroying his own desire insofar as it was the Other's desire... obsessive neurosis, which is an architecture of contrasts

108. #108

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.588

     The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > ///. *On the Ideals of the Person* > FIGURE 3

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses his optical model to demonstrate its own limits: while the model clarifies the imaginary register and its mirror-play of ego-ideals, it cannot account for the symbolic function of objet petit a, which structures desire as a relation to absence and grounds the true end of analysis — not narcissistic identification but the subject's confrontation with its own abolition in fundamental fantasy.

     he has to maintain this desire as unsatisfied (the hysteric) or as impossible (the obsessive).

109. #109

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.704

     The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious > GRAPH 2

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is constitutively structured through the Other's desire and the margin opened by demand's excess over need, while critiquing Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic for repressing jouissance and showing that the symbolic order (including the Name-of-the-Father and the law of no metalanguage) always already dominates the imaginary register of ego-formation.

     The cunning of reason is a seductive notion because it echoes a well-known individual myth characteristic of obsessives, obsessive structure being known to be common among the intelligentsia.

110. #110

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.774

     Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metaphor cannot be reduced to analogy (contra Perelman) because its logic is that of signifier-substitution—three terms against one, crossing the bar between signifier and signified—thereby grounding rhetoric in the structural logic of the unconscious and showing that enunciation can never be reduced to what is enunciated.

     the fit of rage, related by Freud, that his Rat Man flew into as a child, when he had yet to be armed with foul language, before becoming a full-fledged obsessive neurotic.

111. #111

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.791

     Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > *Significance* > *Le signifiant* > NOTES TO "THE MIRROR STAGE'¹

     Theoretical move: This passage is a set of translator's and editor's footnotes to Lacan's "The Mirror Stage," providing philological clarifications, bibliographic sources, and terminological glosses; it is non-substantive with respect to original theoretical argumentation.

     Here, however, it seems that Lacan is directly referring to the mechanism of 'undoing' (something that has been done) found in obsessive neurosis.

112. #112

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.803

     Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTE S T O "A THEORETICA L INTRODUCTIO N T O TH E FUNCTION S O F PSYCHOANALYSI S I N CRIMINOLOGY " > NOTE S T O "LOGICA L TIM E AN D TH E ASSERTIO N O F ANTICIPATE D CERTAINTY " > NOTES TO 'FUNCTION AND FIELD

     Theoretical move: This passage is a set of editorial and translator's notes to Lacan's "Function and Field" essay, clarifying terminology, providing bibliographic references, and glossing French/Latin terms; it is non-substantive in terms of original theoretical argumentation.

     Annulation (undoing what has been done)... it seems that Lacan is directly referring to the mechanism of 'undoing' (something that has been done) found in obsessive neurosis.

113. #113

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.834

     Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTE S TO "TH E SITUATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE TRAININ G OF PSYCHOANALYSTS IN 1956" > NOTE S T O TH E DIRECTIO N O F TH E TREATMEN T

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes to Lacan's "Direction of the Treatment," clarifying terminological choices, identifying intertextual references, and glossing key concepts such as repetition, transference, metaphor, metonymy, desire, and the drive—thereby serving as a secondary apparatus rather than advancing a primary theoretical argument.

     On this 'case of pure obsession in a man,' cf. Seminar V, 447.

114. #114

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan

     Classified Index of the Major Concepts > *III. Desire and Its Interpretation* > B. PSYCHIATRY'S CLINICA L CATEGORIES

     Theoretical move: This is a classified index entry (non-substantive) listing page references for major clinical categories—neurosis, perversion, and psychosis—within the Écrits, organized under psychiatry's clinical taxonomy.

     Obsessive neurosis: 98,108,303-4,314, 451-54, 556, 597-98, 609, 632-33.

115. #115

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.311

     Presentation on Psychical Causality > *From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance, Considered from the Viewpoint of Its Deviation* > *What the Psychoanalyst Must Know: How to Ignore What He Knows*

     Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the analyst's authority not in privileged knowledge but in the structural function of speech: true speech (parole) constitutes the subject's being through symbolic recognition, while the analyst's task is to silence the intermediate discourse of narcissistic misrecognition in himself so as to interpolate a revelatory interpretation that undoes the latent "word chain" determining the subject's destiny.

     this chain provides the meaning by which we can understand the simulacrum of redemption that the subject foments to the point of delusion in the course of the great obsessive trance that leads him to ask Freud for help.

116. #116

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.348

     Response to Jean Hyppolite 's Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kris's clinical case to argue that ego-psychology's method of analyzing resistance by mapping the patient's world onto the analyst's patterns produces acting out rather than genuine analytic progress—demonstrating that approaching defenses from the "surface" (the ego) fails to engage the subject's own desire and instead elicits incongruous responses whose drive-reality is not the reality value that symptoms achieve.

     we should not, of course, disdain the making conscious of an obsessive symptom, but it is something else altogether to fabricate such a symptom from scratch.

117. #117

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.393

     The Freudian Thing > *The talk given was couched in the following terms:*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious is structured by the primacy of the signifier over signification, such that symptoms, dreams, parapraxes, and jokes are all instances of the signifier's irreducible dominance—and that psychoanalytic practice degenerates precisely when analysts abandon this linguistic-symbolic dimension in favour of ego-adaptation and object-relational corrective experience.

     obsessive neurosis presuppose in their structure the terms without which the subject cannot accede to the notion of his facticity with regard to his sex in the one and with regard to his existence in the other

118. #118

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.395

     The Freudian Thing > *The talk given was couched in the following terms:*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impasses of hysteric and obsessional neurosis cannot be resolved through imaginary exchange or ego-strengthening (as contemporary ego psychology proposes), but only by recourse to the big Other as the structural place of the symbolic and guarantor of speech—thereby indicting contemporary psychoanalysis for a fundamental misreading of Freud that produces increased alienation rather than analytic progress.

     I will return to the masculine as regards the subject of the obsessive strategy… Here it is death that one must stave off [tromper] using a thousand ruses

119. #119

     Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.758

     On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire > Science and Truth

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of metalanguage—grounded in the self-referential speech of truth—is co-extensive with Urverdrängung, and uses this to differentiate how magic, religion, and science each relate "truth as cause," showing that only psychoanalysis, via the subject of science, can rigorously articulate this relation without disavowal or deferral.

     An analysis on the basis of the subject of science necessarily leads one to bring out in religion mechanisms that are familiar to us from obsessive neurosis.

120. #120

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.288

     xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI: .. .** *who is the analyst*

     Theoretical move: The obsessional's liberation from the master's imaginary prison requires a temporal process of scansions; through the logic of the Master/Slave dialectic, the obsessional must work through identifying the other's thought as a mirror of his own, until he recognises that the only true master is death — yet this recognition is perpetually deferred because the subject is too comfortable in servitude.

     it is only then that the obsessional can realise the concept of his obsessions, that is to say what they signify.

121. #121

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.49

     **IV** > **M. HYPPOLITE:** *Rejection [rejet]?*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Verwerfung (foreclosure) names a primitive nucleus that is more foundational than repression — something excluded from the subject's symbolic history altogether rather than merely repressed — and then uses Freud's dream-theory and the Signorelli example to show that the most theoretically significant residue is precisely what is most absent, forgotten, or hesitant, because desire and its repressed substratum speak through the gaps in discourse.

     To explain how a repression of this or that sort is produced, of an hysterical or obsessional type, there is actually no need to have recourse to an innate predisposition.

122. #122

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.287

     xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI: ft** *is the navel of speech.*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is the very concept of analysis because it is its time, and uses the Master/Slave dialectic to illuminate obsessional neurosis: the obsessional's waiting for the master's death functions as a reprieve from confronting his own being-for-death, which is precisely what analysis must work through via repetition-compulsion given symbolic duration.

     there are some obsessionals whose lives consist in waiting. They turn their analyses into another waiting…why does this waiting of the analysis reproduce in a certain manner the waiting in life, and change it?

123. #123

     Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **vin** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the case of Robert and his single word "Wolf!" to distinguish the superego (as senseless, ferocious law located in the symbolic) from the ego-ideal (as exalting), and to articulate how even the most reduced form of language ties a subject to the human community, while also returning to the optical schema of container/contained to theorize the nascent imaginary in psychotic structure.

     Zwang is the term most often rendered in English by 'compulsion' (cf. 'Zwangsneurose', 'Zwangsvorstellung' - 'obsessional neurosis', 'obsessional idea').

124. #124

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     BookX Anxiety > *NOT WITHOUT HAVING IT*

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances a catalogue of partial objects (objet petit a) as pre-symbolic, non-shareable objects whose entry into the field of exchange signals anxiety, while simultaneously arguing that the partial object's synchronic function in transference has been systematically neglected — a neglect that explains Freud's limit at castration and the post-analytic failures in sexual function. Topological surfaces (cross-cap, Möbius strip) are then deployed to distinguish the specular (imaginary) object from objet petit a.

     the Rat Man's famous nocturnal conduct when, having obtained by himself an erection in the looking-glass, he goes to open the hallway door to the imagined phantom of his dead father, in order to present, to the eyes of this spectre, the state of his member.

125. #125

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that anxiety is "not without object" — its object being the objet petit a in its primordial form as a "yieldable object" (cession) — and uses this to ground the specific structure of obsessional desire: the a precedes and substitutes for the subject, inaugurating a dialectic in which all forms of the a (breast, gaze, voice, faeces) share the structural characteristic of potential cession.

     the constitution of desire in the obsessional and its relation to anxiety… the a can subsequently function in a dialectic of desire that is the specific dialectic of the obsessional

126. #126

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.86

     BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not without object but has a distinct object structure: it is the cut that precedes and grounds signification, and as "that which deceives not," it is the cause of doubt rather than doubt itself—the only phenomenon that escapes the signifier's constitutive capacity for deception. This leads to the claim that action borrows its certainty from anxiety by transferring it, and that jouissance-on-command (as in Ecclesiastes/circumcision) marks the originary site of anxiety.

     Just because anxiety's link to doubt, to hesitation, to the obsessional's so-called ambivalent game, may strike you as clinically tangible, this doesn't mean that they are the same thing. Anxiety is not doubt, anxiety is the cause of doubt.

127. #127

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.121

     BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the *passage à l'acte* is constituted by the subject's absolute identification with *objet a* — her reduction to and ejection from the scene as that object — and that this structural logic, rather than tactlessness or countertransference, explains why Freud himself enacts a *dropping* (passage à l'acte in reverse) when he terminates the treatment of the young homosexual woman. The topology of *a* in the mirror of the Other is shown to illuminate both hypnosis and obsessional doubt as different modalities of the object's structural invisibility to the subject.

     The other reference is the obsessional's doubt... what does this radical doubt bear on... The obsessional's treatment is always a veritable honeymoon between analyst and patient

128. #128

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.146

     **x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety points to a radical, irreducible lack that cannot be symbolized or compensated by the signifier; using topological figures (torus, cross-cap, Möbius strip) he demonstrates that this structural fault—prior to and constitutive of the signifier itself—cannot be filled by negation, cancellation, or symbolization, distinguishing it categorically from privation and absence.

     this is what the obsessional forces himself to do and wears himself out doing. Cancelling-out and denegation target, therefore, this point of lack, but they don't for all that get there.

129. #129

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.304

     **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP** > what the reproducer has understood what the explainer had understood

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Piaget's tap experiment to critique psychology's blindness to the causal dimension of the object as structured by desire and the phallic relation, then articulates five levels of the constitution of objet petit a in the S/A relation—oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and the desire of the Other—deploying this schema to reframe obsessional neurosis as structured around demand's cover over the desire of the Other, with anxiety as the irreducible kernel.

     the obsessional grasps from this is always the desire in the Other... To cover over the desire of the Other, the obsessional has one path, and that is his recourse to demand.

130. #130

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.329

     **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the anal object (objet a) functions as the *cause* of desire rather than its goal, and that inhibition is the structural locus where desire operates; this grounds a theory of the obsessional's recursive desire as a defence against genital/castration anxiety, whereby the excremental *a* acts as a "stopper" substituting for the impossible phallic object.

     the obsessional has the most exemplary value for us. We're forever putting our finger on the characteristic... that in him desires are always evinced in a dimension that just now I went so far as to call the function of defence.

131. #131

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues for a "circular constitution" of objet petit a across all libidinal stages—against Abraham's linear-developmental model—grounding the cause-function of desire structurally in the gap between cause and effect, with excrement as the paradigm case that reveals how biological objects only acquire their subjective destiny through the dominance of the signifier.

     the importance of its function, which is always recalled to our attention and especially so, as you know, in the analysis of the obsessional

132. #132

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.317

     **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's impossibilized desire is structurally linked to the fantasy of an Almighty God (ubiquity/omnivoyance), which functions as the Ego Ideal covering over anxiety — such that true atheism, conceived as the dissolution of this fantasy of almightiness, is the analytic task specific to the obsessional structure.

     he's no less of an obsessional for it, a sound obsessional, with desires in the only mode in which they can be constituted in the register of might, namely, impossible desires

133. #133

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.344

     **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and jouissance are structurally disjoint—separated by a central gap—and that the object *a* as the irreducible remainder is the cause of desire, not a brute forced fact; it then uses the inhibition-symptom-anxiety grid at the scopic level to reframe mourning as the labour of restoring the link to the masked object *a*, distinguishing Lacan's account from Freud's while following the same trajectory.

     At the heart of the fourth level, at the central place of the symptom such as it is incarnated specifically at the level of the obsessional, I've already designated the obsessional's fantasy of almightiness.

134. #134

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.340

     **xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes his seminar on anxiety by arguing that anxiety is a signal prior to the cession of object *a*, that the scopic level most fully masks *a* and thus most assures the subject against anxiety, and that birth trauma (understood as intrusion of a radically Other environment rather than separation from the mother) and the oral/anal stages of object constitution reveal how desire is fundamentally structured around the yielding of *a* in relation to the demand of the Other — a structure irreducible to Hegelian dialectics.

     anxiety... staved off, hidden, in what we call the obsessional's ambivalent relationship... it's actually a matter of something else. The object that the subject cannot impede himself from holding back as the asset that gets him noticed is thus merely his ejecta, his evacuations.

135. #135

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.292

     **xx** > **XXI PIAGET'S TAP**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a functions not as the object of desire but as its *cause*, and that this causal function — first legible in the structure of obsessional neurosis — is the primordial "shadow" or metaphor from which the philosophical category of cause derives; grasping the a as cause of desire is what orients the analysis of transference beyond the circle of transference neurosis.

     the obsessional's symptom… an obsession, or a compulsion, articulated or not as a motivation in his inner language *Go do this or that, Go check the door's locked,* or *the tap's turned off.*

136. #136

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.313

     **xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the anal object (excrement as objet petit a) achieves its subjective function not through the mother's demand alone, but through its structural articulation with castration (- φ): excrement symbolizes phallic loss, grounds obsessional ambivalence, and prefigures the function of the object a as territorial/representative trace — yet this still falls short of explaining how the concealment of the object founds desire as such.

     we can't understand anything about the phenomenology of obsession... if we don't grasp in a far more intimate, grounded and regular way than we are used to, excrement's link not only with the (- φ) of the phallus but with the other forms of the a.

137. #137

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     BookX Anxiety > **v** > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that anxiety is constituted by the emergence of lack under the pressure of a question (from the Other), and traces the origin of the signifier itself to a primordial act of deception — laying a falsely false trace — which simultaneously constitutes the subject, the Other, and the structure of cause, showing that the signifier reveals the subject only by effacing his trace.

     In his very particular way of treating the signifier, namely, of casting doubt on it, of giving it a good rub, of effacing it... the obsessional, by a dead-end path... operates precisely in the direction of finding the sign beneath the signifier.

