THE UNCONSCIOUS PRONUOUNCES A RADICAL UNKNOWN

MERONI Maria del Carmen

There has never been an initial satisfaction of the drive, which goes over its circuit shaping the human body in the field of the Subject. There is no other possible body if these circuits are not printed. The construction of a Demand on the field which will be the field of the Other can not be avoided.
It is neither possible that this circuit obtains a satisfaction which does not reproduce its own unbalance. Freud wrote in 1915: the pressure is constant, the source is never cancelled, the object could always not be. It is not possible to look at something looking at one's own eyes at the same time, it is not possible to kiss something kissing one's own lips at the same time, it is not possible to seize something without inevitably interpreting what has been said about the way of seizing the members of a body that will later be called "one's own".
The Demand of the Other in the field of the Subject is built by Lacan on the thesis of primitive erogenous masochism to which Freud arrived in 1924, a masochism which already was, for Freud, a construction of the Subject leaning on the original defenseless of the human body. Lacan points out in it the satisfaction which is never complete in the field of the Other to give reason for the difference of the sexes (an issue brought about by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), and he overprints this remark to the inconveniences which are found in the metapsychological text on the Drives (where are those eyes that look, if they do not coincide with what is given to be seen?, why would the muscles want to dominate those members of a body?), this text is five years previous to the Death Drive, that can be read then as the repetition of a lack which reminds of the existence of the field of the Other, built as a failure each time, in the attempt to fill it up.
The drive as grammar of the Demand (the grammar of a language is what makes it not to be an inarticulate set of words) can only be formulated reading as nobody had done it before Lacan did it, the Freud of 1920-24 applied on the Freud of 1915, and even on that of 1905 in the Three Essays.
The Other that can not be grasped completely because it is not One (the unceasing passion for the signifier), and the "a" always ungraspable (there is not erogenous circulation that can hold it completely), these are two of the elements produced by Lacan that are not in Freud, but do not exist without Freud.
Well, now then, what has psychoanalysis won, with all this? What action, what tool, didn't the psychoanalysts dispose of before Lacan progressed on this issue as from Freud, beyond Freud?
I do anticipate then a clinical thesis: what is impossible to try to find again because it was never found, what the unconscious takes as the representation of a failure in the encounter with the Other, and the erogeneous circuit of the drives repeats as a satisfaction which is never complete, it is all very different if it is treated as the misfortune that with the castration anxiety and the envy for the penis one will always try to cancel, that is to say the Destiny of the neurosis itself, than if the same thing is faced as the possibility of building up the acknowledgement of a radical gap, acknowledgement that could stop the passion which the Subject of the Freudian castration complex becomes obstinate with.
If the drive is ultimately Death Drive (this finding was only produced due to the jump of Lacan over Freud from 1920-24 towards 1915 and even farther back), then the signifier insistence in the disencounter which the desire promotes and also claims for so not to vanish, and the reiteration of the drive's run, not sufficient to capture the object which is built in its circuit, could take the value of a precious tool and not of an unfortunate obstacle (as the neurotic, himself, believes).
A short account will try to show the clinical incidence of this reading.
It refers to a woman in analysis, about forty years old, who is married (for both of them it is the second marriage) to a man that seems to her a swindler, a recurrent liar, whom she can never unmask, he pretends, he hides, he evades (lovers, money, etc.). He is an economist linked in that moment of Argentina to president Menem's government, whose reputation of cheating, swindle and corruption not previously known in public life, for his government and for himself, is specially shocking for this woman who was at the time a militant member of the government party. Her father had been a peronist. Perón founded in 1945 the political Movement which president Menem headed by then. A "historic" peronist from the glorious times of peronism, her father was an unconditional admirer of Perón's brilliant "quickness" to seduce both the oppressed workers and the conservative Armed Forces (in a postwar period of economical magnificence for capitalism in Argentina, it is necessary to say).
Frequently, the fantasy of the inexhaustible quickness did not work so well: when the parents could not pay the grocer's bill they owed, they sent her to ask for more "credit" and she avoided, when it was possible, to walk in front of that grocer's doing a long way round to cover up the shame for her father which she remembers vividly. She is, of course, an expert in shaping her semblance: wigs, false eyelashes, decorated nails.
Her mother could show herself as charming and funny, the center of the parties, she had been an actress when she was young and she told anecdotes about her nomad childhood through several countries (her parents acted in circuses), stories about which one never knew to what extent they were "ornamented", or directly invented, but this mother also had severe depressions, complete days in bed and nobody knew very well why, and then the whole house was a disorganized body. Nothing had a fix place, except for my patient's maternal grandmother (who lived with them). This grandmother was always ill in her bedroom, the only tidy and ornamented room with carpet and pictures. It "seems" (my patient was a six years old girl) that one day she took too many tranquilizers together, may be by mistake, and killed herself. There were some written papers, letters (may be a posthumous revealing letter?, she does not know, she never asked), but her mother, this elderly woman's daughter, destroyed them all.
Thus, that girl today in her forties, married to the swindling economist, discovers inevitably (despite all her efforts not to find out, to get confused, and that the swindler continues to be "unchargeable to" as she said), that this man had invested 300.000 dollars, which he administered for a close friend, in financial businesses in Mexico, that the Tequila effect had liquefied some months ago that money and he had not told his friend that the money did not exist any more and that there was no way to replace it quickly. The friend, without knowing anything, had just bought a property counting on that money, and he needed the money to pay for it. He burst into the house furious and she could not help learning all about it.
