A mourning logic after Lacan/p>

DREIZZEN Adriana

Man always carries out his desire through any opening of the limit

By the name of the work we could assume it is possible to think about a mourning logic before and after Lacan. In fact, although we do not find what could be strictly called a Lacanian mourning theory, I think that the developments he proposes in several of his seminars -some of them based on the invention created by him-, the object a, provide the logic coordinates to walk through the rut of the clinic of mourning which had been opened by Freud.

One of the ways to be considered is the one concerning to the subjectiving function of mourning. It involves the essential importance attached to the elaboration of the loss in order for it to become a re-register of the gap would have been caused to the subject at his constitution.

When the work of mourning is prevented, it is frequent that several clinical phenomena become apparent, such as hallucinations, acting outs, repeated actings, the start of some kind of addiction, psychosomatic phenomena, frequently clouded by a melancholic characteristic. The work of elaboration entails recalling, dreams, parapraxis, which are related to the loss suffered. This is a set of unconscious formations which indicate a considerable binding effort undertaken by the psychic apparatus through which a significant recomposition -efficient to focus the gap, name it and favor the repositioning of the subject in the phantasy- takes place.

I place Lacan's first thoughts and developments about the subject matter of that mourning prevented or stopped in its elaboration time in the seminar VI, "Desire and its interpretation" and in VII "Psychoanalysis ethics". The tragic end of the young characters in Hamlet and Antigone serve as plot in the mentioned seminars to analyze the deadly consequences of the abolition of the possibility of mourning.

In the Shakespeare's drama, Prince Hamlet's father is killed by his brother Claudius, who immediately after gets married with his sister-in-law and usurps the kingdom. The exequies of the dead king receive minimal funeral rites, and this is what ironically says Hamlet with these eloquent words: "The funeral food has been used for the wedding banquet".

Antigone's speech, which reveals the urgency to bury her brother, refers to the ethical value concerning to the survivor of not giving up the undertaking when faced to the impediment to bury the deceased's body. It exemplarily reflects the characteristic of unique object that a loved one has for the survivor, independently from any value or moral judgment that can be made on his person. In this tragedy, the character of uniqueness lies, as the young woman eloquently expresses it, in that as her father and mother are dead she will not be able to have another brother. She has lost something irreplaceable, and in order to register her passage through the world, it is absolutely essential for her to fulfill the rituals needed for the mourning. Burying him is a way of naming him, thus re-giving him the human identity that any mortal being deserves. This is what makes the relatives register the loss as a lack.

How can we think about the sacrificial price -to deliver up life- that both young persons, Hamlet and Antigone, pay; the one searching for the revenge of his father's homicide and the other for supporting the ethical commitment of burying Polynices' remains? What clinical implications can we deduct in order that a significant loss do not affect a subject with a lethal weight but, on the contrary, be the occasion, the exquisite propitiatory opportunity for his remarkable nomination as a subject?

We understand that Lacan proposes a particular operation to elaborate mourning which consists in making to coincide the slit opened by the mourning -which he had called a whole in the real- with the great slit, the x point, the symbolic lack.

The spectral disaster that any mourning entails in the structure, re-sends the subject to make available the operation which establishes the register of the gap, because a lack originated in the preceding time can be an answer to the lack generated by the following time.

In the seminar X, about "Anxiety", Lacan re-works the subject matter of mourning, but now from what is already outlined as his invention -the object a. This theoretical contribution, an object named by a letter, allows us to think about the logic of a subjective commitment when faced to a loss. The object a which oscillates between the "plus of enjoyment" and "object lack", is the theoretical resource which allows us to travel through the letters withheld in a devastating enjoyment and to recover the position of a desiring subject. When finishing this seminar, Lacan proposes -whether the object a functions or not in the structure- two possible cycles for the subject: a propitiatory one, which he calls mourning-desire, and another combined in the ends of the mania-melancholia. This hypothesis gives us clues to think about the setting up of the ideal ego and the narcissism in this latter clinical entity, issue that I will not deal with this time.

From the last seminars, particularly XX, "Still", Lacan proposes a contact with the enjoyment which contemplates the logic of the supplementary. Regarding the subject matter of mourning, where a real loss has happened, we can suppose that a logic of the supplementary, could explain an operation different from the mere substitution of the object lost. In the classical Freudian text "Mourning and melancholy", the times for the mourning are related to the possibility of recognizing the loved absence, to the elaboration of the loss step by step until its ending, when the libido unbound from the lost object returns to the ego to cover new objects. Then these steps contain a substitution logic. No doubt, the times for the mourning are related to the elaboration of the loss and to the substitution of the lost object by other love objects. The logic of the supplementary contemplates the alternative for the subject to find the letters for some writing of his own in the signifier re-composition pertaining to the elaboration of the loss. Where the object is irreplaceable, to supplement the loss opens the way to a new contact with the gap, with the lack of a signifier in the Other, a route of access towards a sublimatory horizon.

I will finish this by citing a clinic excerpt referred to a young woman. Some years ago, when she consulted, she described a state of deep sadness and lack of interest. She had suddenly lost her mother in her first childhood due to an automobile accident. She remembers that when faced to the family disaster, neither her elder brothers nor her father took the "care" to explain her what had happened. She abruptly went from the place of "the smallest and most favorite daughter of an old mother, to the one of an orphan who was suddenly deprived from the cares". To the previously described symptoms, periods of severe anorexia added in the crucial moments of her life: shortly before graduating, before going abroad for a scholarship, before getting married. So, she expects more attention from the ones who surrounded her and also from the psychologist. She defines these episodes as "the daughter comes over me", thus referring to her asking "for more cares" as related to the moment she felt she had been deprived from them. Most of her analysis was related to said irreparable mourning, going through the elaboration times previously described. Later, she was mother, something she wished but feared, and she could leave the place of "daughter" behind. Later on, within the framework of her profession, she started a research which lead her to specialize and write about issues related to the "cares" and ways to assist needy children.

As we proposed previously, the concept of supplementary allows us to think about a logic where mourning is not resolved in an endless substitution of objects. On the contrary it enables the ways of desire, thus favoring a creation act in the subject.

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