Symbolic Debt

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (4)

1. #01

   Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.219

   **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.

   the Rat Man, saddled with guilt and other negative consequences of his father's financial and romantic misdeeds, can be said to be a son who pays dearly with his pathology-crippled life for the unpaid debts and various transgressions of his paternal progenitor

2. #02

   Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.224

   **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.

   the superego and the negative affects it produces are incarnations of some of what this section's title, 'symbolic debt,' designates.

3. #03

   Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.234

   **12**

   Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's reinterpretation of the Scholastic formula *adaequatio rei et intellectus* via homophony transforms truth-as-adequation into truth-as-symbolic-debt, making the analysand's unconscious accountability to the Freudian Thing (das Ding / la Chose) the telos of analytic termination rather than a reification of the object.

   the symbolic debt for which the subject is responsible as a subject of speech… the ways in which speech is able to recover the debt it engenders

4. #04

   Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.378

   The Freudian Thing > *The Thing's Order* > *Symbolic Debt*

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's neurotic suffering is constituted by a symbolic debt inscribed through broken promises, false words, and misrecognized law—not by imaginary or real deprivations—and that psychoanalysis must reorient itself toward this dimension of speech and the symbolic chain rather than toward ego-level resistance analysis.

   the symbolic debt for which the subject is responsible as a subject of speech