In psychoanalysis, the body coincides neither with the biological organism nor with the ego’s specular image. Rather, it is a speaking body, marked by language and jouissance. This text explores how jouissance becomes inscribed in the body, producing clinical effects that exceed any normative or adaptive interpretation.

Written on the body is a secret code, visible
only under certain conditions of light;
what has accumulated over a lifetime can be found there.
In some places, the palimpsest is so deeply engraved that the letters
can be felt by touch,
as though written in Braille.
I prefer to keep my body folded away,
protected from prying eyes.

Jeanette Winterson

Body and jouissance

While science deals with the organism, and therefore with the organs that constitute the biological aspects of the body, psychoanalysis approaches the body differently.

In issue 44 of the journal La Cause freudienne, devoted to Events of the Body, Jacques-Alain Miller specifies that the organism supports two distinct bodies: the body of knowledge, which knows what must be done to survive, the body of organs treated by medicine; and the libidinal body, the body of jouissance, which is the one that concerns psychoanalysis.

Perhaps the discovery of the unconscious and of psychoanalysis itself would not have been possible had Freud not taken an interest in what hysterical patients had to say about their bodies. These were bodies of which his patients spoke, bodies afflicted by a “singular truth”, bodies spoken through words.

Through his patients, Freud discovered that the hysterical body did not conform to the anatomical or neurological knowledge with which he himself, as a neurologist, was thoroughly familiar. It was this listening that enabled Freud to discover the process of repression, to develop the concept of the unconscious, and to recognise the role of trauma insofar as trauma leaves traces on the body.

Through the hysterical symptom, Freud was able to demonstrate that the signifier, as a symbolic element, marks the body.

What, then, becomes of speech? What is the connection between language and the body? Between the writing that takes place through speech and the language of hysterical patients, which inscribes its hieroglyphs upon the body itself?

Freud began to question the relationship between language and the body, and the functioning of speech in psychic life. The emergence of psychoanalysis dissolved the theatre of hysteria staged by Charcot at the Salpêtrière. Freud sought the answer to the mystery of the hysteric’s speaking body within the field of the unconscious.

No longer a public stage, but a private theatre unfolding on an Other Scene. The hysterical symptom is, first and foremost, a message addressed to the Other, who receives it and gives it meaning.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud invites us to pay attention to what is expressed in discourse concerning the body: “I have a lump in my throat”, “my nerves are on edge”, “I have a weight on my stomach”, to mention only a few examples.

And how many questions arise whenever we are confronted with the fragility of our own bodies? Whenever a rupture tears us away from an achieved state of homeostasis?

Each time the armour provided by the Symbolic falters, there emerges the affect par excellence: anxiety.

For Freud, the body in psychoanalysis is therefore a body animated by libido and the drives, marked by the signifier. His treatment of hysterical patients led him to recognise the limits of healing through words, prompting him to elaborate his second topography — Ego, Id and Superego — and the concept of the death drive beyond the pleasure principle.

With Lacan

Lacan, for his part, never ceased questioning the interweaving of the body and words. His interest focused above all on the effects produced in a living, sexed body by the fact of being speaking and mortal.

In The Signification of the Phallus (1958), he states that what interests him is not so much the relationship between human beings and language as a social phenomenon, but rather the possibility of identifying, within the laws underlying the Other Scene — that of the unconscious — the effects of language that determine the constitution of the subject.

His teaching explores two dimensions: that of meaning, concerning the subject of the unconscious and involving the Symbolic and the Imaginary; and that of jouissance, which concerns the body and belongs to the Real.

The Real is the third register, alongside the Symbolic and the Imaginary. It is the register of the unsayable, where the signifier is reduced to a letter, outside meaning.

What, then, can be said about the concept of jouissance?

In Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), Lacan develops a definition of jouissance through a return to Freud’s concept of the death drive, described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

In that work, Freud isolates the destructive and silent component that tends to repeat itself, beyond the logic of the pleasure principle.

Lacan takes up this concept and introduces a paradigmatic shift, moving from the unconscious structured like a language to the concept of jouissance as irreducible to desire.

The irreducibility of jouissance derives from the fact that jouissance comes from the Thing.

Whereas desire occupies a dialectical position — as the desire of the Other — jouissance remains autistically fixed upon the Thing and, for this reason, remains irreducible in relation to the desire of the Other.

Desire, in fact, through the signifying action of the Other upon the subject, empties the body of jouissance and establishes the subject as a lack-of-being. It thus constitutes the subject as divided, structured around this necessary, originary loss.

Jouissance, by contrast, is structured around the Thing, which in Freud is das Ding, the object of mythical satisfaction, lost through primal repression.

