Originary Plenitude

Originary Plenitude names the retroactively constructed image of a state of wholeness, completeness, or satisfaction that the subject fantasizes as having existed before some constitutive loss. It is not a description of any actual prior condition but a structural fiction produced by fantasy itself: fantasy's "fundamental deception" is precisely this — it generates the image of plenitude in order to narrate loss as contingent rather than necessary, as something that happened to the subject rather than something that constitutes it. The concept thus belongs to the psychoanalytic account of how the subject misrecognizes its own structural lack: by positing an originary state that was full and then taken away, the subject (and by extension ideology) converts the irreducible gap that is constitutive of subjectivity into a story of deprivation with an implied remedy.

This retroactive construction is the conceptual hinge on which fantasy turns as a political and epistemological operator. If lack were understood as primordial and irreducible — as Lacan insists — then no recovery of a prior state of being would be thinkable or desirable. Originary Plenitude is the specific image-content that fantasy installs to prevent that recognition: it gives the subject something to mourn and, crucially, something to strive to recover, thereby sustaining desire within a narrative of loss-and-potential-restoration. McGowan's argument in the source text (enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan) is that Western philosophy has taken this image at face value and criticized fantasy for propagating it, whereas psychoanalysis reveals the image to be fantasy's own product — which opens the possibility of a different, non-recuperative relationship to fantasy itself.

Within enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, the concept of Originary Plenitude occupies a pivotal diagnostic role: it is identified as the specific content that Fantasy produces when it functions deceptively — i.e., when it operates ideologically rather than as a site of potential political transformation. The concept is therefore a specification of Fantasy: it names not what fantasy is structurally (the formula $◇a) but what fantasy does representationally when it conceals rather than exposes the constitutive role of Lack. As the cross-referenced synthesis of Fantasy explains, fantasy is the screen that "conceals the Real" by papering over "the constitutive impossibility of the sexual relationship"; Originary Plenitude is the precise image-content of that screen — the "structured fiction" that gives the covering operation its narrative form.

The concept also bears directly on the cross-referenced notions of Lack, Lost Object, Alienation, and Ideology. Lacan insists that "nothing in the real is missing" and that lack is strictly an effect of signification — it is produced by the symbolic order, not suffered as the loss of some anterior fullness. Originary Plenitude is precisely the image that fantasy generates to deny this: it reframes structural, constitutive Lack as the contingent loss of a Lost Object, and thereby keeps the subject striving for a recuperation that is structurally impossible. This also aligns with the account of Ideology given in the cross-references: ideology requires fantasy as a supplement to paper over social antagonism, and the fantasy of Originary Plenitude is the privileged ideological narrative that makes the antagonism appear as a remediable wound rather than an irreducible condition. McGowan's intervention is to argue that psychoanalysis, by exposing Originary Plenitude as fantasy's own retroactive construction, does not simply debunk fantasy but opens a transformed relation to it — one that does not seek to recover what was never there.

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of PsychoanalysisTodd McGowan · 2013 (p.213)

fantasy's fundamental deception consists in its constituting an image of originary plenitude that the subject has lost.

The phrase "fundamental deception" is theoretically loaded because it locates the problem not in any particular fantasy's content but in the structural operation fantasy performs: "constituting an image" — that is, retroactively producing, rather than passively representing, the fiction of "originary plenitude." The word "originary" is critical: it marks the temporal claim (prior to loss) that the image makes, which is precisely what converts irreducible structural Lack into an apparently contingent deprivation of a Lost Object, thereby sustaining the subject's hope of recovery and the ideological promise-structure that accompanies it.