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UNCONSCIOUS AND SUICIDES RATTIN Enrique In 1920, Freud set out that the discovery of unconscious desires in the suicide, should not surprise us because such desires can be found in the unconscious of all human beings. Although the suicides suffer of logic of the decision, the psychoanalyst's word can impact in the dialectical of the relationship of the subject (possible suicide) to the significant. The explanation of suicides must be searched in the corpus of the Freudian theory of the Oedipus, because what appear in the centre of the suicidal act are the aggressiveness and the identification. This is understood because the internal logic of the Oedipus contains an intolerable representation of our own death (castration) and the love-hate toward the Otherness. In 1920, Freud said that: "Indeed, the psychoanalysis has found an explanation for the suicide's enigma, who is going to commit suicide, maybe is not going to find the psychic energy, if he first of all, does not kill an object with whom he has been identified, neither who, in second place, does not return towards himself a desire of death that was directed to another person." The Oedipal drama is completed by the logical articulation of the aggressiveness and of the identification with the relationship to the Phallus. Freud wrote to Fliess in the N manuscript attached to letter 64 entitled "Impulses" that: Hostile impulses towards parents (desire of their death) are also part of the neurosis. They appear consciously as an obsessive representation. In paranoia impulses correspond to the most insidious of the persecution delirium (leaders and monarchs' pathological mistrust). These impulses are repressed when the compassion for the parents appears: their illness, their death. Then, to make reproaches to themselves for their death (melancholy), or to punish themselves hysterically, by the idea of retribution, with the same illness states that they have had, is a way of exteriorising Bereavement. The identification that here takes place is a way of the thinking and would not get superfluous the search of the reason. Here the germ of what Freud is going to expose in "Bereavement and Melancholy" (1917) appears and his contribution to the interpretation of the suicide. In his work entitled "Psychology of the Masses and Analysis of the Ego", he had already spoken about the identification like the most primitive form of the affective bond to an object and on the other hand about a regressive transformation that takes the place of a libidinal bond to an object like an introjection of the object in the ego. In spite of the narrow relationship between identification and desire, we must not confuse them in the suicide interpretation. In the Oedipal triangulation the object of the desire is not the object of the identification. Although the identification is propitiatory of it, the object is always whisked away like lost object, like cause. What the subject sees in the image of the mirror is the form of narcissistic identification, but with a correlative tendency of the aggressiveness, represented in the imagos of the fragmented body. Is the time of the subjective structuring where human beings, in an erotic relationship, are fixed to an image that alienates him, paranoiac constitution of the ego. Freud said that the necessity of a rivalry among siblings is the basis of the identification to the paternal totem, but with the Oedipal identification, the subject can transcend the constituent aggressiveness of the first subjective individuation. In his seminar "The logic of fantasy" of February 12, 1967 Lacan said, that the repetition allows us to put in correlation two ways in which the subject can appear differently. He said that the subject could appear in his temporary determination of corresponding to the two defined states like the one of the alienated ego and the one that reveals the position of the unconscious in the psychoanalysis. It could be thought that if here Lacan articulates that in the level of the temporary schema the passage to the act is what is allowed in the alienation's operation, it is not impossible to wonder about the relationship of this with the suicide's interpretation, even more if Lacan said that the other term, impossible to be chosen in the alienating alternative, corresponds to the acting-out. Freud said in his article "Current Considerations about War and Death" that we find in the unconscious of civilised man the primitive man's attitudes and that the first duty of all human beings is to tolerate their lives. The experience of psychoanalysis leads us to notice that the dialectical movement homicidal-suicide is particularly representative in the registration of the patricide. What does the subject kill in his father, knowing that after his father's death the law appears? All the great records of Freud, except for the case of the little Hans, refer to the suicide like in the case Performed by the sister of the Wolves' Man, in the attempt of drowning in the bath by Schreber, in the obsessive impulses of the Rats' Man, in Dora's partial identification with her father, or in the failed attempt of Anna O. after her father's death, and finally like in the passage to the act by an homosexual girl. Although Freud finds singular significances, he does not universalize a sense from those clinical cases. Even more, he includes the suicide inside the "Acts of Erroneous Term" in his article "Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens" (1901), without organizing a theory on the suicide. Hysterical identification, melancholic identification, death wish, patricide, sadism, aggressiveness, turn against himself, failure of the conservation instinct or punishment for unconscious guilt, can only be subjected to the analysis of the singular significance. The practice teaches us that suicides can be named as a passage to the act or as an acting-out. Although the structure of the passage to the act, like a suicide form is dominant in the psychosis but not exclusive, being the princeps example the homosexual girl's attempt. Freud in "Bereavement and Melancholy" introduced the famous sentence: the shadow of the object has fallen on the ego. This is interpreted as the passage of a relationship between ego and object to a relationship between ego (transformed by the identification to the object) and critical instance. In his lesson of July 3, 1963, Lacan said that the object surpasses its direction and is the one that succeed. The object "a" is usually hidden behind the i(a) of the narcissism. The hidden object "a", with an unknown essence, is what the melancholic needs to pass through his image, attacking it to be able to reach in that object "a", that transcends him, what escapes from his control and whose falling will lead him to the precipitation, that is the suicide. Lacan said: "the suicide through the window is not casual, is resorting to a structure that I accentuate as the one of the fantasy". The fantasy in the neurotic and in the perverse one offers a frame, but a movable one, where the subject can hurl himself from by that possible hole due to the welding effect between subject and object. This is a position that, with a lot of caution, has to be occupied by the psychoanalyst in the course of a cure. The act, the acting-out, the passage to the act or the failure act are part of transfer. The subject's structure is suicidal. The effects of the significant on the subject, the afanisis for the effect of the Otherness' desire. The Freudian object arises from the logic of the alternation of the presence-absence significant of the fort-da of the game with the reel, loss of the natural regulation of the object for a real statute: the word like death of the thing. Certainly, in the suicide, life is gone, but in the time of subjective structuring, the act of Narcissus gives us the existence. The subject obtains the first significant from the great Otherness, from the Otherness' faults, where the desire is introduced through. To the question: Che vuoi? The subject offers his own disappearance as an answer, a suicidal position that immerses him in the desire. That is why we should think about the insistence of the suicide attempts in that moment so singular of revolting and restructuring known as adolescence. In his seminar "The Formations of the Unconscious" of February 12, 1958, Lacan remembered Freud that said that further than the principle of the pleasure it was the aspiration of resting and eternal death. It is the resistance of some subjects to approach to their histories like subjects and to their desires of leaving the game. Unwanted subjects that do not want that significant chain in which they have not been admitted. A desire's recognition. The more the subject is affirmed with the help of the significant in his desire of leaving, the more he enters again, being integrated to the significant chain becoming himself a sign. Abolished and dead, he is an eternal sign to the others and the suicides more than the others. I conclude in that order with two quotations of Lacan and Freud. "The suicide is a terrifying contagious beauty condemned by men that makes that the suicide epidemics were the realest thing in the experience". "If you want to tolerate life, get ready for death". Montevideo, September 2000 Enrique Rattín |