For Lacan, the Thing is absolute jouissance, always already lost, because it is erased precisely where it is inscribed.

This is a jouissance that cannot be entirely transformed into a symbol or an utterance. It remains localised in the body, leading Lacan to conceive of the symbolic Other as itself lacking, marked by a constitutive absence.

This condition is universal in the sense that, for everyone, beyond clinical structures, there is something unsayable, something that cannot be symbolised.

It is precisely in this sense that Miller speaks of “generalised foreclosure” and of a “restricted supplementation” (Miller, 2001, p. 193).

The former responds to the impossibility, for human beings, of becoming one with the Other and overcoming their lack-of-being.

The latter consists in the effort to compensate for the rejection of the signifier that would guarantee the stability of language. Supplementation thus becomes a subjective means of preventing a psychotic triggering in subjects who cannot rely upon the Oedipal solution.

Today, more than a century after the birth of psychoanalysis, we live in a globalised society in which the modern subject becomes generalised, standardised and dissolved within the proliferation of lifestyles, dispossessed of the jouissance associated with the drive objects that concern the body.

With Jacques Lacan, the body is investigated through three fundamental registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

The body as an enigma

As I mentioned earlier, the body presents itself as an enigma. Having a body raises questions. Human beings become entangled with their own bodies and, at the same time, experience a certain “captivation” by them.

It is in his 1975 Seminar, The Sinthome, that Lacan states:

“The speaking being adores his body because he believes he possesses it. In reality, he does not possess it, because the body, his only consistency — a mental consistency, of course — continually escapes him. It is already quite miraculous that it persists throughout the entire process of its deterioration” (p. 66).

Because the body eludes us, because it escapes our grasp, something is needed to hold it together. A principle of articulation, an anchoring point, is necessary to sustain the body’s consistency.

Lacanian psychoanalysis identifies three essential ways of approaching the body. It begins with the Imaginary, through the mirror stage, which functions as a principle of consistency, conferring unity upon the initially uncoordinated infant and organising its relationship with the world and its objects.

To the imaginary body, Lacan articulates the symbolic body, that of language, before arriving at the real body, which refers to jouissance.

With Lacan, we must consider the dimension of the signifier as Real in its encounter with the body. A body that “enjoys itself”, an enigmatic body.

Something of this can be heard in the words of those who, faced with an experience by which they feel overwhelmed, declare: “It’s stronger than me” or “I can’t do otherwise.”

To put it another way, how does the parlêtre, the speaking being, construct a body? What relationship does it maintain with its own body?

For psychoanalysis, the body is spoken by the signifiers specific to each subject. The construction of the body is the singular effect of the interweaving of words and body for each individual, in their uniqueness, as an effect of the resonance of the signifier upon the body.

From the encounter between the signifying structure and the body, a loss is produced: something becomes detached from the body, something Lacan calls object a.

To the Freudian objects — oral, anal and genital — Lacan adds the voice and the gaze as objects.

In Seminar XI, he indicates that this object a, around which the drive makes its circuit, is nothing other than an emptiness, a hole that can be occupied by any object.

Object a creates a hole in the body. It must be conceived as a lost object because, however much one tries, this lack can never be completely filled: eating everything, seeing everything, understanding everything…

It therefore occupies a particular position: sometimes within the body, sometimes outside it. It is what is most intimate to us and, at the same time, most foreign — extimate.

The analytic experience

The analytic experience is an experience of speech that takes place in the presence of two bodies: that of the analysand and that of the analyst.

The engagement of speech within this experience reveals the disjunction between the body as a body of jouissance, speech and being.

What can be glimpsed through this experience sometimes allows a surprise to emerge, opening the possibility of a renewed relationship with life.

In Seminar VII, Lacan speaks of the psychoanalyst’s “non-desire to cure”. What does this mean?

Perhaps it means that, for the analyst, the incurable and the impossible are not conditions to be defeated.

The analyst has learned, through their own experience as an analysand, that one cannot be cured of the human condition.

For Lacanian psychoanalysis, the subject is not the result of the sum of memory traces. Rather, the subject emerges from possible equivocations, from the slips and stumbling points of linguistic experience.

In his later teaching, Lacan emphasises an unconscious that operates like a memory composed of discontinuous points, cuts and ruptures that act directly upon the body.

We thus move from the unconscious structured like a language to the parlêtre, a neologism coined by Lacan to condense into a single word the indissoluble relationship between the human being, language and the drive.

With Lacan, the incurable ceases to be understood as a failure and comes instead to be recognised as each subject’s singular way of being in the world.