138. #138

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.335

     **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's desire is structurally circular and irreducible — sustained as impossible by circling through oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and vociferous registers without ever closing on itself — and that this topology (figured as a circle on a torus that cannot be contracted to a point) explains the obsessional's relation to symptom, acting-out, passage à l'acte, idealized love, and narcissistic image-maintenance.

     the circle of the obsessional's desire is precisely one of those circles that can never be reduced to a point owing to their topological place on the torus

139. #139

     Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.43

     BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the hiatus between the mirror stage (specular/imaginary) and the signifier (symbolic) is not a temporal discontinuity in his teaching but a structural articulation, where the specular image is always-already dependent on ratification by the big Other; he further stages this through a three-phase cosmology (world → stage → world-laden-by-stage) to distinguish Lévi-Straussian analytic reason from psychoanalytic reason grounded in the primacy of the signifier over any homogeneous materialism.

     especially in the experience of the obsessional neurotic in whom Freud himself noticed a long time ago the extent to which these cosmic worlds could co-exist in a fashion which apparently doesn't raise the least objection

140. #140

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive, in its turning inside-out through the erogenous zone, always seeks something that responds in the Other; and he prepares to introduce the lamella-myth (via Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium) to articulate the drive's 'false organ' as the only graspable pole in the domain of sexuality.

     It is quite wrong simply to identify the celebrated scybala with the function given it in the metabolism of obsessional neurosis.

141. #141

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the primal scene is constitutively traumatic—not grounded in libidinal empathy or instinctual maturation but in a 'factitious fact' structured by the tuche (the encounter with the Real)—and that the split in the subject persists as the deeper division between the dream-image and the invocatory/scopic solicitation of the gaze and voice.

     either too much pleasure in it—at least, this is how at first we conceived the traumatizing causality of the obsessional neurotic

142. #142

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Interpretation in psychoanalysis is not arbitrary meaning-making but a precise signifying operation that reverses the signifier/signified relation to isolate a kernel of non-sense — irreducible, non-meaningful signifying elements — which is what enables the advent of the subject.

     when he proposes, on the subject of his obsessional neurotic patient, the so-called Poordjeli formula, which links the two syllables of the word licorne (unicorn)

143. #143

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.85

     THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE EYE AND THE GAZE > OF THE GAZE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the fundamental relation to sexuality in analytic experience is not grounded in libidinal empathy or instinctual maturation, but in a traumatic, factitious fact (the primal scene), and that the subject's split—exemplified by the dream-awakening structure—points toward a more profound split between the representative image and the invocatory/scopic causality (voice and gaze) that underlies it.

     either too much pleasure in it—at least, this is how at first we conceived the traumatizing causality of the obsessional neurotic

144. #144

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the drive's turning-inside-out movement through the erogenous zone is structured as an appeal that seeks a response in the Other, and that the drive's proper "organ" is not the biological organ but an ungraspable, circumventable false organ — the objet petit a — whose nature he will illuminate via a myth drawn from Plato's Symposium.

     It is quite wrong simply to identify the celebrated scybala with the function given it in the metabolism of obsessional neurosis.

145. #145

     Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: Interpretation is not open to arbitrary meaning but operates at the level of the signifier to isolate a kernel of non-sense (kern), reversing the ordinary signifier-to-signified relation and bringing out irreducible, non-meaningful signifying elements that animate the subject's desire.

     when he proposes, on the subject of his obsessional neurotic patient, the so-called Poordjeli formula

146. #146

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analysable symptom is constitutively structured as a reference to Knowledge—always indicating that something is known (or unknown) somewhere—and uses this to distinguish neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, while simultaneously positioning the psychoanalyst as the Subject Supposed to Know who enters the signifying operation rather than standing outside it as a classifier; this framework is then set against Hegel's Absolute Knowing and modern epistemology to articulate that knowledge is itself a signifying articulation contingent on its moment of constitution.

     remember in the Ratman what happens in the desperate attempts to slim which the Ratman devotes himself to in function of what? … it is in order not to be dick that he wants to slim.

147. #147

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.163

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a theoretical figure, Lacan argues that silence is not the ground of the scream but is caused by it—paralleling the structure of the big Other as a holed, divided surface—and uses this to articulate how the o-object emerges as a remainder/residue in the operation of demand, structuring fantasy, desire, and transference around an irreducible cut.

     especially for example in the case of obsessional neurosis for the author and practitioner whom I am indicating

148. #148

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the clinical structures of neurosis (hysteria and obsession) through the differential relation each takes to the demand of the Other, showing how the o-object (objet petit a) anchors subjective positions differently in each structure, and concludes that the end of analysis is the signifier of the barred Other — the Other's acknowledgment that it is nothing.

     The obsessional like the neurotic is in the same situation. He operates differently with the demand of the Other. He put himself in his place and he offers him the spectacle... of a challenge

149. #149

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's *Sophist* through the lens of non-being, falsity, and the simulacrum (*fantasma*), Lacan argues that the subject is constituted as a gap (*écart*) rather than as a knowing reference—and that this gap-structure makes the analyst homologous to the Sophist, just as the Subject Supposed to Know is revealed to be a phantasy.

     He is the obsessional soul who haunts every locus of analysis

150. #150

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.208

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand), Lacan articulates the drive's circuit as a loop around a gap in the body, where "pure difference" (exquisite/acid fringe of sweetness) functions as the irreducible kernel of desire; the ejaculatory formula Poord'jeli is analysed as a vocal signifier that mimes and masters this circuit, connecting the drive's reversal to the sacred incantatory dimension of the Voice.

     But it is also, in the obsessional style, a game of mastery. We must evoke here the dream of the sickle to say a little bit more about the voice, the scream and the call.

151. #151

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the analysis of Philip's proper name and fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) to articulate the interweaving of transference, the unconscious, drive, repetition, and the incestuous encounter as the conditions under which a desiring subject emerges from the analytic situation—turning the phonematic transcription of the fantasy into a site where metaphor, metonymy, castration, and the analyst's desire converge.

     Philip might have said, in a formula not without ambiguity which is an obsessional one.

152. #152

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.308

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real is constituted through the impossible — not as a condition of possibility (the Kantian-psychological error) but as the remainder produced when the possible is negated — and links this structure to the triad of subject, knowledge, and sex via the topology of the Möbius strip and the concept of Entzweiung, grounding the analytic relationship to the symptom in this splitting.

     the symptom, even if it is apparently the one that is most characterised for our habits as clinicians, that of the obsessional for example, we have only too much experience that it is only completed...in a certain relationship to the other

153. #153

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.202

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage performs two theoretical moves: first, it shows how the proper name functions as a signifier that splits the subject between objectification ("I am so-and-so") and self-identity ("I am me"), and second, through a clinical case and Leclaire's contribution, it argues that the phonematic decomposition of proper names enacts the primary mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, while the signifier itself is defined as a pure connotation of antinomy constitutive of the subject — with objet petit a precisely as what escapes this antinomy.

     a rather serious case, in the style of the Ratman but more severe. A very intelligent and open subject who was obsessed at the beginning by the idea that he had for his wife an attraction of an incestuous character

154. #154

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

     Theoretical move: This seminar discussion, centered on Leclaire's case presentation, works through the theoretical status of the fundamental fantasy (Urphantasie) and its relation to signifier, myth, and body, while also elaborating the distinction between first name and family name as indexing the tension between the Imaginary and Symbolic registers of identification, and closing with a reading that connects transference, the Name-of-the-Father, obsessional structure, and anxiety.

     But precisely Philip is an obsessional. And the desire of his mother is precisely what creates a question for him. That is the reason why Philip has the greatest doubts about himself and about his identity.

155. #155

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     **Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that nomination is not arbitrary convention but a memorial act carrying topological structure, and uses the proper name (via Leclaire's 'poord"jeli') as a paradigm for the suture function of the signifier—showing how the obsessional's clinical specificity is marked by an 'exquisite difference' caught in a suture, while Topology (Möbius strip/Klein bottle) models the torsion inherent in both language and living bodies.

     it is here that there is specified the obsessional trait: here is the new element which can be added to what is called, properly speaking, the clinic

156. #156

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.163

     **Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Using Munch's *The Scream* as a topological illustration, Lacan argues that silence is not mere absence of speech but the structural correlate of the voice-as-object (objet petit a), such that the scream *causes* silence rather than silence grounding the scream; this models the Möbius/Klein bottle topology of demand, from whose cut the objet petit a falls as remainder—the origin of desire, fantasy, and transference.

     especially for example in the case of obsessional neurosis for the author and practitioner whom I am indicating

157. #157

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.314

     **Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965.** > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structure of neurosis by showing how desire is constituted with respect to the demand of the Other, distinguishing hysteria (desire maintained as unsatisfied, castration instrumentalised) from obsessional neurosis (desire rendered impossible, phallus safeguarded via oblativity), while warning that interpreting the o-object under its faecal species as the truth of the obsessional is a clinical trap that merely satisfies the neurotic's demand — and concluding that the end of analysis is the signifier of a barred Other whose knowledge is nothing.

     The obsessional like the neurotic is in the same situation. He put himself in his place and he offers him the spectacle, the spectacle of a challenge by showing him that the desire that this demand provokes in him is impossible.

158. #158

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     **Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that nomination is not arbitrary but a memorial act tied to the function of the signifier, and uses the topology of the Möbius strip / Klein bottle to model how proper names and sutures operate differently across clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion), with the obsessional's relation to the 'exquisite difference' as the paradigm case.

     here is the new element which can be added to what is called, properly speaking, the clinic... this elective point which designates in the obsessional something which remains caught in the suture which is properly speaking to be opened up

159. #159

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.179

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a multi-voice clinical-theoretical discussion of Leclaire's case presentation, turning on the distinction between fantasy and signifier, the differential status of first name versus family name for subjectivity/singularity, the question of the empty unconscious, the body's encounter with the signifier, and the role of transference and the Name-of-the-Father in an obsessional patient's structure.

     Philip is an obsessional. And the desire of his mother is precisely what creates a question for him.

160. #160

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.189

     **Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) is legible as the intersection of the proper name, the unconscious signifying chain, transference, and the drive—showing that the analytic encounter is constitutively structured as an "incestuous adventure" in which the analyst's desire and the subject's becoming are articulated through phonematic and metonymic condensation, culminating in the subject's constitution as desiring through the analyst's name.

     Philip might have said, in a formula not without ambiguity which is an obsessional one.

161. #161

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.206

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the clinical case of Philip (Leclaire's analysand) to theorise how the circuit of sense—anchored by pure difference, the gap of the body, and the dehiscence of the other body—produces desire, the drive, and the object voice, culminating in the Shemah prayer as a limit-case where the signifier, jouissance, and the sacred converge around an invocatory formula.

     Philip, in his neurosis, did not understand it that way, and if I already said how he strove to mime the signifier by the quasi-ritual gesture of the hands united in a cup... the jaculatory formula poord'jeli, seemed destined to master, while fixating it in death, the circuit of desire.

162. #162

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.232

     **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symptom is constitutively structured around a reference to knowledge — not merely as a sign of some organic state but as a signifier that indicates "somewhere it is known" — and uses this to differentiate psychosis, neurosis, and perversion by their distinct relations to knowledge/non-knowledge, while positioning the psychoanalyst as "subject supposed to know" who enters the signifying operation rather than merely classifying from outside.

     remember in the Ratman what happens in the desperate attempts to slim which the Ratman devotes himself to in function of what? In function of the fact that at the same time there is among his beloved's acquaintances someone called Dick

163. #163

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.204

     **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the proper name functions as a signifier that simultaneously marks, objectivises, and alienates the subject, while Leclaire's contribution extends this by proposing that the signifier is constitutively an antinomy—a pure connotation of opposition—whose bodily materialisation (the cupped hands gesture) reveals obsessional mastery as an attempt to hold together the irreducible split that is constitutive of the subject, with Objet petit a defined as precisely that which escapes this signifying antinomy.

     a constant concern about a certain mastery is a common trait in obsessional neurotics. That Philip enters this category is, I think, a fact that has escaped no one. It is this passion for a certain mastery that, to begin with, I would like to question.

164. #164

     Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     **Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965**

     Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Sophist through the problem of non-being, falsity, and the simulacrum (fantasma), Lacan argues that the gap (écart) constitutive of the simulacrum is also constitutive of the subject, and that the Sophist—precisely as the one who lacks a sure reference and operates through this gap—figures the analyst himself, who likewise occupies a place of non-knowledge in relation to the analysand.

     He is the obsessional soul who haunts every locus of analysis

165. #165

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory and its reduction of analytic theory to frustration and demand, arguing that the analyst's proper position is to demand nothing, and that what the analyst gives is the objet petit a — specifically, through the anal object as the paradigm of demand, castration, and the gift, Lacan exposes the scatological underside of the phallic dialectic in obsessional neurosis and the concept of oblativity.

     if you read attentively everything that has been said about this phallic dialectic, especially in the obsessional, and about the touching and the not touching, and of the precautions and of the approaches, all of that smells of shit.

166. #166

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic theory, grounded in topology (specifically the torus and Möbius strip), is structurally distinct from myth and demonstrates its scientific character precisely through this topological self-demonstration; simultaneously, the modern neurotic is constituted as the "representative of truth" at the historical juncture where science, by suturing the subject's gaps, paradoxically excludes the very truth that the neurotic embodies in speech and language.

     we are not going to go wandering about asking what obsessionels were in the time of the Stoics

167. #167

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     Monsieur Safouan

     Theoretical move: Safouan's case presentation of an obsessional's 'duplication of the feminine object' is used to argue that the split between a narcissistic/desired beloved and an anaclitic/demanding 'perverse' partner is structurally grounded in the imaginary phallus (-phi): the beloved is not identified to the phallus but to minus-phi, the guarantee of the Other's castration, while the subject himself is subtilised into (-phi), such that symbolic castration (as the regularisation of the phallic position) must be distinguished from imaginary castration via yet-unformulated distinctions around negation.

     The subject of this paper, is the duplication of the feminine object in the love life of the obsessional.

168. #168

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.43

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage, presented by André Green as a commentary on Lacan's o-object, argues that the psychoanalytic subject is constituted through the effacing of the trace—a logic linking the Death Drive, the Name of the Father, castration, and metonymy—and that this logic of effacement (cutting/suturing) is what structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) fails to capture, reducing symbolic difference to mere homology rather than recognizing the barred lack as the cause of desire.

     The one and the other are valorised in so far as they allow the subject to feel better, says Freud, by having thus escaped desire...the religions of humanity represent obsessional systems, just as the different philosophies represent paranoiac systems.

169. #169

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.42

     IV - IDENTITY AND NON-IDENTITYTO ONESELF: THE DEATH DRIVE

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Death Drive operates through the effacement of the trace—a logic linking the signifier's self-cancellation to castration, paternity, and the cause of desire—and that this logic (not structuralist homology) is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, while also grounding a structural technique built on the non-identity of the signifier to itself.

     Freud concludes to the link between the Vater Arsch, the father's arse, and the patriarch, this subject possessing of course a quite filial veneration for the author of his days, like any obsessional.