Not to find out about something hidden, to put up with those lies about what he did know very well, is now revealed to this woman as the configuration of her passion for ignorance. But up to here it refers to concealment and lie. The cathartic indignation announces the anxiety that does not take long to appear. She pursues him, she lashes him, she watches him, she wants more. If the mother had not destroyed the grandmother's papers, everything would have been clear. Her impotence and fury are endless. The man, inert, does not answer anything.
Now then, it happens a little later that the swindler's son from his first marriage (he is about fourteen years old), born with a cardiac dysfunction, must undergo a corrective surgery. In the pre-surgical evaluations, the child's blood group is tested, together with that of the father and the mother (the liar and his ex wife) as possible blood donors. My patient goes with the liar to receive the results of those routine blood analysis and there the following scene takes place: the nurse, confused and not knowing what to say, hands over the father's, mother's and child's analysis, and my patient (who has studied something about this subject), guided by the nurse's face, realizes that the blood analysis are incompatible: from the blood types of those adults it is impossible to obtain the blood type of that child. The liar does not realize anything: neither about the blood data, nor about my patient's astonishment, or about the nurse's discomfort on trying to say something and stopping abruptly. He puts all the papers together, places them in a folder, and both of them leave.
Her immediate deduction is: if the boy and the father believe that this man is the child's biological father, and this is not true, it is because the mother lied. She is sure that in this case he does not lie but that he "does not know" anything. Basing herself on some personal characteristics of the other woman (a certain sexual promiscuity which was one of the reasons for the divorce), she is sure that the child's mother knew everything from the very beginning and hid it all the time. If she tells what she "knows", she is afraid of destroying this man with the devastating news, and she can't do anything other than keep silence, furious and impotent at the same time, now even supporting the other woman's lie.
A short time after but around eight or nine months from the previous commotion with the dollars in Mexico, my patient's health starts to deteriorate. She has diarrhea and fever impossible to stop, she gets evidently very thin, the clinical index gives indication of chaos (blood, urine, faecal substance), the liver does not work, her hair falls down, her skin cracks. She is 1,70 m tall and her weight drops from almost 60 kg to 40 in two months.
The different physicians they went to during those weeks, start by searching for a lymphatic cancer, or a liver or a pancreas one (which use to have a quick development and a very bad prognosis). In the middle of this corporal marasmus that comes with her to her sessions, with incoordinated medical consultations and check ups that she left go by slowly for the quick advance of her physical deterioration, I indicated her to consult without delay a well-known gastroenterologist, who puts her into the university hospital that he heads. He suspected a cancer too, but the confinement allowed him to do coordinate and quick check ups. I visited her every day. I supported with presence and patience the course of the days in hospital in which neither her, nor me, or the famous professor whom I trusted in, knew if she could survive.
When the indicators of the searched for cancer did not appear in the check ups, this physician carried out the adequate enzymatic tests and diagnosed the late appearance (when she was forty years old!) of a celiac disease which was producing a disaster in the metabolism of food and specially in the intestinal flora. The late appearance is very strange, the disease (which is genetic, but the clinical experience gives to it predisposing factors and precipitating circumstances), shows up generally in babies, never later than the first year of age. In her state she almost no longer metabolized any food.
It is now necessary to hydrate her, to feed her by the vein and to indicate to her a strict celiac diet, that she must maintain as long as it is necessary, it is not sure if for the rest of her life. She starts to improve quickly.
What happened with the analysis then?
I propose the reading of an effect: in the field (which she disposed of) of her interpellation to medical knowledge concerning the ungovernable and arbitrary body of a woman, in the frame of the transference (questioned too by her broken body), the indication made by the analyst of that immediate consult, and the contingent finding of a curable disease, put the Unconscious to work, so that it produced an interpretation of the facts that could be pointed out in the course of the analysis.
In repeated slips in one session during her convalescence period, corrected by her each time, the name of the gastroenterologist with a changed letter is transformed into "Cindor". In Argentina, "Cindor" has been for many years the well known name of a popular chocolate milk for children. This food which is forbidden for her now, inscribes in the typically nutritious field of the primary Other, that it is not necessarily devastating, the fact that sometimes it is certainly impossible to know what happens inside a woman's body. "Cindor", the place where the Unconscious in transference sends her, points out that, there, it is not possible "from the beginning to know everything". An edge of Real created by the slip, it is not at all the same thing as a "lie".
In effect, the lie refers to a complete knowledge that is absolutely not lacking to the Other ,which is very different from not knowing, and even more, from facing something which is impossible to know. If a woman has the habit of a certain sexual promiscuity, does this prove that she "knew" the biological origin of the child or precisely that she could very well, for this reason, not know?. One thing is to hide what you know, and a very different one is to have concealed the existence of a lack of knowledge.
The Oedipus misfortune, for a woman her unfortunate certainty of not having (in this case, a possible knowledge), because it has been denied or taken away from her, here turns into an interpellation to the analyst by means of an acting-out, but precisely there a misencounter is inscribed in the supposed knowledge of the motherly Other, according to this fantasy, about life, death and sex. Fantasy of knowledge and its correlate of "lie", which also affects the male partner, with whom she can, in any case, either identify herself as her fellow creature, or question him endlessly as her Other.
The exhausting perseverance in the impotent search for the truth hidden behind the lies, could have for this woman, when the interpretation of the Unconscious in which the Other does not know has been underlined the necessary times, a different way out than the destiny of chronic reiteration of the female version of the Freudian castration complex.
The Unconscious, whose insistence does not come from the Pleasure Principle, repeats and supports the representation of a gap which the difference between the sexes makes impossible to fill up, and fixes the run of the satisfaction, never complete, which the drive demand builds up in a body. We owe to Lacan (beyond Freud, and not without Freud) the fact that it is possible nowadays to guide the analysis on this way.