The End of Analysis and the Issue of Man-Woman as Sexual Values

MARTINS CONSIDERA Isabel

The starting point for our paper is a hypothesis, which could also be a subtitle for it. It is something that was taken from the last lessons from Lacan’s XVIII Seminar, i.e., that the boundaries for the Real in the analysis experience, the role of the analyst is to detach the function introduced by a woman.

The point we would like to make can be summarized as follows: how, during the process of analysis, can an analyst get to the point of being discoursively situated so as to operate towards detaching such a function which is introduced by a woman?

In which stage of discoursive advance is it necessary to be so that this logical question is present in the analysis experience? Where to allocate such a question? Why have we said that such a function is to be detached by the analyst provided that the interrogants pointing to the end of analysis be present? And why is it a function that is foreclosed in other discourses including the psychoanalysis one? That is what we are trying to deal with in our paper?

The first requirement for such a question to be posed is that we are dealing with a speaking subject. By speaking subject we mean the one who speaks during the analysis, the one who begins to have an idea of how much he or she submits him/herself to the jouissance effects aroused by the signifier in the language or, posing the matter in another way, in the speech of the one who speaks, the phallus as signifier has a function. Such a position the subject finds him/herself immersed into can only be achieved by means of its construction during the analysis itself which renders the one who speaks capable of distancing him/herself from what he/she captures as jouissance in the Other’s desire becoming, thus, able to question him/herself about his/her own way of functioning, i.e., his/her symptom while it revealed itself as a pattern of jouissance in the unconscious and to begin hearing something of what he/she speaks, or rather, of what he says when he speaks.

It is because the analytical task is related to the phallic function concerning the one who speaks at the boundaries of such a function and it is due to the uneasiness that the speaking subject undergoes that we experience, at this stage of an analytical process, what Lacan formulates as a logical and grammatical matter: there is no sexual relationship.

This grammatical assertion has a logical range that can be located within the Sexuation Table next to the proposition formulas to the left, i.e., on the masculine position. Throughout this pathway of articulation, of the logical and the necessary, the one who speaks in the analytical process faces the logical category of the impossible, i.e., that there is no sexual relationship as long as it is impossible to write, i.e., not to cease not writing.

Why cannot one cease not writing? Because there is no inscription in the unconscious of the Man-Woman difference. Since Freud it is known that the libidos is masculine and that boys and girls share the same position concerning the phallus as absence of a penis in the mother. Thus, it is via the Phallus as a signifier that one gets to the logical question of having and being, a question one can only have access to by means of discoursive operations. Lacan deals with this logic in The Meaning of Phallus and in other seminars. It is the edge of the discoursive advances, which is situated in-between the hysterical discourse and the master’s one, where the phallus has a function due to what is hidden in the feminine mysteries. It is a point where, in the relationship between the sexes, as a structure the man betrays if a woman is related to the phallus in the sense that she gives, in love, something she does not possess. At the same time the woman is unfaithful to her one and only man. Freud locates such a question in terminable and interminable analysis, in terms of fear to passivity, from the part of the man and penis envy, from the part of the woman.

As we have already pointed out, this is a discursive limit one gets to in the analytical process. A point of failure as to the phallus as an organ, due to the signifier coming to scene as the cause of the effects of the jouissance. This makes a difference as to where the subject situates him/herself in relation to castration, whether in terms of impotence/omnipotence that keeps the unifying jouissance, or by means of the logical category of the impossible, where the subject realizes that he/she does not have the organ that would make the One of the unifying jouissance in the conjunction of subjects of opposite genders, since what can be found there is an incommensurability.

Having reached where we are, the point is: how does one make the bet again, i.e., how can one launch the a again, which is what let us go on and operate in the process of analysis? At this point we come to the hypothesis we have discussed in our paper. In the XV Seminar Lacing says that this point, where those who listen to as analysts are involved, is the only living point in the process of analysis because it can imply consequences to the praxis. He also says that analysts have moved back when faced to it, what has kept the praxis away from its consequences. It is a point where analysts are strongly questioned as to the function of Subject presumed Knowledge, a function that can put the transference effects in various discourses in order, for the things that the knowledge constructs have already been known by someone else.

Lacan says that the SpK on which the analyst must rely on to fall off, to ‘de-be’ from being, once the analyst cannot be it has been kept away from the analyses. The analysts have kept themselves attached to the logics stream, which keeps the SpK away for pointing out the mastery, or to the hysterics stream, which keeps it attached to a fallacy. The analysts who listen have moved back when facing their act and have regarded the SpK issue as superfluous, as scientists would do, or have kept it away, as logicians would do, or put some music around it, becoming its representative, as a philosopher would do. They only have not taken it as support for their act.

On the other hand, Lacan says that, at this point, logics can both hide the incommensurability, if it takes the place of truth, and can help prevent confusions as to the analyst status. That has been this way for logics only presents itself and is established from a very articulated definition, where it can show us what lacks. He adds that the point where logics can help the analyst is the one where it can get rid of the SpK, which is exactly in the form of the trace of what is called mathematical logics. There is something, there, where, according to Lacan, one can find the tracing of what is posed to the analyst in terms of the point where it must be situated for his/her act. A point, which has to do with, the dimension of truth but if logics go towards the truth in order to have something changed.