170. #170

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283

     there are normal perverts,

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's reduction of analytic theory to frustration and demand, arguing that the analyst's position is precisely to demand nothing, and that the privileged o-object in the field of the Other's demand is anal—linking oblativity, the phallic fantasy in obsessional neurosis, and the anal phase's logic of the bar (gift/retention) to show that 'giving what one has' is always giving shit, whereas genuine love is to give what one does not have.

     the phallic phantasy especially in obsessional neurosis… if you read attentively everything that has been said about this phallic dialectic, especially in the obsessional, and about the touching and the not touching… all of that smells of shit

171. #171

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.73

     **Seminar 6: Wednesday 12 January 1966**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic theory, grounded in topology (the torus, then the Möbius strip), distinguishes itself from myth by demonstrating its scientific structure; simultaneously, the modern neurotic—as the subject of science—is constituted as the one in whom truth speaks, making psychoanalytic praxis the structural complement (though not of a homogeneous order) of the neurotic symptom.

     we are not going to go wandering about asking what obsessionels were in the time of the Stoics

172. #172

     Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     Monsieur Safouan

     Theoretical move: Safouan uses the case of the obsessional's duplicated love-object to argue that the splitting between the narcissistic (desired) and anaclitic (demanded) object is structured by the function of (-phi): the more the virtual body-image i(o") tends to coincide with the imaginary phallus, the more the subject is "subtilised" into (-phi), so that the beloved's identification with the phallus is not an act the subject performs but an operation in which he is already caught — resolving into the question of how symbolic castration (via Oedipal negation) regularises the phallic position.

     The subject of this paper, is the duplication of the feminine object in the love life of the obsessional.

173. #173

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.243

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 22: Wednesday June 7 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act installs the subject precisely at the disjunction between body and jouissance: the body of the woman becomes the metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinguished from the penis) functions as the symbol of a withdrawn jouissance that underlies social exchange — yet this structural arrangement leaves feminine jouissance unresolved and adrift, mirroring the slave's displaced jouissance in the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

     The fact of having dialogued with Socrates never prevented anyone from having obsessions that tickle, greatly upset, his to phronein!

174. #174

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the neurotic's relation to fantasy from the perverse by situating their respective jouissance-arrangements in topological-spatial figures (toilet, bedroom, boudoir, parlour), and closes by announcing that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is foreclosed — a structural definition of the analytic act that will anchor the following year's seminar.

     Obsession, in the bog.

175. #175

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.275

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire structurally emerges from the gap between demand and need within language, that unconscious desire is constituted as "desire-not" (désirpas) through a broken link in the discourse of the Other, and that fantasy functions not as content within the unconscious discourse but as an axiom — a "truth-meaning" — that anchors the transformation-rules of neurotic desire.

     for obsession, impossible desire

176. #176

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.253

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 23: Wednesday 14 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy has a grammatically closed structure ("a child is being beaten") that is the correlative of the alienation-choice "I am not thinking," and that jouissance in perversion must be distinguished from the neurotic fantasy's role as a measure of comprehension/desire — with perversion defined through the impasse of the sexual act rather than through the fantasy structure itself.

     A hysterical structure is not the same as a phobic structure! No closer to one another than to the obsessional structure, whose symptom represents a structure.

177. #177

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.276

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the function of fantasy in neurosis from its function in perversion by mapping clinical structures onto spatial metaphors (bedroom, toilet, boudoir, wardrobe, parlour, bog, analyst's office), culminating in the claim that the analyst's office is the site where the sexual act is presented as foreclosure (Verwerfung), thereby anticipating the seminar on the psychoanalytic act.

     Obsession, in the bog.

178. #178

     Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.275

     the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 24: Wednesday 21 June 1967**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is structurally constituted by its displacement from demand through language, making it inherently the desire of the Other and necessarily unsatisfied; fantasy is reframed not as a content to be interpreted but as a truth-meaning axiom within the neurotic's unconscious discourse, supplying for the lack of desire.

     for obsession, impossible desire

179. #179

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the events of May 1968 and the institutional crisis of his École as the occasion to argue that the psychoanalytic act is constitutively determined by jouissance while simultaneously requiring protection from it, and to formulate the key lemma that "there is no transference of transference" — a claim whose misreading by contemporaries demonstrates both the necessity of his strategic unreadability and the gap between the act and its subsequent theoretical appropriation.

     the case from which there remains to be found everything that we know about obsessional neurosis. Freud had been 'taken in like a tyro (rat)'

180. #180

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.140

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is uniquely defined by the irreducibility of the language-effect as its object and by the constitutive division of the subject that no knowledge can exhaust — thereby distinguishing it from psychotherapy and from Hegelian absolute knowing — and grounds this in the structural difference between hysteria and obsession as two modes of the subject's relation to the repressed signifier.

     it is quite sincerely at the level of the structure described as obsessional that the subject produces the signifier that is at stake, in so far as it is his truth, but provides it with the fundamental Verneinung

181. #181

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.205

     **Annex 3**

     Theoretical move: Lacan defends the strategic obscurity of his texts as a protection against ideological capture, while articulating that the psychoanalytic act is determined by its relation to jouissance (from which it must simultaneously protect itself), and advancing the lemma that "there is no transference of transference" as a key formula distinguishing the psychoanalytic act from ordinary clinical transference.

     the case from which there remains to be found everything that we know about obsessional neurosis. Freud had been 'taken in like a tyro (rat)'. This in effect was what was enough to read of the Ratman

182. #182

     Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.140

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis is defined not by a criterion external to it but by the psychoanalyst as instrument, and that the psychoanalytic act brings the subject to an awareness of its constitutive, irreducible division as a language-effect — a division that definitively refutes the Hegelian project of exhaustive self-knowledge (gnothi seauton / pour-soi) and is exemplified in the contrasting logical structures of hysteria and obsession.

     it is quite sincerely at the level of the structure described as obsessional that the subject produces the signifier that is at stake, in so far as it is his truth, but provides it with the fundamental Verneinung.

183. #183

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.384

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

     Theoretical move: The hysteric is structurally constituted as a psychoanalysand because she already embodies the 'subject supposed to know' in her flesh, making the cut that separates this supposition from the unconscious structure (master/woman) the pivotal operation of analytic treatment; in parallel, the obsessional's relation to the master reveals that his desire is constitutively impossible.

     the obsessional is the one who, from the master, only identifies this thing which is the real, that his desire is impossible.

184. #184

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.343

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that neurosis (hysteria and obsession) stages the fundamental aporia between knowledge and enjoyment, and that the neurotic's testimony—not therapeutic benefit—is what gives psychoanalysis its historical and theoretical stakes, particularly within capitalism's structuring of enjoyment.

     the obsessional is the one who refuses to take himself as master because, with respect to what is at stake - the truth of knowledge - what is important for him, is the relationship of this knowledge to enjoyment

185. #185

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.311

     Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions phobia not as a discrete clinical entity but as a structural "turntable" that illuminates the relations between hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and perversion, and from which the disjunction between knowledge and power can be re-examined.

     the two great orders of neurosis, hysteria and obsessional neurosis

186. #186

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.336

     Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is structurally excluded from the symbolic system of knowledge, yet is thereby realised as the Real; this exclusion—figured through the phallic signifier—organises all clinical structures (neurosis/psychosis), and the triad of enjoyment, the Other as locus of knowledge, and the objet petit a provides the proper framework for understanding both infantile biography and the analytic encounter.

     for the obsessional neurotic it is much more so than for the others... the signifier of O as completed is implicit

187. #187

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.363

     Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychoanalytic act is distinguished from masochistic practice by a double sense of 'faire le maître': the analysand produces/makes the analyst through the act, while the analyst merely plays/pretends at mastery—yet the analyst's genuine function is to bring the full weight of the objet petit a into play, not to master the operation. This distinction grounds a further claim that for the neurotic, knowledge is the enjoyment of the subject supposed to know, which is precisely why the neurotic cannot sublimate.

     in connection with the obsessional, we will say that the psychoanalyst plays/makes the master (fait le maitre) in the two senses of the word faire.

188. #188

     Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.377

     Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the differential structures of hysteria and obsessional neurosis by mapping each onto a foundational "model" (woman/master) and showing how each neurotic subject installs a Subject Supposed to Know in place of that model's constitutive ignorance, while grounding the whole analysis in the set-theoretic logic of the Other and the o-object.

     nothing of the obsessional can be conceived of except by referring to a structure in which, for the master, in so far as he functions as 1, a signifier that only subsists by being represented for a second 1 that is in the Other.

189. #189

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.174

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

     Theoretical move: Lacan drives a wedge between the Oedipus myth (dictated by the hysteric's dissatisfaction, privileging law over enjoyment) and *Totem and Taboo* (an obsessional-neurotic construction that places enjoyment at the origin, then law), arguing that the psychoanalytic discourse must move beyond mythic interpretation toward a more rigorous combinatorial of desire's causation.

     It is to the testimony that the obessional contributes about his structure, to the aspect of the sexual relationship that proves to be impossible to formulate in discourse, that we owe the myth of Freud.

190. #190

     Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex and the Name-of-the-Father function as logical zero-points (analogous to Peano's axiom of zero) that ground the series of natural numbers, and that the "murder of the Father" is the hysterical substitute for rejected castration; he then pivots to show that the superego — originating from the mythical primordial father of *Totem and Taboo* — issues the paradoxical impossible command "Enjoy!", which is the hidden motor of moral conscience.

     the obsessional, how the obsessional slips away. He slips away simply by not existing. It is this something to which... the obsessional in so far as, he is in the debt of not existing

191. #191

     Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.44

     The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Klein bottle topology and a playful six-verse poem to demonstrate that the relation between man and woman passes through love, then substitutes the world for the sexual partner, and terminates at a wall that is not a cut but the locus of castration — the point where truth and knowledge are held apart. This topological demonstration grounds the claim that the discourse of capitalism forecloses castration, and that it is only the analytic discourse (emerging from logic, the four discourses, and language) that re-introduces castration as the hinge between truth and knowledge.

     it circulates! It makes common cause, the flux, the influx and everything that is added on to it when one is obsessional, for example oblativity, this sensational invention of the obsessional.

192. #192

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the symbolic order of marriage is constitutively androcentric (drawing on Lévi-Strauss), positioning the woman as an object of exchange rather than a subject, which generates an irreducible structural conflict between the symbolic pact (fidelity directed toward the universal) and the imaginary vicissitudes of libidinal relations; the myth of Amphitryon reveals that only a triangular structure involving a transcendent "god" (Name of the Father) can sustain the conjugal bond above imaginary degradation.

     THE SPLITTINGS [DEDOUBLEMENTS] OF THE OBSESSIONAL

193. #193

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.225

     B EYOND THE IMA GINARY , THE SYMBOLIC , OR FROM TH E LITTLE TO TH E BIG OTH ER > XVII

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's reality is constituted not by the brute real but by the emergence of the symbolic order, which structures even somatic reactions, obsessional alienation, and intersubjective experience — the real only becomes effective for the subject at the junction where symbolic "tables of presence" organise it.

     The obsessional's basic story is that he is entirely alienated in a master whose death he awaits, without knowing that he is already dead, in such a way that he can't make a move.

194. #194

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.250

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the schema of the "wall of language" separating the subject (S) from the true big Other (A), distinguishing the imaginary plane of ego/specular other (a/a') from the symbolic plane, and arguing that the Other's capacity to lie—not merely to answer—constitutes the decisive proof of authentic intersubjectivity; this schema also serves as a critique of ego-psychology's imaginary reduction of analytic aims.

     one can give an entirely rigorous demonstration of the fact that his way of conceiving of the cure of obsessional neurosis will have no other result than that of making the subject paranoid.

195. #195

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.278

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Amphitryon (Sosie/double) and a critique of Fairbairn's clinical case to argue that analysis progresses not through ego-splitting observation but through speech addressed to the absolute Other, and that misrecognition of the imaginary register—treating imaginary drives as real—produces iatrogenic paranoia rather than cure.

     What the obsessional hangs on to is always other, for if he truly recognised it, he would be cured.

196. #196

     Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.277

     XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Sosiel

     Theoretical move: Using the Amphitryon/Sosie myth as a clinical allegory, Lacan argues that the ego is constitutively alienated—always encountering its own reflected image rather than attaining desire or the Other—and that this imaginary capture is at its most binding in obsessional neurosis, where ego-reinforcement (as prescribed by ego psychology) only deepens the subject's dispossession.

     The fatal influence of the ego is brought to a maximum in him... If the obsessional mortifies himself, it is because more than any other neurotic, he binds himself to his ego, which bears within itself dispossession and imaginary death.

197. #197

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 6: Tuesday 18 February 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes ek-sistence as the Real dimension of the Borromean Knot, uses this to articulate the triadic RSI structure as an "infernal trinity," and pivots to redefine the symptom—against both Hegelian repetition (via Kierkegaard) and Marxian social analysis—as the particular way each speaking being (parlêtre) enjoys their unconscious.

     the symptom of the obsessional is not the symptom of the hysteric

198. #198

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.100

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 6: Tuesday 18 February 1975**

     Theoretical move: Lacan theorizes that for the obsessional, death is a 'parapraxis' (failed act), linking the structure of obsession to the impossibility of grasping death as a genuine act; simultaneously, he pivots to the problem of feminine ek-sistence, arguing that women exist not under a universal 'The' but as numerable ones — a move that articulates the Not-all against any totalizing universal.

     For the obsessional, death is a parapraxis (*un acte manqué*). It is not so stupid, because death is only approachable by an act.

199. #199

     Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.32

     **Introduction** > **Seminar 2: Tuesday 17 December 1974**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot structures the three registers (R.S.I.) such that phallic enjoyment, ek-sistence, and the hole are each topologically grounded: phallic enjoyment is produced through the knotting of the Symbolic ring; the Real is made by jouissance that ek-sists; and the sexual non-relationship is inscribed in language rather than filled by it, with anxiety marking the limit of enjoyment of the other body.

     he consecrates it as the ideal neurosis. This indeed is what he says moreover in attaching it to obsessional neurosis which is the ideal neurosis

200. #200

     Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.12

     Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean Knot must be understood as a tetradic (four-ring) structure in which the sinthome serves as the fourth element linking the otherwise separate Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real; the Oedipus complex is recast as a symptom/sinthome, and the father's name is itself a sinthome, with Joyce's art exemplifying how artifice can work upon and through the symptom via equivocation in the signifier.

     The obsessional, I said somewhere, I was reminded of it recently, is something of the order of a frog who wants to make himself as big as an ox. It is particularly difficult, as we know, to tear away the obsessional from this grip of the look.

201. #201

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.126

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977** > **Seminar 12: 17 May 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the Unconscious is not amenable to awakening or metalanguage, that psychoanalysis functions through a poetic/hole-effect rather than suggestion, and proposes the invention of a new, sense-free signifier as the possible opening onto the Real — while translating 'Unbewusst' as 'une-bévue' as a performative demonstration of this metatongue operation.

     Obsessional neurosis for example, is the principle of conscience.

202. #202

     Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.114

     **Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 19 April 1977**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that lalangue—the mother tongue as obscene, pre-structural substrate—is what the analytic session truly circulates around (via the analysand's kinship discourse), and that the symptom (sinthome), not truth, is what the analyst actually reads; "varité" (a portmanteau of truth and variety) names the only accessible approximation of truth, rendering psychoanalysis structurally an "autism à deux" redeemed only by lalangue's communal character.

     neurotic, a sexual obsessional as has been said. It is hard to see why an obsession with sexuality would not be as valid as any other

203. #203

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.262

     **XX**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is fundamentally structured by the subject's exteriority to the signifier — where the neurotic 'inhabits language,' the psychotic is 'inhabited by language' — and that the onset of psychosis is triggered at the moment of being called upon to 'speak out' one's own speech, a failing rooted in the prior foreclosure of the primordial signifier (Verwerfung).

     the obsessional's response, negation, neither . . . nor . . . , neither male nor female. This negation comes about against a background of mortal experience and of hiding his being from the question

204. #204

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.192

     **XII** > **XIII** > **The hysteric's question (II):** *What is a woman?*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that hysteria (in both men and women) revolves around the question of procreation—a question generated by the fact that the Symbolic cannot account for individual existence, birth, or death—and grounds this in a reading of Freud's early letters showing that repression originates in the failure of signifying inscriptions to carry over across developmental stages.

     the question of death is another mode of the neurotic creation of the question - its obsessional mode.

