On the passage from inhibition to anguish

RIVADERO Stella Maris

Couples with difficulty in love encounters come often to my consulting room. One of the main obstacles is male doubt about paternity (although, nowadays, science enables us to confirm tentative paternity through a DNA analysis).

What happens when inhibition and suffering occur in these encounters without anguish?

Male doubts and inhibitions sometimes intermingle with the ghostly interplay with their partners. Under the deceiving veil of victims to modern Madonnas, men claim that, once women get the treasured good -a son as substitute of that phallus denied by their mothers-, they become valueless, disposable and discarded objects. Moreover, they seem to be marked by an angelic figure that erases any trace of sex.

¿How do these men offer themselves after being the instrument of pleasure for these women to become mothers? Which are the difficulties they face in the encounter with a woman as "babe"?

Within inhibition we find a situation different from unconscious poiesis. Anguish is related to desire, inhibition is the pillar of unwary desire. Therefore, what should he do to let this mute enjoyment open up?

The act of falling fondly in love and love itself evolve around the ghostly notion that couples are formed progressively, this is related to object a as object-cause. Men offer themselves by giving away what they own at a price that does not correspond, whereas women offer themselves in the countenance of being, since they do not have what men own.

Women in a female position become a symptom as long as they interrupt phallus enjoyment; they say to men: "Not everything is under the protection of the phallus"; there is something else beyond that logic, and all cannot be turned into a symbol.

The man who takes his wife as a "babe" is showing respect for the Real; on the contrary, the man who immobilises her in the role of "whole mother" does not share this respect, the father’s perversion consists in making a woman the cause of his desire, a cause that exceeds the phallus. This encounter with the Real means disregarding women’s statements and simply considering the mystery they personify.

The weaker the father’s strength to enable this symptom, the higher the possibility for the subject to suffer from inhibition. If a father does not recognise his enjoyment for a woman’s body, but considers her an object, if he just idealises her, she turns out to be considered a housewife, an overwhelming domestic ideal. Female idealisation opposes to the function of the real father.

A couple comes to my consulting room since they argue constantly. He says he is "fed up": whenever he gets home, as he does not earn any money, his wife orders him to do several house choirs: "prepare dinner", "do the shopping", etc., while she is watching her favourite TV program. I inquire on the reason why he is obedient when he may give a polite negative answer, he smiles and adds: "when she orders me to do something, I have to obey".

After that, his wife complains that she always has to give orders to him since he does not obey promptly, thus they start arguing. This is the point when I ask them how they have met each other. She says she needed an employee, and he answers she needed someone to work for her. I conclude everything has turned out all right: "she needed someone to work for her and she found an employee". Only now do they listen to each other and start laughing.

They associate their respective conditions as sons and daughters before the demands of the fundamental other. Her omniscient, omnipresent and demanding father appears insistently in her story. Her male partner focuses on her father’s excessive intrusion as the cause of the occurrence of problems in their couple.

The image of that great "pater" unveils the absence of his own father, who left with another woman when he was a child and practically pretended to have nothing to do with his children. After that, he asks for individual sessions under her demands. He does not understand why he is always "trapped" by "loony women" when there are so many others. In his series of love encounters, the main point of those relationships is either the presence or the absence of those women’s parents. He narrates several difficulties that do not qualify as symptoms according to him, and on top his inhibitions to earn money, he has difficulties in accepting the responsibility of being a father.

When he is asked about his father and the men of the family, a distinctive common feature arises: he defines the responsibilities and treaties with women so that they look demanding, unbearable and excessively tiresome. He starts to complain about the absence of his father shyly. He is of no account to his father; his doubt is related to that father who has not taken him into account.

A father is someone who conveys the significancies and symbolisms of phallus attributes; a son needs to absorb them in order to use them afterwards. The second sexual awakening is a time of re-defining the subject’s position in relation with his enjoyment, the object and the absence of the Other.

Every new position implies re-distributing the assessment of enjoyment, recycling oneself and receiving the legitimacy arising from the Other. What does our subject find before the primal questions related to the encounter with the other sex, what does being a man mean? What does giving something away to a woman mean? At that time, the father, who is also absent from his mother’s speech, could not give the analysed person his castration away, the gift of his absence, so that the latter could make use of all his titles.

Behind the image of exception rendered by the Mother, it is difficult to embody a father who, absent from the scene in primal moments, leaves the subject unarmed before the Thing.

What is difficult for the neurotic is make the consistency of the images of exception collapse. The reality of fatherhood can not be seized since he does not register his own father’s impotence either.

It is necessary to intervene with Real so that possibilities to embody his father can arise, until he starts realising his father is not placed as a man before his second wife, either. The patient becomes aware of his own father’s limitations, another man who cannot approach a "Babe", who can only get related to a "full-time mother".

In a privileged moment, and as a response to my emphasis on his wife’s opinions about the surname that the daughter would be given, anguish arises. His wife insisted on giving the baby her surname, e.g. her father’s surname. Unlike the proverb Freud was fond of quoting: "Pater incertus est, mater certissima", in this situation, the only one who is "certo, certissimo" is her father.

The patient calls himself father, although such name that does not carry enough strength to imply his subjective responsibility yet. He may do something with it the moment he can discover who his own father is.

He can only view his place is by a woman as a slave to her demands. In the "museum symptom", time is made to remain eternal, the urgency of anguish dares the subject intend a break, time is not eternal.

He concludes his brief report of a dream as follows: "I was walking along a street near my job when I happened to be running behind an old man, I ran over and over, I was chasing him but I couldn’t get him; was the old man or not?" His dream comes to an end and he wakes up trapped in anguish.

In his story, he connects the person he calls "the old man" to his employer, to someone he cannot go for help or give some of his suggestions on the way of working, which would improve the work environment, and would benefit economically all the work group. He wonders how he could reach an old man, whether the distance is always so long that he cannot shorten it.

He cannot measure the distance since his own father is evanescent. But in this lapse of time, in the passage from inhibition to anguish, he can start searching for his father and discuss some things with his wife, modifying his place as employer-slave, the narcissist identity that relieves him of the question about his desire for the Other.

Sobre un tipo particular de elección de objeto en el hombre, (contribuciones a la psicología del amor I), by Freud, Sigmund. Vol. XII, 1910. Amorrortu Ediciones. Sobre la más generalizada degradación de la vida erótica amorosa (contribuciones a la psicología del amor II), Vol. XII, 1912. Amorrortu Ediciones. (Contributions to the Psychology of Love).

Inhibición, Síntoma y Angustia. Tomo XX, 1925. Amorrortu Ediciones.

32° Conferencia: Angustia y vida pulsional. Tomo XXII, 1932. Amorrortu Ediciones.

Seminario "RSI", by Lacan, Jacques. Unedited, 1974-5, Biblioteca EFBA.,

Seminario "La Angustia, by Lacan, Jacques. Unedited, Biblioteca EFBA.

Seminario "De la Femineidad". Lecturer: Vegh, Isidoro. Dictated at EFBA, 1989

Paradojas del Masoquismo, by Wainsztein, Silvia. Cuadernos Sigmund Freud Nº 16. EFBA,1993.