This point is the moment when those who listen as analysts have moved backwards in making the cut with the ties of the verbal nucleus of I, a point where Lacan says that the analyst slides as a and comes back to the spherical world whereas, as Lacan stresses, the world is toric. It is necessary to launch the a again towards the function of the written, as long as it has something to do with the Lacanian Real, which goes in the direction, not of putting the relation into question by means of the propositions from the masculine side, via the phallus as signifier, by which the category of the impossible is reached, i.e., the sexual relationship cannot cease not being written; but rather, in the direction of questioning the Phallus, in terms of its truth condition. Such an interrogation of the truth condition of the Phallus, which has to do with the formulas situated on the right side of, the feminine side of the Sexuation Table, questions the value of the Phallus as a tool, as a calamus.

In order that the questions that have to do with the truth condition of the Phallus may arise for the one who speaks in an analytical process it is mandatory that the analyst gives the support which will allow the written to have a function, related to the truth dimension, as tracing, at the point where, in the mathematical logics field, the logics, by not succeeding in keeping the SpK away, points to us where the analyst is situated for his/her act, a point where there is something of the feminine function to be detached, in the pathway of the Real, which differs from the pathway of the feminine mysteries.

Lacan says that the woman function can only be detached in what a mathematician calls for in terms of multiunity. This request arises, according to Lacan, from the moment when the tracing proved necessary for the Euclidian demonstration, such a necessity for a tracing made the mathematical thinking a difficult one and based on this assumption everybody went mad because they did not know whether the triangle to be traced is a generic one or a particular one? The function that the above-mentioned multiunity has is to know that the Father is there. The Father is there in his radical function, in the function that the multiunity has, from where the woman function can be detached.

As we have said, throughout the formulas from the woman side, it is the Phallus that is being questioned I its truth condition, it is questioned by means of the function of the written, which situates it as a tool concerning the jouissance of the Real, which is made up by the effect of letters that return in the repressed signifier and make tracings. One can make a turn around the Real that permeates every hole I the various discourses concerning the sexual values that are Man-Woman related to the value of the jouissance of the Phallus as a signifier in the language. It is a place where the convenience policy concerning the jouissance has kept all of us mute, maintaining, thus, the desire in a certain way tied to the signifier Name-of-the-Father while it is equivalent to the Phallus. A woman, in the sense that she is not-wholly phallic jouissance, is capable of writing what can be inscribed just because of her not being, and that is exactly the discoursive function that a woman introduces if the analyst supports to the ‘de-being’ of the Subject presumed Knowledge at this discoursive point. It is such a Real jouissance made up by the effect of letters that decides the praxis, in the sense that it is to have consequences in terms of changes in the Real jouissance that permeates the holes in the discourses, provided that the analyst presents him/herself for the act.

It is only there that there is a change, not a recovery of the jouissance in the sense that one is capable of getting away from it, which is primeval in what concerns the Real Father in its structure and which has kept the knot of the symbolic concerning the matter of Name-of-the-Father equivalent to the Phallus. Such an operation is situated in-between the discourses from the master and from the analyst, i.e., at the point where the logics if it does not covers the dimension of the truth, locates, according to the mathematical field, the point of the tracing where the analyst must be in order to detach the function that can be introduced by a woman.

If something is written in a mathematical field, which is not a mere one, once the logics underlying the castration is related to the impossibility of writing the sexual relation once it does not cease of not writing itself, it can only be something related to the contingent, on the feminine side, in the sense that it does not cease of not writing itself. That something is written is a statement that opens into two directions. In one direction letters are powdered which revolve around what one tries to be, in the place of the maternal jouissance, unifying jouissance, according to the Father’s signifiers, i.e., the symbolic deal is thus challenged which allows for some realization in the human community, which has to do with the function of the sacred but which in the Symbolic keeps the desire tied to the compulsion of destiny as jouissance of the Real where and with which a detachment can be made with the way the subject has been writing letters, making relations where there are none. In the other direction the letters that do not give consistence to be, for they cannot be written, are the ones that renders the analyst the authority to sustain his/her praxis, i.e., his/her act, which is to give support to the SpK for its ‘de-being.’

This function, which a woman introduces, is foreclosed in other discourses, even in the psychoanalytical one, and it is only the analyst who can detach it, by means of discoursive operations, which has to do with the crucial points for the end of the analysis for Lacan, i.e., which has to do with the Lacanian Real, with shifting the jouissance of the Real that permeates the holes in the master’s discourse and levels our desire, jouissance of the Real, which can be changed by means of discoursive operations. It is, thus, a jouissance of the Real that decides the praxis considering that it is to have consequences. In short, the function that a woman introduces is the heterosexuality, both for one gender and for the other.