205. #205

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.105

     **VII** > **1**

     Theoretical move: By moving from the clinical case of Dora's hysteria through a theory of narcissism to ethological examples (the stickleback), Lacan argues that the Mirror Stage constitutes the ego as an alienating, foreign image that structurally inscribes an aggressive tension ("either me or the other") into all imaginary relations—and that this same logic differentiates hysteria from psychosis via the criterion of language disturbance rather than persecution-like content.

     I was brought in, in short, to declare that she was psychotic and not, as had at first appeared, an obsessional neurotic.

206. #206

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.305

     **XXIII** > **The highway and the signifier "being a father"**

     Theoretical move: The highway-as-signifier analogy is deployed to show that the signifier does not merely connect points but *creates* and polarizes a field of meanings; this is then applied to Schreber's psychosis by arguing that the foreclosed signifier 'being a father' leaves only a network of minor paths (imaginary/partial routes), generating hallucinatory substitute signifiers in place of the absent structuring highway.

     paternity and death are two signifiers that Freud links in relation to obsessionals.

207. #207

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.148

     **X** > **On the signifier in the real and the bellowing-miracle**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis is distinguished from neurosis not by degree of ego pathology but by the structure of testimony to the unconscious (open vs. closed), and that psychoanalysis — unlike ego psychology or the discourse of freedom — operates at the level of discourse's effect on the subject rather than at the level of rational leverage, making psychotics "martyrs of the unconscious" and rendering their condition therapeutically irreducible.

     obsessional neurosis, for instance, doesn't simply consist of symptoms but is also a structure.

208. #208

     Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.169

     **X** > **XI** > **1**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the primordial signifier (Wahrnehmungszeichen) is the condition of possibility for memory, historicization, and neurosis, while its foreclosure (Verwerfung) constitutes the distinctive mechanism of psychosis—a "hole in the symbolic" rather than a reworking of reality—thereby reframing Freud's Verneinung and the neurosis/psychosis distinction in strictly signifier-based terms.

     the dynamics of the three great neuropsychoses that he applies himself to - hysteria, obsessional neurosis, paranoia

209. #209

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.419

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the scholarly correction of Freud's mistranslation (kite vs. vulture) in the Leonardo essay not to discredit Freud but to isolate what is genuinely original in that text: the introduction of the phallic mother as the child's imaginary relation to the phallus-as-lack, which also marks the inaugural structuring of the imaginary register and the first appearance of narcissism in Freud's work.

     Freud will also turn whatever this paradoxical aspect is in Leonardo's thirst for knowledge, in his cupido sciendi... into an obsessional trait, because he calls it a Grübelzwang, a compulsive brooding.

210. #210

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.388

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his trajectory from intersubjective schema (subject/Other/little other) toward discourse and object-as-signifier, then formalises the Oedipus complex and castration complex as interlocking symbolic structures, arguing that the Name-of-the-Father introduces a radical symbolic dimension into the child-mother relation, and that the phobic object functions as a metaphor standing in for this symbolic gap.

     a deepening or an extension into other neuroses, most notably hysteria and obsessional neurosis

211. #211

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.78

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the object-relations school (Marty, Fain, Bouvet) for reducing the analytic situation to a real dyadic relationship aimed at collapsing imaginary distance, thereby foreclosing the symbolic dimension of speech and the Other — and shows that this technical orientation produces paradoxical perverse reactions, particularly in obsessional cases. Against this, he reaffirms that the symbolic (S-A) and imaginary (a-a') axes must be held in their mutual, crossing functioning, with the paternal function and Oedipus complex as the fourth term that re-situates the preoedipal imaginary triad.

     cases of obsessional neurosis, this way of situating the development of the analytic situation entirely within a pursuit of the reduction of this notorious distance… leads to what may be called paradoxical perverse reactions

212. #212

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.25

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-22-0"></span>THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the object relation cannot be theorized without the phallus as a third-party element disrupting any dual (imaginary) subject-object relation, and that the dominant object-relations practice errs by reducing the analytic situation to an imaginary dyad (identification with the analyst's ego), as exemplified by its mishandling of obsessional neurosis.

     What is an obsessional? All in all, he is an actor playing his part, carrying out a certain number of acts as though he were dead. It's a way of shielding himself from death.

213. #213

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.425

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation is structurally correlated with an inversion of the ego/other relation in the imaginary register, such that the very process of de-subjectification (sublimation) entails a fundamental self-forgetting—illustrated through Leonardo's mirror writing as the symptom of a radical alienation in which the subject addresses himself from the position of his own imaginary other.

     nothing in the elaboration of his work which he was constantly starting over in a truly obsessional way could be structured without there being something to reproduce this relation between the ego and the other

214. #214

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.384

     XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the Little Hans case by arguing that neurosis is a closed question articulated at the level of the subject's existence through the symbolic dimension, and that transference is the structural mechanism by which the analyst—as the locus of the big Other—progressively decrypts the organised discourse of neurosis through dialogue, with the paternal function necessarily doubled into a real father and a higher symbolic/witnessing father (Freud).

     it is more woeful still in obsessional neurosis where it is not only a matter of the subject's relation to his sex but also of his relation to the very fact of existing. What does it mean to exist?

215. #215

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.404

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage identifies the "homosexual transference" in obsessional neurosis as an illusory solution that the obsessional subject constructs around the object, bridging exploit, fantasy, and partial love, while distinguishing Abraham's concept of "partial love of the object" from the later Kleinian notion of the part object.

     the homosexual transference in obsessional neurosis. That's what I call the illusory solution.

216. #216

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.399

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "oblative" (altruistic) resolution of obsessional neurosis is itself an obsessional fantasy, and proceeds to map four cardinal points of obsessional desire—centering on the maintenance of the big Other as the locus of signification—before distinguishing "acting out" from the exploit and from fantasy as a message addressed to the analyst that exposes the subject's impasse with demand, desire, and the castration complex.

     the illusion, the very fantasy that is within reach of the obsessional is ultimately that the Other as such gives his consent to his desire.

217. #217

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.464

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the resolution of obsessional and hysterical neurosis hinges on the subject's correct relationship to the phallus as a signifier—not identifying with it but assuming one's place relative to it—and that failures of analytic technique (reducing this to imaginary phallic identification) produce symptomatic persistence rather than cure, with the Freudian formula 'Wo Es war soll Ich werden' pointing toward the properly symbolic realization of desire.

     If the obsessional is led to undo so many things, it's because they are things that can be formulated. Namely, a demand, as we know. Except it's a demand for death.

218. #218

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.454

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that neurosis is a fully structured linguistic phenomenon—"speech pronounced by the barred subject"—and that the opacity of the unconscious derives specifically from the Other's desire, which sits between the Other as locus of speech and the Other as embodied being; regression is thereby recast not as a temporal return but as the reappearance in discourse of earlier signifying forms linked to demand.

     It's the personality in the sense in which it designates, in behaviour, in relationships with the Other and with others, a certain movement that is always found to be the same, a scansion, a certain way of moving from the other to the Other and moreover to an Other that is always and endlessly being re-found and forming the very variations of obsessional action.

219. #219

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.132

     *UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that love is the fundamental human solution to the structural unsatisfiability of demand—having "an Other of one's own"—and uses this thesis to trace comedy's history from Aristophanic id-irruption through New Comedy's metonymic love-object, culminating in Molière's *The School for Wives* as the paradigm case in which full speech, metonymy, and the comedic treatment of desire are displayed with Euclidean clarity.

     We see him enter right at the start with an obsession about not being cuckolded. That is his principal passion.

220. #220

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.437

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic interpretation must be grounded in a two-circuit schema (symbolic and imaginary) in which the subject's articulation of need passes through the Other, and that this structure requires a "Other of the Other" — a meta-symbolic function — to account for how the subject can symbolize the locus of speech itself; this reframes debates about castration, penis envy, and aggressiveness within a broader topology of desire.

     Last time I began commenting on the case of an obsessional woman treated by one of our colleagues

221. #221

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.389

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional desire is structured by dependence on the Other, and that fantasy must be redefined not as a blind imaginary image but as the imaginary captured in a particular use of signifiers—a scenario ($◇a) in which the subject is implicated—thereby distinguishing the obsessional's relation to desire from the hysteric's identificatory structure.

     the dependence on the Other for access to this desire, which is the mode in which this access is made available to the obsessional

222. #222

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.435

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the resolution of the castration complex does not hinge on having or not having the phallus as an organ, but on the subject's recognition that she/he *is not* the phallus; the Phallus functions as the signifier of desire itself, and the case of the obsessional woman illustrates how misrecognizing this—treating the phallus as an object to be possessed rather than a signifier of desire—leads to analytic impasse.

     her relations with him are marked by the sign of obsessional destruction. According to the essential form of obsessional economy, this desire for destruction turns back against her.

223. #223

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.381

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus functions as the privileged signifier that designates the overall effects of the signifier on the signified, and that desire—structured as the desire of the Other—is the key axis around which both hysterical and obsessional clinical structures are organized, with the Splitting of the Subject (Spaltung) as the structural condition making the unconscious possible.

     What does the obsessional do in order to consist as a subject? He is like the hysteric, rest assured... The obsessional, too, is orientated towards desire. If it were not a question of desire above all else, there would be no homogeneity in the neuroses.

224. #224

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.383

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan differentiates the hysteric's and obsessional's structural relations to desire: the hysteric locates desire in the Other's desire, while the obsessional's desire is constituted as an absolute condition that necessarily destroys the Other—making the obsessional's search for the object of desire self-defeating, since desire requires the Other's support as its very place.

     the obsessional, insofar as his fundamental movement is directed at desire as such, above all in its constitution as desire, is moved to aim for what I am calling the Other's destruction.

225. #225

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.412

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference and suggestion constitute two distinct but constantly confused lines in analytic practice, and that it is desire — as the field of the divided subject — which resists the collapse of transference into suggestion/demand; neurosis is reframed not as a quantitative deficit of desire but as a structural arrangement that maintains desire's articulation against this collapse.

     in every case it will emerge that he has been preoccupied during the whole of his existence with placing his desire in a strong position and constituting a stronghold for his desire, doing it on the plane of essentially signifying relations.

226. #226

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.373

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bouvet's object-relations account of obsessional neurosis—centred on imaginary phallic incorporation—by insisting the phallus must be understood as a signifier (part object properly so called), and he uses this critique as a springboard to re-articulate the Graph of Desire, showing that desire is constitutively located in a field *beyond* demand, irreducible to the passage of need through the defiles of demand.

     It is through maintaining the part object - maintenance that requires an entire scaffolding, which is precisely what constitutes obsessional neurosis - that the subject is said to avoid lapsing into a permanently threatening psychosis.

227. #227

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.393

     **THE OBSESSIONAL AND HIS DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional desire is structurally maintained through prohibition rather than satisfaction: the obsessional turns the evanescence of desire into a forbidden desire supported by the Other's refusal, while clinically demonstrating that drive-stage 'fixations' are not imaginary regressions but signifying articulations of demand at the level of the unconscious—thereby critiquing developmental object-relations theory in favour of a structural account of desire beyond demand.

     A common fact of experience, and one of the very first facts, concerning the analytic investigation of obsessionals is to observe the place that sadistic fantasies occupy for the obsessional.

228. #228

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.416

     **TRANSFERENCE AND SUGGESTION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that obsessional neurosis requires interpretation at the level of castration-as-symbolic-law rather than suggestive identification with a part-object; mistaking the plane of demand for the plane of fantasy-identification constitutes a fundamental technical error whose visible symptom is the analyst's projecting passive homosexuality onto material (the bidet dream) that actually poses the question of the castration of the Other.

     For the obsessional, although the question is articulated a little differently, it's exactly the same from the point of view of the relation, the topology - and with reason.

229. #229

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.369

     **THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > Freud comments in these terms:

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the difficulty of accessing sexual desire is located in the gap between the Other's absolute subjectivity (as giver/withholder of love) and its necessary objectification as an object of desire; this gap produces dizziness/nausea, theorized via the Phallus as signifier rather than as image or fantasy, which Lacan proposes as the key rectification over existing (Ego Psychology) technique.

     We will come back to the dialectic of being and having in the hysteric, and we will progress further when we see what point this takes us to in the obsessional.

230. #230

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.200

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural failure of the Name-of-the-Father (foreclosure in psychosis, or its effective overruling by the mother in homosexuality) determines the subject's inability to complete the Oedipus complex's third moment; the key theoretical move is to show that homosexuality is not simply an "inverted Oedipus" but results from a precise structural inversion of authority within the parental couple, where the mother lays down the law to the father instead of the reverse.

     it is possible to observe for example an obsessional neurosis type of effect, as we will see on another occasion

231. #231

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.481

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the obsessional's demand for death must be understood as a signifier mediated by the Oedipal horizon rather than reducible to Penisneid or castration, and that the Christian commandment 'love your neighbour as yourself' discloses—when formulated from the locus of the Other—the unconscious circuit in which the subject is the one who hates (demands the death of) itself, converging with Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden'.

     At the level of the subject, the demand for death is mediated by an Oedipal horizon that makes it possible for it to appear on the horizon of speech and not in its immediacy. If it were not thus mediated, we would not have an obsessional, but a psychotic.

232. #232

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.423

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close reading of his schema—distinguishing the line of articulated demand from the upper horizon of the demand for love—to argue that desire is structurally located in the intermediary zone between need and that horizon, always structured by the Other; he then critiques a clinical case where reduction to a dyadic, two-person (homosexual transference) framework systematically misses the symbolic/phallic elements visible in the dream material.

     Last time we got to the point of focusing on some studies of an obsessional neurosis which I have several times invited you to read carefully

233. #233

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.472

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan concludes Seminar V by arguing that the phallus signifier is pluripresent across all neurotic structures, that obsessional neurosis is characterised by a 'demand for death' that structurally destroys the very possibility of demand, and that guilt in neurosis is independent of any reference to the law — reversing the Pauline formula so that 'if God is dead, nothing is permitted.'

     there is a fundamental form that we find on the horizon of every demand by an obsessional subject, and it constitutes precisely the greatest obstacle to his formulating his demand.

234. #234

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.425

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques a clinical practice that reduces the treatment of obsessional neurosis to a two-person relation and ratifies the subject's fantasmatic production at the level of demand rather than desire, showing through detailed case analysis that such indoctrination—centered on the imaginary other and phallic fantasy—produces regression, acting out, and artificial transference effects rather than genuine analytic cure.

     All that you know, moreover, about this subject's relationship to himself, his existence and the world, which is called an obsessional neurosis, is infinitely more complex than a relationship of libidinal attachment to the subject of his own sex

235. #235

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.469

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques a clinical case in which treatment ends not in genuine symbolic resolution but in the imaginary absorption of the phallus—a mechanism already operative in obsessional neurosis—arguing that a "more successful symptom" is not an adequate terminus for analysis, since the symbolic place of the phallus-as-mediator between man and woman has not been worked through.

     drive to its ultimate consequences and facilitate by way of suggestive approbation what was already to be found in the mechanisms of the obsession, namely, the absorption or incorporation of the phallus at the imaginary level

236. #236

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.523

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index chunk from Seminar V, listing page references for key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts without advancing a theoretical argument.

     obsessional neurosis/obsessionals 121-4, 192-3, 364-5 ... obsessional distance 442-4

237. #237

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.518

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, page references, and cross-references for Seminar V concepts; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

     obsessional's circuit 445

238. #238

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.509

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it consists of editorial footnotes, a Freud case citation regarding obsessional neurosis, and an alphabetical index of the seminar — no original theoretical argument is advanced.

     See Sigmund Freud, 'Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis', SE 10: 187. 'If you received a command to take your examination this term at the first possible opportunity, you might manage to obey it. But if you were commanded to cut your throat with a razor, what then?'

239. #239

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.476

     **YOU ARE THE ONE** YOU HATE

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates guilt as structurally located between desire and demand on the Graph of Desire, not merely as a response to prohibition: the prohibited demand kills desire, and this mechanism—visible only from outside the subject's lived position—defines neurotic (especially obsessional) guilt. The demand for death is shown to be an articulated symbolic demand whose reflexive structure makes it equivalent to the death of demand itself, while the polypresence of the phallus-as-signifier (rather than imaginary organ) explains the unity of obsessional phenomenology across sexes.

     the obsessional is condemned to carry out his battle to save his subjective autonomy... at the level of desire that everything that appears at this level, even in a disavowed form, is linked to this aura of guilt.

240. #240

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.449

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the obsessional's circuit of desire from the hysteric's by showing that the obsessional uses the signifying articulation of demand to annul the Other's desire through verbal destruction, yet paradoxically this same destructive signifying act sustains the Other's dimension — a structure illustrated by the French formula 'Tu es celui qui me tues', and contrasted with the illusory analytic 'solution' of imaginary identification.

     The obsessional spends his time destroying the Other's desire... it's about destruction through words and signifiers. The subject finds himself prey to what one calls magical - I don't know why, why not quite simply say 'verbal'? - destruction of the Other

241. #241

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.447

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **THE CIRCUITS OF DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipal structure is grounded in the castration complex as the effect of the signifier on the Other, which introduces a constitutive lack-in-being into the subject; this foundational lack then distributes into distinct clinical structures—symptom, hysteria, and obsession—each defined by a specific relationship to desire and its object.

     The obsessional's relationship to his desire is subject to the fact... that an early role is played therein by what is called the Entbindung, the unbinding of the drives, the isolation of destruction... his own desire decreases, blinks, wavers and disappears the closer he gets to it.

242. #242

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.463

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus achieves its privileged status as master signifier of the unconscious not through anatomical primacy but through its metaphorical passage into the signifying chain via the paternal metaphor; in psychosis, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father prevents this metaphorical effect, leaving the Other's desire unsymbolized and causing the 'it speaks' of the unconscious to erupt in the Real as hallucination, while in obsessional neurosis the Other's desire is actively disavowed (Verneinung) rather than left unsymbolized.

     the obsessional is someone who, in this relationship to the Other's desire, finds himself primordially, originally marked by the defusion of instincts... Undoing the Other's desire is not the same thing as having been unable to grasp the Other's desire.

243. #243

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.513

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing technical terms, proper names, and page references from Lacan's Seminar V, providing no original theoretical argument but mapping the conceptual terrain of the seminar.

     obsessional neurosis 36~99 obsessionals and 36~82, 442,443,458-60

244. #244

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.350

     THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

     Theoretical move: The passage uses Hamlet's structural position—his delay, his encounter with death, and the father's revelation of truth—to articulate the Lacanian subject as constituted by the signifier and the Graph of Desire, distinguishing the obsessional's relation to desire (Erwartung) from the Oedipal structure, and positioning the father who "knew the truth" as the key differential coordinate between Hamlet and Oedipus.

     the major function of desire consists here in keeping at bay and awaiting the hour of the desired encounter... Playing a game with respect to the moment of the encounter essentially dominates the obsessive's relation to his desire.

245. #245

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.329

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structure of fantasy ($◇a) by distinguishing how the object of desire (objet petit a) takes the place of the symbolically deprived phallus, and then uses this framework to differentiate perversion (emphasis on the imaginary pole, a) from neurosis (emphasis on the barred subject, $), with Hamlet serving as the privileged illustration of neurotic fantasy through his constitutive subjection to the Other's time.

     obsession by the function of an impossible desire... the obsessive's procrastination, which is moreover founded on the fact that he always prepares himself for things when it is too late

246. #246

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.453

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques both a 1956 Parisian article that collapses the distinction between perverse fantasy and perversion, and the broader tradition of object-relations theory (Abraham, Ferenczi, Klein, Glover), arguing that the structural position of desire — defined by irreducible distance from the object — cannot be reduced to an individual developmental conquest of reality; perverse fantasy illuminates the very structure of unconscious fantasy as such.

     A certain French author believes that the notion of distance is decisive in obsessive neurosis, whereas it is in certain perversions that it plays a decisive role - for example, the distance of an object [from oneself] is obviously far more manifest in the phenomenology of fetishism.

247. #247

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.528

     384. Breathing

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial notes and commentary glossing references made in Lacan's Seminar VI, identifying textual sources, clarifying allusions, and cross-referencing other works by Lacan and his interlocutors; it is primarily bibliographic and non-argumentative, though it anchors several Lacanian concepts (aphanisis, logical time, fantasy, desire) to their source locations.

     The supposed 'bad distance at which the obsessive stays from the object'

248. #248

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.441

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of fantasy — defined by the aphanisis of the subject at the height of desire — is the hub from which neurotic (and perverse) clinical structures differentiate: the subject must find something to sustain desire in the face of the Other's desire, generating the distinct solutions of phobia, hysteria (unsatisfied desire), and obsession (impossible desire).

     as an impossible desire, which is the case in obsession.

249. #249

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.466

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.

     Consider what actually happens at the end of the obsessive's complicated maneuvers - he is not the one who enjoys.

250. #250

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.56

     THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of associationism (contiguity and similarity) maps directly onto metonymy and metaphor in the signifying chain, thereby subordinating psychological atomism and its Gestalt critique to a single linguistically-grounded theory; the dream's wish-satisfaction operates at the level of "being" as verbal appearance rather than substance, and desire—irreducible to demand—is located at the enigmatic point opened by the subject's relation to the signifier.

     You heard him speak about desire and demand. We are trying to highlight the difference in structure between desire and demand here because the distinction between them is not simply theoretical, but is linked to the crux of our practice.

251. #251

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.442

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a differential dialectic of desire in neurosis: hysteria and obsession are contrasted as two distinct structural positions relative to desire and the phallus, with the phallus theorized as the signifier that ties desire to the law of exchange and fertility, such that the neurotic subject's fundamental impasse is the "to be or not to have" disjunction—being the phallus for the Other exposes one to the threat of castration, while the neurotic ego-defense is what organizes the subject's distance from the Other's desire.

     The obsessive is someone who is truly never where something that could be called his desire is at stake. He is not where he apparently runs a risk. He makes $ - the disappearance of the subject at the point of desire's approach - into his weapon and his hiding place.

252. #252

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hamlet's identification with the "foil" (the mortal phallus) as the structural key to his desire, and then pivots to argue that mourning—illustrated by the cemetery scene—produces a hole in the Real that is the strict converse of Foreclosure: what is lost in reality irrupts as an absolute (impossible) object, and this opens onto a rearticulation of mourning via the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real rather than mere object-relations.

     We believe we find ourselves here on a familiar path, where we can recognize one of the characteristics of the obsessive's desire, but let us not too quickly stop at such overly obvious appearances.

253. #253

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.448

     THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

     Theoretical move: By re-reading Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten" through the lens of metaphor and alienation, Lacan argues that the obsessive fantasy stages the neurotic's structural relation to desire: the subject sustains desire precisely by perpetuating its precariousness, finding jouissance not in satisfaction but in the symptomatic metonymy of 'être pour' (being-for) that defers 'pour être' (being as such).

     The obsessive's fantasy bears a relation to jouissance, and this relation can even become one of its conditions.

254. #254

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.304

     THE MOTHER'S DESIRE

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the graveyard scene in Hamlet to argue that mourning is the condition for the constitution of the object (objet petit a), and that Hamlet's sudden reactivation of desire occurs through a narcissistic identification with Laertes's grief — a mechanism that dissolves the distinction between hysterical and obsessional desire, pointing instead to a more fundamental structure of desire as such.

     Hamlet's is an obsessive desire, inasmuch as he attempts to prop himself up on the basis of an impossible desire.

255. #255

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.212

     SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses close reading of a clinical dream-text to argue that the phallus functions as a perpetually absent signifier whose structural elusiveness—not aggressive retaliation or castration anxiety in the ordinary sense—organises the neurotic subject's symptomatology, thereby critiquing hasty analytic interpretations that reduce the material to castration as cause rather than context.

     I dislike thinking it was a compulsion; that's why the cough annoys me.

256. #256

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

     **XIV** > **XV** > The *jouissance* of transgression

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Sade's work to argue that the literary experiment of transgression reveals the structure of jouissance as approach to an unbearable centre, and introduces two theoretical terms: the part object (as the logic of Sade's social law) and the indestructibility of the Other in fantasy — ultimately connecting the Sadistic relation to the structure of obsessional neurosis.

     a certain relationship to the Other, that we call Sadistic, reveals its true connection to the psychology of the obsessional? - the obsessional, whose defenses take the form of an iron frame, of a rigid mold, a corset, in which he remains and locks himself up

257. #257

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.16

     **THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Outline of the seminar**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ethics of psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to psychogenesis, sociogenesis, or any of the three dominant analytical ideals (genital love, authenticity, non-dependence), but must be grounded in the autonomy of the signifier and the law of discourse—most sharply condensed in Freud's 'Wo es war, soll Ich werden'—and measured against the full tradition of ethical thought, including Aristotle's ethics of habit.

     It is enough to see how the experience of an obsessional is structured at the beginning to know that the enigma concerning the term 'duty' as such is always already formulated even before he formulates the demand for help

258. #258

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.138

     **IX** > **X**

     Theoretical move: Lacan organizes sublimation around Das Ding (the Thing) as a constitutive emptiness, then maps the three Freudian mechanisms—Verdrängung, Verschiebung, and Verwerfung—onto art, religion, and science respectively, arguing that science's foreclosure of the Thing causes it to reappear in the Real, while courtly love is positioned as the paradigmatic case of sublimation in art.

     the respective mechanisms of hysteria, obsessional neurosis and paranoia with three forms of sublimation, art, religion and science

259. #259

     Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.62

     **IV**

     Theoretical move: By reading das Ding as the 'beyond-of-the-signified' — the absolute, prehistoric Other that can only be missed, never reached — Lacan grounds the clinical structures of hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia in differential relations to this primordial lost object, and then opens the path toward a Kantian ethics where das Ding is replaced by the pure signifying system of the moral law.

     in obsessional neurosis, the object with relation to which the fundamental experience, the experience of pleasure, is organized, is an object which literally gives too much pleasure.

260. #260

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.442

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXVI - "A Dream of a Shadow Is Man"**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, Chapter XXVI, providing philological clarifications, textual variants, bibliographic references, and explanations of Lacan's optical schema and identification formulas. It is non-substantive as theoretical argumentation, serving only as editorial apparatus.

     This may be a reference to the formula Lacan provided for obsession in Chapter 18: Α Ο φ^ΰ',ΰ", a'",...)

261. #261

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.259

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorises the structural difference between hysterical and obsessional fantasy through their respective relations to the phallic signifier Φ: the hysteric sacrifices her own desire to keep the Other in possession of the key to her mystery, while the obsessive attacks the imaginary phallus in the Other (what Lacan calls "phallophany") to manage the unbearable real presence of desire — revealing that handling the symbolic function of Φ, not working through imaginary castration, is the genuine analytic task.

     There is another path, that of the obsessive, which is, as you all know, far more intelligent in its way of operating.

262. #262

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.248

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

     Theoretical move: Lacan introduces capital Φ as the unique symbol that occupies the place of the missing signifier — not because any signifier is literally absent from the battery, but because the dimension of questioning opens a subjective gap where the signifier's own foundation becomes ungraspable, making Φ indispensable for understanding how the castration complex operates on the mainspring of transference.

     The phallus in hysteria and obsession.

263. #263

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.380

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety is not purely internal to the subject but circulates between subjects as a kind of shared energy, and that desire functions as a remedy for anxiety—yet the analyst's proper position requires not using desire merely as an expedient but sustaining a relationship to "pure desirousness" that refuses to fill the place of the anxious Other for the patient.

     obsession can be defined on the basis of the two statuses of desire that I call 'unsatisfied desire' and 'impossible desire' - that is, desire instituted in its impossibility.

264. #264

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.378

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reinterprets Freud's economic account of anxiety-as-signal by mapping it onto the fantasy formula ($◇a): anxiety is produced when cathexis is transferred from little a to the barred subject's place (S), and its essential characteristic is not flight but Erwartung—the radical mode by which the subject maintains its relationship to desire even when the object is absent or unbearable.

     He who is suffocated by this Mitleid is the obsessive... what he respects, what he is unwilling to violate in the other's image, is his own image. If the inviolability of this image were not carefully preserved, what would arise would truly be anxiety.

265. #265

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral and anal stages must be understood through the structural distinction between need, demand, and desire—where desire emerges as a gap or negation irreducible to need's satisfaction—and uses the anal stage to demolish the myth of "oblativity," revealing that anal desire is constituted by the subject's identification with the excremental object (objet a) and its symbolic evacuation, which grounds the obsessional's fundamental fantasy.

     This is the true foundation of the whole of a radical structure that you will encounter in the fundamental fantasy of the obsessive neurotic in particular. He devalues himself, and locates the whole game of the erotic dialectic outside of himself.

266. #266

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.431

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XVIII - Real Presence**

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, Chapter XVIII, providing philological clarifications, textual variants, and source identifications. It contains no independent theoretical argument.

     Reading φ in the formula for the obsessive's fantasy, as in the 1991 edition of the Seminar (p. 295), instead of Φ; note, however, that other versions read Φ.

267. #267

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.349

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**

     Theoretical move: Lacan repositions psychoanalytic action as a necessary response to the unconscious/repressed, critiques Ego Psychology as a mass-formation obstacle to analytic efficacy, and begins dismantling the conflation of ideal ego and ego-ideal by grounding both in narcissism as rethought through the mirror stage — thereby clearing space for a renewed account of analytic action and the structure of fantasy.

     Recall what I told you about the obsessive and the style of his performances and even exploits — you can find it in the article in which I gave definitive shape to the talk I gave in Royaumont.

268. #268

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.264

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Φ (the phallus as symbolic/unconscious function operative for all speaking subjects) from φ (the imaginary phallic unit of measurement that organises the obsessive's erotic object-equivalences), arguing that in obsessive neurosis the phallic function is not repressed but emerges consciously and avowedly at the level of symptom, which is precisely what must be explained against both Bouvet's theory of imaginary introjection and a naïve psychologism.

     The formulation of the second term of the obsessive's fantasy [the part to the right of the lozenge] alludes precisely to the fact that objects are for him, as objects of desire, situated as a function of certain erotic equivalences

269. #269

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.221

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst must preserve the gap between demand and desire by resisting premature interpretation: the "margin of incomprehension" is precisely the margin of desire, and collapsing it—whether by satisfying the obsessive's demand, offering phallic communion, or nourishing the subject with metaphor—forecloses desire in favour of symptom, while the object of desire is shown to pre-exist the subject who seeks it.

     one must not give the obsessive neurotic the slightest encouragement or absolution of guilt... the precise mechanism by which he wants to make you eat, so to speak, his own being in the form of a piece of shit.

270. #270

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.272

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE** > Further along, we read.

     Theoretical move: The phallus (Φ) is theorized not merely as a sign of desire but as the signifier structurally excluded from the signifying system, whose function is to mark real presence—that which exceeds all signification—while the obsessive's compulsion to fill every gap in the signifying interval is understood as defense against encountering this real presence.

     The way he has of filling in everything that can present itself as a gap in the signifying system [dans le signifiant] - the way in which, for example, Freud's Rattenmann makes himself count up to so many between the flash of lightning and its thunder - is designated here in its veritable structure.

271. #271

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.268

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the obsessive's structure to articulate aphanisis as the specific failure of the Φ (phallic) function when it encounters the real dead end of fantasy, distinguishing this from Jones's naturalistic reading and tying the subject's vanishing to the barred Other—while introducing "real presence" as a homonym for Eucharistic dogma that illuminates this phallic function at the surface of obsessive phenomenology.

     Nothing is more difficult than to back the obsessive neurotic up against the wall of his desire.

272. #272

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.330

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > **STRUCTURAL DECOM POSITION**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the question of transference from countertransference to the analyst's ontological participation ('our being'), then uses this reframing to adjudicate the Kleinian (analyst as object) versus Anna Freudian/ego-psychological (analyst as subject, therapeutic alliance) poles, before pivoting to myth as the structural category that underlies psychoanalytic fate—the analysand's quest for what he calls his 'destiny'—and links it to the matheme of fantasy ($ ◇ a).

     It was a lecture on obsessional neurosis whose title I no longer recall - it was something like 'The Neurotic's Myth,' which, as you see, brings us right to the heart of the question. In it I demonstrated the role of mythical structures in determining the Rat Man's symptoms.

273. #273

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.11

     *Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the entire philosophical tradition stemming from Descartes's cogito rests on a single structural prejudice — the Subject Supposed to Know — and that psychoanalysis radically subverts this prejudice by demonstrating that the Other (as locus, not subject) is merely the depository of the supposition of knowledge, which returns to the subject as the unconscious.

     We will try, the next time, to map out the references to the phenomenology of obsessional neurosis in a signifying scansion in which the subject finds himself immanent in every articulation.

274. #274

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.248

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: By mapping the torus topologically, Lacan formalises the structural inversion between the subject's demand/object and the Other's demand/object, deriving from this the differential structure of obsessional and hysterical neurosis, and showing that the neurotic's impasse consists in pursuing objet a through the specular image i(o) rather than acceding to it directly.

     For the obsessional the accent is put on the demand of the Other, taken as object of his desire

275. #275

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.167

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of anxiety as the desire of the Other (not a defence against which one defends, but the source of defences), articulates the phallus as the mediating object between demand and desire, and then pivots to a topological grounding of these arguments through the introduction of the torus and a critique of Eulerian circles as an inadequate logical model—establishing topology as the rigorous foundation for Lacanian logical claims about identification and negation.

     the obsessional from time to time, every time there cannot be repeated to satiety the whole arrangement which allows him to manage the desire of the Other, sees re-emerging of course in a more or less overwhelming fashion the affect of anxiety.

276. #276

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan defines anxiety as the sensation of the desire of the Other — not an affect without an object in reality but one where the lack of object is on the subject's side — and positions the phallus as the mediating term between demand and desire, showing how hysteria and obsessional neurosis are each specific strategies for managing the desire of the Other.

     it is the dead person who is asked to make use of it. It is not for nothing that I highlighted the story in the Ratman, the nocturnal hour when having contemplated his erection at length in the mirror he goes to the entrance door to open it to his father's ghost

277. #277

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.177

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of Boolean logic (union, intersection, symmetric difference) and the paradox of self-including sets to argue that the signifier cannot signify itself — it must be posed as different from itself — and that this logical structure maps onto the topology of the torus, thereby grounding the structure of desire topologically rather than through flat Eulerian representation.

     When one of my obsessionals, quite recently again after having developed all the subtlety of the science of his exercises with respect to feminine objects to whom… he remains attached… by what one can call a constant infidelity

278. #278

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.99

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the structural distinction between love and desire: love is a natural, hydraulic force grounded in narcissistic libido, whereas desire is constituted by lack—specifically the lack of the phallus in the other—and can never coincide with love without collapsing into narcissism. This distinction grounds the clinic of hysteria and obsession and is anchored retrospectively in Plato's Symposium as the founding articulation of the subject of desire.

     Which will lead me this year to articulate completely for you the meaning of the desire of the hysteric as well as that of the obsessional, and very quickly, because I would say that up to a certain point, it is urgent.

279. #279

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.194

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Piera Aulagnier, invited by Lacan, argues that anxiety is not typed by content (oral, castration, death) but is structurally defined as the collapse of all identificatory reference points—the ego's dissolution before the un-symbolisable—and that its resolution or temporary suspension is bound to the coincidence of demand and desire in jouissance, with castration functioning as the transitional passage that converts the penis into the phallic signifier.

     to do so seems to me as inaccurate as to try to define an obsessional symptom while remaining at the level of the automatic movement which can represent it.

280. #280

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.145

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the "reality of desire" is constituted through the dimension of the hidden and the structural weakness of the Other as guarantor of truth; this dialectic is traced through hysteric and obsessional modes of evading capture, and culminates in the claim that ethical behaviour—and the irreducibility of the castration complex at analysis's end—can only be understood by mapping desire's function in relation to the Other.

     The obsessional's taste for ubiquity is well known, and if you do not spot it you will understand nothing about most of his behaviour. The least thing, because he cannot be everywhere, is in any case to be in several places at once, namely that in any case he can nowhere be laid hold of.

281. #281

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.129

     *Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The neurotic's defining feature is the desire to know — specifically to reverse the effacing of the thing by the signifier and recover the real that preceded signification — and this structure, rather than social maladjustment, gives neurosis its theoretical authority; meanwhile, sublimation is reframed as a paradoxical detour through signification by which jouissance is obtained without repression.

     This is the most profound meaning of the summary, exemplary behavior of the obsessional. What he always comes back to... is to bring it about that this advent of the function of the signifier has not been produced.

282. #282

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.183

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 16*: *Wednesday 4 April 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus—its two irreducible circles, their symmetric difference without intersection, and a privileged composite circle that both encircles and passes through the hole—to provide an intuitive topological model for the structural relationship between demand and desire, where the "self-difference" of the objet petit a and the void of desire are formalised through non-intersecting, non-unifiable fields.

     whether it is a matter of the obsessional, of the hysteric, of the pervert, even of the schizophrenic, have to articulate the relationship between desire and demand.

283. #283

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.250

     *Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962* > *Seminar 22*: *Wednesday 30 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the obsessional's sadistic fantasy misses its true target: it aims at the specular image i(o) rather than at the object of desire o itself, because a fundamental asymmetry between the specular image and the object (which has no specular image) leads the neurotic astray—and it is this structural confusion, not narcissism per se, that accounts for neurosis and radically distinguishes it from perversion and psychosis.

     there is indeed a destructive aim in the phantasy of the obsessional, but this destructive aim... has the meaning not at all of the destruction of the other, object of desire but the destruction of the image of the other

284. #284

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.284

     *Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Symposium's agalma — what Alcibiades seeks at the heart of Socrates — to argue that the object of desire is ultimately the Other's desire itself (the pure eron), and that the phallus functions as the punctual, organising point that connects the barred subject ($) to the object (o) in the fundamental fantasy, while also introducing the third Freudian mode of identification as constituted through desire at the locus of the big Other.

     in connection with the neurotic and precisely the obsessional, I indicated to you how it can be conceived that the search for the object might be the true aim, in the obsessional phantasy, of this always renewed and always impotent attempt at destroying the specular image

285. #285

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.144

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus and the Graph of Desire's four nodal points to articulate the structural difference between message and question, grounding desire as precisely that part of demand hidden from the Other—and showing how the neurotic (especially the obsessional) constitutes himself as a real/impossible in face of the Other's impotence to respond.

     you will understand nothing about an obsessional if you do not remember this dimension that he the obsessional incarnates because of the fact that he is too much...once he tries to come out of his ambush position as a hidden object, he has to be a nowhere object

286. #286

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.198

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural typology of clinical positions (normality, neurosis, perversion, psychosis) organized around the axis of identificatory conflict with the partial object, castration, and the differential articulation of demand, desire, and jouissance — arguing that what distinguishes each structure is not the content of the drive but the subject's identificatory relation to the phallic object and the Other's desire.

     The obsessional can also be sadistic - for him it means the ongoing presence of an anal relation, a relation where it is a question of possessing or being possessed... the father's beating has remained the privileged sign of his love.

287. #287

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.84

     *Seminar 9*: *Wednesday 24 January 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the subject is constituted through its relation to the signifier, where the signifier's origin lies in the subject's own effacing of a trace—a redoubled disappearance that is the mark of subjectivity itself—and that negation, the phallic object, and the obsessional's compulsion to undo are all facets of this foundational structure of the subject-as-signifier.

     it must really have all the same occurred to you that it is with this that the obsessed subject is dealing all the time: ungeschen machen, to undo something... what he wants to abolish is what the annalist writes throughout his history

288. #288

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the super-ego's peculiar severity derives from its dual origin—as the earliest identification (heir to the Oedipus complex) and as a reincarnation of archaic id-formations—and uses this structural account to explain clinical phenomena including negative therapeutic reaction, unconscious guilt, and the differential manifestation of guilt in obsessional neurosis, melancholia, and hysteria, ultimately linking the super-ego's cruelty to the death drive turned inward.

     In obsessional neurosis (or certain forms thereof), the guilt-feeling is strident in the extreme, but incapable of convincing the ego that it is justified. The patient's ego therefore strenuously refuses any imputation of guilt

289. #289

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud advances the structural-dynamic thesis that the psyche's tripartite division (id, ego, superego) must be articulated with the dualism of Eros and the death drive, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido as the energetic medium that links drive-fusion/de-fusion to the pleasure principle and to the indifferent displacements characteristic of the primary process.

     amongst the effects achieved by certain serious neuroses, e.g. the obsessional neuroses, the de-mergence of drives and the appearance of the death drive deserve special consideration

290. #290

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical analysis of Little Hans's horse phobia and the Wolf-man's wolf phobia, Freud argues that symptom-formation in neurosis is constituted not merely by repression of a single drive-impulse but by the simultaneous repression of two opposed impulses (hostile aggression and passive affection toward the father), with displacement onto an animal surrogate as the structural mechanism that transforms a comprehensible emotional reaction into a true neurosis, and with regression serving as an alternative or supplementary defense to repression proper.

     his behaviour following the all-important dream was 'bad', cruel, sadistic, and he very soon developed a thorough-going obsessional neurosis.

291. #291

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud reframes the conceptual architecture of defence, repression, anxiety, and trauma by: (1) demoting 'repression' to a sub-category of a broadened concept of 'defence'; (2) constructing a developmental sequence from trauma through danger-situation to anxiety-as-signal; and (3) showing that the distinction between objective and neurotic fear dissolves once the drive is recognized as an internal danger that mirrors external helplessness.

     in obsessional neurosis the pathogenic events are not forgotten. They remain conscious, but are 'isolated' in some way not yet comprehensible to us

292. #292

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud develops the theory of narcissism by tracing libido distribution across organic illness, hypochondria, sleep, and love-object choice, arguing that ego-libido and object-libido are structurally parallel and that primary narcissism is universal, grounding the compulsion to love others in the pathogenic effects of excessive libidinal build-up in the ego.

     after the manner of hysteria (in the case of dementia praecox and paraphrenia proper) or obsessional neurosis (in the case of paranoia), re-attaches the libido to objects

293. #293

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes for a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud's writings, clarifying translation choices for key Freudian terms (Angst, Trauer, Triebrepräsentanz, Inhalte, etc.) and cross-referencing other Freudian texts; it is paratextual apparatus rather than theoretical argumentation.

     See 'Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose' ['The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis'; the case in question is discussed at the very beginning of the work, which was first published in 1913.]

294. #294

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety in phobias and obsessional neurosis is fundamentally a signal-affect generated by the ego in response to a danger situation ultimately reducible to castration, and that symptoms are produced not to avoid anxiety per se but to avoid the underlying danger situation that anxiety signals; this requires reconciling the dual-drive theory with the libido-organization stages by treating drives as always mixed rather than pure.

     What we have learnt about fear in the context of phobias also remains relevant to obsessional neurosis. It is not difficult to reduce the overall situation characteristic of obsessional neurosis to that characteristic of phobias.

295. #295

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation by contrasting conversion hysteria (which largely confines its defence to repression) with obsessional neurosis (where libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase, superego harshness, and reaction-formations constitute a distinct and more elaborate defence structure), proposing that the castration complex drives both and that the difference lies in constitutional/temporal factors affecting the genital organisation of the libido.

     The symptoms of obsessional neurosis are generally of two kinds, which tend in opposite directions. They consist on the one hand in prohibitions, precautions, penances – i.e. they are negative in nature; on the other hand, and in sharp contrast, they consist in surrogate gratifications.

296. #296

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud identifies two surrogate repressive techniques specific to obsessional neurosis—obliteration and isolation—and argues that both operate through motor symbolism to achieve the same goal as repression, while also raising the problem of whether castration anxiety is the sole motor of defence across all neuroses, particularly in women.

     in obsessional neurosis the ego is so much more a locus of symptom-formation than it is in hysteria; that it clings tenaciously to its relationship to reality and to consciousness

297. #297

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs a developmental series of danger situations (birth trauma → object-loss → castration → super-ego) each generating its specific fear-determinant, while simultaneously revising his earlier economic theory of anxiety to recast fear as an intentional ego-signal rather than an automatic libidinal discharge, and correlating each fear-determinant with a corresponding neurotic structure.

     just as obsessional neurosis has a stronger affinity to maleness... fear of the super-ego in obsessional neurosis.

298. #298

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that in obsessional neurosis the regression of the libido doubly exacerbates the conflict between ego, id, and super-ego: it forces erotic impulses into aggressive forms, enabling the super-ego to punish the ego for drives the ego cannot consciously recognise as its own, and symptom-formation gradually shifts from defense to surrogate gratification until the ego reaches paralysis of will.

     Puberty marks a decisive watershed in the development of obsessional neurosis. The process of genital organization broken off earlier in childhood now reasserts itself with tremendous force.

299. #299

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's structural dependence on the superego reveals how sublimation and identification produce a de-mergence of drives, unleashing the death drive within the superego and making morality itself a lethal product of psychic catabolism; fear of death and consciential fear are thus retraced to castration fear as their core.

     Let us return for a moment to obsessional neurosis. Circumstances are different here. The de-mergence whereby love turns into aggression is not brought about by anything the ego does, but is the result of a regression that takes place in the id.

300. #300

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that narcissism and object-love constitute two fundamentally different libidinal economies whose interaction explains the gendered asymmetry of erotic fascination, the structure of parental love, and the various paths to object-choice — showing narcissism to be not merely a developmental phase but a persistent force that shapes object-relations throughout life.

     This sexual over-valuation gives rise to the curious condition of being in love, reminiscent of neurotic obsession

301. #301

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud distinguishes inhibition from symptom by grounding inhibition in ego-function restriction—caused either by excessive eroticization of organs, conflict-avoidance with the id or superego, or energy depletion—while symptoms are processes operating outside or upon the ego, making the two conceptually non-equivalent even when clinically overlapping.

     Obsessional neurosis disrupts the work process by making the person prone to constant distractions, and making him waste time by repeating and dwelling on things unnecessarily.

302. #302

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the transition from hypnotic/cathartic technique to modern free-association analysis reveals that patients do not remember the repressed but instead repeat it as action under conditions of resistance — establishing repetition-compulsion as the central dynamic of transference and the structuring force of analytic work.

     Particularly in the case of the many forms of obsessional neurosis, forgetting is limited in the main to losing track of connections, misremembering the sequence of events, recalling memories in isolation.

303. #303

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the analyst's central technical task is to contain the patient's compulsion to repeat within the transference as a controlled "playground," transforming acting-out into memory and ultimately into a workable transference neurosis; the decisive therapeutic change comes not from identifying resistance but from working through it—a phase that distinguishes analysis from suggestion-based therapy.

     does not listen carefully enough to what his obsessional ideas are saying to him, or does not grasp the real intention of his obsessional impulse

304. #304

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud constructs the concept of primary narcissism by tracing it through three convergent sources—clinical perversion, schizophrenic withdrawal, and child/primitive omnipotence of thought—and uses it to justify the theoretical separation of ego-libido from object-libido and sexual drives from ego drives, while defending psychoanalysis as an empirical rather than speculative science.

     the conclusion that I was driven to by analysis of both of the pure forms of transference neurosis (hysteria and obsessional neurosis)

305. #305

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     IX

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that symptom-formation is not directly tied to anxiety but is mediated by the 'danger situation': symptoms are created to extricate the ego from danger, with anxiety serving as the minimal signal that triggers this defensive process, while the persistence of archaic danger situations—rather than the drives themselves—is what distinguishes neurosis from normal development.

     if we stop an obsessional neurotic from washing his hands after he has touched something, he will become prey to almost unbearable fear... In obsessional neurosis the danger is much more internalized.

306. #306

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud refines and taxonomizes the mechanisms of repression and resistance, distinguishing five types of resistance from three psychic agencies (ego, id, superego), and revises his theory of anxiety away from direct libido-transformation toward an ego-signal theory grounded in the paradigmatic danger situation of birth.

     Such a phenomenon is palpably present in obsessional neurosis, where it takes the form of an ego-alteration, that is, a reaction-formation within the ego, due to an intensification of whatever stance is antithetical to the thrust of the drive

307. #307

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego-id and ego-superego relationships are not binary oppositions but dynamic, partially overlapping organizations; the symptom's "exterritoriality" from the ego-organization initiates a secondary defensive battle in which the ego oscillates between reconciliation (incorporating the symptom) and renewed repression, with secondary illness-gain reinforcing the symptom's fixation and generating analytic resistance.

     The systems that typically form in obsessional neurotics flatter their self-love by giving them the illusory belief that they are better than other people by virtue of being especially clean or especially conscientious

308. #308

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.43

     POWERS OF HORROR > SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that phobia is an "abortive metaphor of want" — a drive-level substitute for the unnamable void that precedes objectal relation — and that language itself functions as a founding fetish that both enables and forecloses the full traversal of that want, making writing the privileged (if not analytic) site for metabolizing abjection.

     This obsessional rumination—which ceaselessly elaborates signs so as better to protect, within the family vault, a sacred object that is missing

309. #309

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.48

     POWERS OF HORROR > "I AM AFRAID OF BEING BITTEN" OR "I AM AFRAID OF BITING"?

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that want and aggressivity are logically coextensive rather than causally sequential: symbolic language (the paternal prohibition) intervenes from the outset to shape drive aggressivity, so that neither pure deprivation nor pure violence can be isolated as originary — the two terms are mutually constitutive, and their disarticulation produces clinical pathology (obsession or paranoia).

     To speak of want alone is to repudiate aggressivity in obsessional fashion

310. #310

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.55

     POWERS OF HORROR > DEVOURING LANGUAGE > PHOBIC NARCISSISM

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that phobia reveals how the paternal metaphor's failure—rather than any object-relation failure per se—leaves the drive without an object, cathecting symbolicity itself as a substitute; this structure, distinct from narcissism, psychosis, and hysteria, is the template for abjection, which is defined as a revolt entirely within language that makes the subject eminently productive of culture.

     Abjection—at the crossroads of phobia, obsession, and perversion—shares in the same arrangement.

311. #311

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.67

     POWERS OF HORROR > FROM FILTH TO DEFILEMENT

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that the sacred has a "two-sided" structure: one side anchored in the Freudian murder-of-the-father narrative (guilt, atonement, obsessional ritual) and a hidden, non-representable other side organized around the maternal, incest-dread, and non-separation of subject and object—a side that Freud repeatedly gestures toward but ultimately suppresses in favor of the paternal-signifier account, and which Kristeva proposes to theorize through abjection and phobia.

     The similarities that Freud delineates between religion and obsessional neurosis would then involve the defensive side of the sacred.

312. #312

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.111

     POWERS OF HORROR > BOUNDARIES OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that biblical purity codes (Leviticus) follow an internal logic of separation whereby abjection of leprosy, bodily defect, flow, and blood all converge on a single fantasy: the subject's self-rebirth through rejection of the non-introjected, devouring maternal body, such that the clean, proper, symbolic body is constituted precisely by expelling all traces of its debt to nature/the mother.

     The obsession of the leprous and decaying body would thus be the fantasy of a self-rebirth

313. #313

     The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.242

     8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *5. The Jouissance of the Signifi er*

     Theoretical move: This passage (a notes section) deploys Žižek's and Zupančič's arguments to develop the theoretical claim that the Real's internal contamination of the Symbolic ensures the big Other's constitutive incompleteness, while also staging the political-ethical deadlock that follows from Lacanian theory when it confronts questions of action, revolutionary violence, and the Kant-Sade nexus.

     the only thing to do is to do nothing. We should just sit and wait. Don't act, never commit. . . . Thus speaks the great obsessional.

314. #314

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 2**

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section for Chapter 2 develops the theoretical argument that the gaze arises from linguistic rather than voyeuristic/fetishistic assumptions, that the cinema is better understood through the concept of the "nonspecularizable" than through the mirror/screen analogy, and that a properly Lacanian account of the subject requires distinguishing the unreturned gaze from imaginary identification and aggressivity.

     Lacan defines obsession as that which covers over the desire in the Other with the Other's demand. This remark relates obsessional neurosis to a certain (Kantian) concept of moral consciousness.

315. #315

     Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son's Suicide · Richard Boothby · p.237

     <span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c17_r1.xhtml_page_224" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="224"></span><span id="Boot_9781635422610_epub3_c17_r1.xhtml_page_225" class="pagebreak" role="doc-pagebreak" title="225"></span>*17*

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the neuroscientific account of psilocybin's disruption of the default mode network (ego/non-ego boundary dissolution) to pose a philosophical question about the status of ordinary ego-stabilised reality versus the psychedelic experience of unity, framing the latter as potentially a more authentic encounter with the Real rather than mere wish-fulfilment.

     coping with depression or obsession, as well as dealing with the fear and anguish of terminal cancer diagnoses

316. #316

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.97

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > The Ratman's Phantasy

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Ratman case exemplifies how perceptual intensity (the positional) is produced by an imperceptible confluence of signifiers (the dispositional field), demonstrating that the unconscious is "structured like a language" in the most literal sense: an overdetermined morphemic matrix ("rat") generates a blinding phantasmatic image that simultaneously conceals its own conditions of production.

     the whole obsessive machinery in which the Ratman was caught up—represented a repetition of the father's unresolved debt.

317. #317

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.6

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Introduction</span><span id="ch0.xhtml_p1" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 1. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span> Returning to Metapsychology > To Recall Freud's Witch

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freudian metapsychology is coextensive with psychoanalytic theory as such, and that its central—if problematic—pillar is the concept of psychical energy, which undergirds everything from displacement and condensation to repression, narcissism, and the dual drive theory; the repeated attacks on metapsychology are therefore nothing less than attacks on the theoretical foundation of psychoanalysis itself.

     The compulsive repetitions of the obsessive, on the other hand, are readily conceived as an excessively intense focus of energy, comparable in some way to a tightly coiled eddy in the flow of experience.

318. #318

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.32

     Barbers and Philosophers > **Runaway Jaw**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces Kierkegaard's theoretical appropriation of Holberg's comic figure of the 'talkative barber' (Master Gert Westphaler) as a conceptual resource for his critique of speculative idealist thought, locating in Gert's compulsive, uncontrollable chatter (*snak*) a proto-clinical structure—an obsessive disease of discourse—that exceeds both intention and interlocution.

     The clinical structure of this curious disease is an uncontrollable and strangely obsessive urge to transmit information to others. Uncontrollable because it typically overwhelms Gert's own intentions

319. #319

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.110

     Fuzzy Math > **Trembling Impatience** > **The Premise- Author**

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys Kierkegaard's distinction between 'essential authors' and 'premise-authors' to argue that chatter is structurally constituted by a lack of self-understanding: the premise-author, having no coherent life-view to communicate, uses public discourse as a substitute for the reflexive work of self-determination, thereby allowing language itself—rather than an intending subject—to speak.

     Gert Westphaler suffers from a 'chatter disease,' the clinical structure of which is an obsessive urge to transmit information that frequently overwhelms his own conscious intentions.

320. #320

     The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.39

     Barbers and Philosophers > To which his friend replies:

     Theoretical move: By analyzing Holberg's Master Gert Westphaler through Kierkegaard's correspondence, the passage establishes "chatter" as a mechanically repetitive, jouissance-driven speech act whose automated quality anticipates Lacan's "empty speech" and Heidegger's "idle talk" — and whose pathological excess stems from narcissistic delusion rather than mere foolishness.

     His chatter may derive from an obsessive urge to inform, but it is driven by a narcissistic delusion of grandeur.

321. #321

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.114

     9. > F r e u d a n d t h e U n r e s o lv e d P r o b l e m of Unconscious Guilt

     Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Freud's concept of "unconscious guilt" predates the second topography and cannot be resolved by simply mapping it onto the ego/superego framework; instead, the passage proposes that unconscious affects are "misfelt feelings"—consciously registered but phenomenologically displaced onto other affects (e.g., guilt felt as anxiety)—thereby reframing the apparent contradiction in Freud's metapsychology of affect.

     the sufferer from compulsions and prohibitions behaves as if he were dominated by a sense of guilt, of which, however, he knows nothing, so that we must call it an unconscious sense of guilt, in spite of the apparent contradiction in terms.

322. #322

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.124

     9. > F r e u d a n d t h e U n r e s o lv e d P r o b l e m of Unconscious Guilt

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's repeated oscillations between positing and repudiating "unconscious guilt" reveal a productive theoretical impasse: guilt cannot be cleanly assigned to either consciousness or the unconscious, because it shades into anxiety (itself subject to the same topographical ambiguity), and Freud's own metapsychological definitions of guilt as ego-perception contradict his clinical appeals to unconscious guilt—a tension Johnston proposes to resolve by engaging neuroscience of the emotional brain.

     In one of those affections, obsessional neurosis, the sense of guilt makes itself noisily heard in consciousness; it dominates the clinical picture and the patient's life as well

323. #323

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.129

     10. > F r e u d 's M e ta p s y c h o l o g i e s of Affective Life

     Theoretical move: By tracing Freud's metapsychological treatment of the affect/idea (Affekt/Vorstellung) distinction from 1894 to 1915, the passage argues that Freud's own texts — against their standard reading — open the door to the theoretical possibility of unconscious affects and 'misfelt feelings,' a concept Johnston proposes to resolve the metapsychological ambiguity between affect as necessarily conscious and affect as subject to defensive displacement.

     obsessionals handle (or, really, awkwardly mishandle) threatening affects by detaching them from their accompanying ideational representations, by removing feeling from these charged Vorstellungen.

324. #324

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.141

     10. > F r e u d 's M e ta p s y c h o l o g i e s of Affective Life

     Theoretical move: By carefully parsing Freud's 1915 German terminology (Affektbildung, Affektbetrag, Affekt-qua-Gefühl, Empfindung), the passage argues that Freud's metapsychology of affect is more complex and less consistent than both Lacanian and Anglo-American inheritors acknowledge, and that Pulver's clinical categories of "unconscious affects" and "potential affects" largely rediscover distinctions already latent in Freud—setting up a critique of Lacan's tendency to reduce affect to a secondary by-product of ideational-representational structure.

     the 'as if' phenomena Freud alludes to, in 'Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,' in connection with the possibility of the existence of an unconscious sense of guilt in certain neurotic analysands.

325. #325

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.177

     12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's metapsychology of affect, centered on anxiety as the uniquely human affect arising from the parlêtre's estrangement from self-transparent affective experience, must be read as a transcontextual theoretical framework rather than merely a historically contingent intervention, and it defends a dialectical (bidirectional) relation between anxiety and doubt against Lacan's own obsessional-neurosis-specific formulation of anxiety as the cause of doubt.

     Obsessional neurotics attempt this mainly through intellectualizations and rationalizations taking the form of a proliferation of hesitant, tentative self-interpretations creating feelings of uncertainty (i.e., doubt) about feelings.

326. #326

     Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.292

     13. > Inde x > Freud, Sigmund (*continued*)

     Theoretical move: This index chunk maps the theoretical terrain of a Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology of affects, tracking key debates around unconscious affects, the priority of signifiers over affects, the translation problems around Vorstellungsrepräsentanz, and Lacan's neologisms (lalangue, jouis-sens, senti-ment) as attempts to articulate the affective-linguistic interface — while situating these debates in relation to neuroscience, neurobiology, and continental philosophy.

     and obsessive disorders, 88–89, 98–99

327. #327

     The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.79

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: Comedy's "Character" form is theorized as the visible short circuit between the ego and the id/It — the unary trait as an enjoying incarnation — such that the comic character's structure reveals that jouissance belongs not to the subject but to the "It," exposing the missing link that normally sutures imaginary unity.

     what first comes to mind in the context of contemporary comedy is perhaps the figure of the obsessional neurotic, such as one finds in some of the better Woody Allen movies

328. #328

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

     Theoretical move: Freud pivots from the earlier therapeutic goal of conscious remembering (via catharsis/hypnosis) to the recognition that patients under resistance *repeat* rather than remember — acting out repressed material as present reality — and that this compulsion to repeat is structurally tied to transference and resistance, reframing repetition as the primary clinical phenomenon to be worked through.

     Particularly in the case of the many forms of obsessional neurosis, forgetting is limited in the main to losing track of connections, misremembering the sequence of events, recalling memories in isolation.

329. #329

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's precarious position between id, super-ego, and external world is structured by a dynamic of drive de-mergence: sublimation and identification unleash destructive drives within the super-ego, turning morality itself into a product of the death drive's catabolism, while castration fear is identified as the nuclear core of all anxiety (consciential, fear of death, neurotic).

     Let us return for a moment to obsessional neurosis. Circumstances are different here. The de-mergence whereby love turns into aggression is not brought about by anything the ego does, but is the result of a regression that takes place in the id.

330. #330

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that in obsessional neurosis, regression of the libido to an aggressive-sadistic organization produces a doubly exacerbated conflict: the superego becomes hyper-severe while erotic impulses emerge as repellent destructive tendencies, ultimately leading to a paralysis of ego will as symptoms progressively serve gratification rather than defense.

     Puberty marks a decisive watershed in the development of obsessional neurosis. The process of genital organization broken off earlier in childhood now reasserts itself with tremendous force.

331. #331

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes the theoretical necessity of a primary narcissism by tracing the concept from its clinical origins through schizophrenia, childhood, and "primitive" thought, thereby justifying the differentiation of ego-libido from object-libido and grounding psychoanalysis in empirical observation rather than speculative theory.

     The hysteric and the obsessional neurotic likewise abandon their relationship to reality... But analysis shows that they by no means forsake their erotic relationship to people and things.

332. #332

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud revises and taxonomizes the concept of resistance (distinguishing five types from three sources: ego, id, superego) and reformulates the theory of anxiety/fear, shifting from direct libido-transformation to an ego-signal model grounded in danger situations, thereby refining the structural account of repression, counter-cathexis, and working-through.

     Such a phenomenon is palpably present in obsessional neurosis, where it takes the form of an ego-alteration, that is, a reaction-formation within the ego, due to an intensification of whatever stance is antithetical to the thrust of the drive that is being repressed

333. #333

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes inhibition as a restriction of ego function—distinguished from symptom by being a process *within* the ego rather than acting upon it—and identifies two mechanisms: avoidance of conflict with the id (via excessive eroticization of organs) and avoidance of conflict with the superego (self-punishment), alongside an energic-economic account of generalized inhibition.

     Obsessional neurosis disrupts the work process by making the person prone to constant distractions, and making him waste time by repeating and dwelling on things unnecessarily.

334. #334

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VII

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that anxiety in phobias and obsessional neurosis is fundamentally a signal-reaction by the ego to the danger of castration (or its derivatives), and that symptoms are produced not to avoid fear itself but to avoid the danger situation that fear signals — a clarification that also forces a revision of drive theory by acknowledging that drives never appear in pure form but always in mixtures of Eros and the destruction drive.

     The motor driving all subsequent symptom-formation is plainly the ego's fear vis-á-vis the super-ego... the punishment threatened by the latter is simply a refined version of the punishment of castration.

335. #335

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the compulsion to repeat, rather than being simply suppressed, must be harnessed via the transference as a controlled "playground" that converts acting-out into remembering; the working-through of resistances — not mere identification of them — is the decisive therapeutic operation that distinguishes psychoanalysis from suggestion.

     does not listen carefully enough to what his obsessional ideas are saying to him, or does not grasp the real intention of his obsessional impulse

336. #336

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     IV

     Theoretical move: Through close analysis of Little Hans's horse phobia and the Wolf-man's wolf phobia, Freud argues that symptom-formation in neurosis involves not merely repression of a single drive-impulse but the simultaneous repression of two opposed impulses (sadistic aggression toward the father and passive affection for him), with displacement—not reaction-formation—as the operative mechanism, and that regression can serve as an alternative or supplement to repression in warding off disagreeable drive-impulses.

     his behaviour following the all-important dream was 'bad', cruel, sadistic, and he very soon developed a thorough-going obsessional neurosis.

337. #337

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     III

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego-id distinction is relational rather than absolute — the ego is the organized portion of the id — and uses this to explain how repression generates symptoms that achieve 'exterritoriality' from the ego-organization, initiating a secondary defensive battle in which the ego oscillates between incorporating the symptom and continuing to repress it, a dynamic reinforced by secondary illness-gain.

     The systems that typically form in obsessional neurotics flatter their self-love by giving them the illusory belief that they are better than other people by virtue of being especially clean or especially conscientious

338. #338

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes narcissism as a structural feature of libido theory by triangulating three pathways—organic illness, hypochondria/paraphrenia, and love-life—to argue that ego-libido and object-libido are dynamically interconvertible, that primary narcissism is universal, and that the compulsion to invest in objects arises from a pathogenic surplus of ego-libido.

     or obsessional neurosis (in the case of paranoia), re-attaches the libido to objects

339. #339

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Addenda

     Theoretical move: Freud reintroduces 'defence' as the general category for all ego-protective techniques against drive demands, subsumes 'repression' as one specific mechanism, and then elaborates anxiety/fear as a signal anticipating traumatic helplessness — establishing a structural sequence: fear → danger → helplessness (trauma) that grounds the distinction between objective and neurotic fear.

     in obsessional neurosis the pathogenic events are not forgotten. They remain conscious, but are 'isolated' in some way not yet comprehensible to us

340. #340

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     IX

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that symptoms are not simply equivalent to fear but are formations that interpose a "danger situation" between anxiety and drive-pressure, functioning to extricate the ego from danger; this reframes the relationship between anxiety, symptom-formation, and defence, while ultimately confronting the unresolved question of why some fear-determinants are never relinquished and neurosis persists.

     if we stop an obsessional neurotic from washing his hands after he has touched something, he will become prey to almost unbearable fear. It is thus clear that... the obsessional procedure of hand-washing [is an] intentional – and successful – mechanism for preventing such attacks of fear.

341. #341

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     II

     Theoretical move: Freud uses the distinction between narcissistic and imitative (anaclitic) object-choice to theorize gender difference in love-life, arguing that female libidinal development tends toward intensified narcissism rather than object-love, and that parental love reveals itself as a structural repetition/resurgence of the parents' own abandoned primary narcissism.

     This sexual over-valuation gives rise to the curious condition of being in love, reminiscent of neurotic obsession

342. #342

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's and editorial notes on Freud's terminology (Angst, Trauer, Triebrepräsentanz, Inhalte, etc.), offering philological and conceptual commentary on translation choices in the Standard Edition — it is non-substantive as theoretical argument but contains minor conceptual clarifications about the Ego, Superego, Id, drives, anxiety, and repetition.

     See 'Die Disposition zur Zwangsneurose' ['The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis']

343. #343

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VI

     Theoretical move: Freud introduces two auxiliary repressive techniques specific to obsessional neurosis—obliteration and isolation—arguing that isolation's logic is ultimately grounded in a primordial taboo on touching, and closes by challenging whether castration fear alone can be the universal motor of repression, especially given women's neuroses.

     the ego is so much more a locus of symptom-formation than it is in hysteria; that it clings tenaciously to its relationship to reality and to consciousness

344. #344

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     The Ego and its Forms of Dependence

     Theoretical move: Freud argues that the superego's special severity derives from its dual origin—as the heir to the Oedipus complex and as a residue of the id's phylogenetic inheritance—and uses differential clinical presentations (negative therapeutic reaction, obsessional neurosis, melancholia, hysteria) to demonstrate how guilt-feeling, whether conscious or unconscious, operates as the superego's primary weapon against the ego, ultimately linking the superego's harshness to a harnessed death drive turned inward.

     In obsessional neurosis (or certain forms thereof), the guilt-feeling is strident in the extreme, but incapable of convincing the ego that it is justified

345. #345

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     VIII

     Theoretical move: Freud reframes anxiety as an ego-generated signal rather than a product of automatic economic discharge, and systematically maps a developmental sequence of danger situations (birth trauma → object-loss → castration → super-ego) that underlie distinct neurotic structures, while revising his earlier libido-transformation theory of anxiety.

     obsessional neurosis has a stronger affinity to maleness... fear of the super-ego in obsessional neurosis.

346. #346

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     V

     Theoretical move: Freud advances a metapsychological account of symptom-formation in conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis, arguing that the distinguishing mechanism of obsessional neurosis is libido regression to the sadistic-anal phase (driven by the castration complex against the Oedipus complex), accompanied by drive de-mergence, a uniquely harsh superego, and reaction-formations in the ego — contrasting with hysteria's simpler reliance on repression alone.

     We turn now to obsessional neurosis, in the expectation that we shall learn rather more here about symptom-formation.

347. #347

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     The Two Types of Drives

     Theoretical move: Freud recapitulates his dualistic drive theory (Eros vs. death drive), articulates their fusion and de-mergence as the dynamic mechanism underlying libidinal regression, ambivalence, and neurotic phenomena, and introduces the concept of a displaceable, desexualized narcissistic libido that operates as a qualitatively indifferent energy serving the pleasure principle across both ego and id.

     amongst the effects achieved by certain serious neuroses, e.g. the obsessional neuroses, the de-mergence of drives and the appearance of the death drive deserve special consideration

348. #348

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Truth is not a hidden surplus beyond appearance but erupts traumatically within appearance itself, and that the Kantian fear of error (keeping the Thing-in-itself at a distance from phenomena) conceals a deeper fear of Truth—a structure homologous to obsessional neurosis; Hegel's Mozartian move dissolves this economy by showing the supersensible is 'appearance qua appearance', while the Lacanian object (objet petit a / das Ding) inherits this logic: place precedes positivity, and sublimity is a structural effect, not an intrinsic quality.

     The fear of error which conceals its opposite, the fear of Truth: this Hegelian formula encapsulates perfectly the subjective position of the obsessional neurotic: the incessant procrastination, the endless precautions

349. #349

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order is constituted around an impossible Real kernel, requiring a contingent element to embody its structural necessity; this logic generates a quartet of "subject presumed to…" figures (know, believe, enjoy, desire) that articulate the unconscious as the gap between form and content—illustrated through Hitchcock and Mozart.

     His role is fundamental in obsessional neurosis: for the obsessional neurotic the traumatic point is the supposed existence, in the other, of an insupportable, limitless, horrifying Jouissance

350. #350

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The symptom's 'return of the repressed' operates from the future rather than the past — meaning is retroactively constructed through the symbolic process, not excavated from hidden depths — and this temporal paradox entails that transference is a necessary illusion through which Truth is constituted via misrecognition, a structure equally operative in historical repetition (Luxemburg, Hegel).

     the obsessional is delaying, putting off the act, waiting for the right moment, while the hysteric (so to speak) overtakes herself in her act

351. #351

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of the Graph of Desire's operation by showing that the point de capiton retroactively fixes meaning through the Master Signifier, and that this quilting operation grounds both ideology (as transferential illusion) and subjectivity (as the difference between imaginary identification with the ideal ego and symbolic identification with the ego-ideal/gaze of the Other).

     This gap can best be articulated with the help of the Hegelian couple 'for-the-other'/'for-itself: the hysterical neurotic is experiencing himself as somebody who is enacting a role for the other... the crucial break that psychoanalysis must accomplish is to induce him to realize how he is himself this other for whom he is enacting a role

352. #352

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.87

     The Philosopher's Stone > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section is bibliographic and scholarly apparatus, providing citations and brief argumentative glosses that support the chapter's main claims about idealism, materialism, and their philosophical genealogy; it is not itself a primary theoretical passage.

     Sigmund Freud, 'The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis: A Contribution to the Problem of Choice of Neurosis'

353. #353

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.176

     Alenka Zupancˇ icˇ > Notes

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes section providing scholarly apparatus (citations, bibliographic references, and brief clarifying remarks) for a chapter on sex, materialism, Laplanche, Deleuze, and Lacan; it is primarily bibliographic rather than substantively argumentative, though several notes contain compressed theoretical interventions worth tracking.

     even when we are dealing with something that appears to be repetition of the same (such as, for instance, the rituals in obsessional neurosis), we have to recognize in the element that is being repeated... the mask of a deeper repetition.

354. #354

     The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.88

     ,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Enduring the Desire of the Other

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire is constituted through the subject's encounter with the opacity of the Other's desire—Fred's bewilderment before Renee's inscrutable want is precisely what generates him as a desiring subject—and that because desire can never be articulated in a signifier without producing a further veil, fantasy serves as the necessary correlative that makes desire bearable.

     'Fred is doomed by his relationship to Renee not because of her inconsistencies but because of his obsessions.' Fred retreats from desire itself—not particularly Renee's desire.

355. #355

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.215

     <span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship

     Theoretical move: This endnote cluster clarifies several technical concepts—S(A) as signifier of the barred/lacking Other, sublimation, subjectivity vs. subjectivization, sexuation structures as strict contradictories—while defending Lacan's theoretical innovations against feminist and structuralist misreadings.

     Obsession could be offhandedly characterized as the category wherein the drives are utterly and completely desexualized (thought alone, perhaps, remaining sexualized).

356. #356

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.155

     THE PHALLUS: ONE OF W~ S PARTNERS > **The Analyst's Discourse**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Discourse of the Analyst, structured around objet petit a as agent, necessarily hystericizes the analysand by placing the divided subject on the 'firing line', forcing Master Signifiers produced through association into dialectical relation with the signifying chain — a process whose motor force is the analyst's pure desirousness.

     The analyst does not question the obsessive neurotic's theories about Dostoevsky's poetics, for example, attempting to show the neurotic where his or her intellectual views are inconsistent.

357. #357

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.115

     <span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > <span id="page-113-0"></span>**The Freudian Thing**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's object (a) is a direct theoretical translation of Freud's *das Ding*: by rendering Freudian neurons as signifiers and facilitations as signifying links, Lacan shows that the Thing is what remains isolated from the signifying chain yet is circled by it — the unsignifiable kernel within the Other that constitutes the subject as a defense against it, and whose differing primal affects (disgust vs. being-overwhelmed) provide structural diagnostic criteria distinguishing hysteria from obsession.

     obsession is variously defined in terms of a different response: pleasure, a sense of being overwhelmed, and guilt

358. #358

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.33

     <span id="page-21-0"></span>Language and Otherness > **Foreign Bodies**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the body is fundamentally "written by signifiers" — that language and the symbolic order override biological organization to produce psychosomatic symptoms, erogenous zones, and fantasies — and uses this to ground the claim that different relations to the Other (as language, demand, desire, jouissance) constitute the basis for the clinical structures.

     the different clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis, and perversion) and their subcategories (e.g., hysteria, obsession, and phobia under neurosis)

359. #359

     The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.126

     <span id="page-116-0"></span>There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship > **"There's no Such Thing** as a **Sexual Relationship"**

     Theoretical move: Lacan's formula "there's no such thing as a sexual relationship" is grounded in the claim that masculinity and femininity are defined separately and differently with respect to the symbolic order—not in relation to each other—such that each sex has a distinct mode of alienation by language and a distinct form of jouissance, making any direct complementary relation between them structurally impossible.

     This is where it appears quite clear that masculine structure is in certain respects synonymous in Lacan's work with obsessive neurosis.

360. #360

     The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.79

     Physics of the Infinite against Metaphysics of the Finite

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that comedy's formal mechanism is the sustained visibility of the split between the ego and the id (It), which is structurally produced through the comic "Character" — defined as an enjoying incarnation of a unary trait — whose passionate attachment to an object stretches and exposes the missing link between the signifier and jouissance that normally remains veiled in imaginary unity.

     what first comes to mind in the context of contemporary comedy is perhaps the figure of the obsessional neurotic, such as one finds in some of the better Woody Allen movies

361. #361

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.257

     29 > **27. Alain Resnais between the Present and the Past**

     Theoretical move: This footnote apparatus advances two theoretical moves: (1) it deploys the concepts of fantasy, desire, and the Subject Supposed to Know to analyze Resnais's treatment of historical memory and trauma; and (2) it introduces shame as structurally tied to the concealment-gesture of fantasizing, extending the ethics of fantasy into Wenders's filmmaking.

     the obsessional feels shame with the revelation of bathroom activity because this activity has a libidinal charge.

362. #362

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.47

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Župančič reads Nietzsche's 'ascetic ideal' and the Protestant Reformation through Lacanian categories—especially the shift from the Discourse of the Master to the Discourse of the University—to argue that 'slave morality' names not the oppressed but a new form of mastery that legitimates itself through knowledge, and that the ascetic ideal (far from being obsolete) is the very invention of enjoyment as something beyond the pleasure principle.

     This undoubtedly plays its part in modern obsessional neurosis (and anxiety), where the critical moments that have to be avoided at any price are precisely the moments of cessation or discontinuity, of pause, of time 'not filled,' of silence.

363. #363

     Theory Keywords · Various

     **Fantasy** > **Gap**

     Theoretical move: The passage establishes 'Gap' as a structural concept operative at two levels: in Freud, gaps in consciousness necessitate positing the unconscious as the connective tissue between disconnected psychical acts; in Zižek, gaps in reality itself (via a Gnostic ontology) reveal that the real is never fully constituted, haunted by unrealized virtual possibilities — cinema being the privileged art form that exposes this incompleteness.

     everything described as a psychical symptom or an obsession in the sick

364. #364

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.135

     **THAT OBSCURE OBJECT**

     Theoretical move: The passage traces a Freudian-Lacanian theory of the drive's object through ethnographic and clinical material, arguing that the partial objects (feces, money, gift, baby, penis) form an interchangeable series grounded in anal erotism, and that Lacan's objet petit a — as always-already lost — is the structural culmination of this series, introducing castration as the condition of any object relation.

     the glasses play an important role in his obsession with an unpayable debt and an anal torture

365. #365

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.158

     From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel > Chapter 4

     Theoretical move: This passage (a footnotes section) does substantial theoretical work by triangulating Lacan, Freud, Deleuze, and Laplanche around the death drive, repetition, and the materiality of the unconscious, arguing that the unconscious as "founding negativity" is what makes possible both the structural function of repression and the discursive proliferation of sexuality—a point Foucault misses by omitting the concept of the unconscious entirely.

     even when we are dealing with something that appears to be repetition of the same (such as, for instance, the rituals in obsessional neurosis)