The superego and the object in psychoanalytical experience: towards a gap between listening and obeying

ABSTRACT:

Based on the premise that the superego is a command that demands an impossible jouissance, this article studies the possible destiny psychoanalysis can give to the superegoic imperative. The issue raised is the coalescence between commanding and obeying, as well as the opening of a gap, as supported by the discourse of the analyst, between the both of them. The development of the study establishes a pairing between listening and obeying, recurring to the hypnosis technique, to Pascal Quignard, to La Boétie and also Herman Melville. The object’s vocal variety constitutes an axis which conducts, in an analysis, to the desire gap and to the symptom that relocates jouissance.

Keywords:
Superego; vocal object; discourse of the analyst

RESUMO:

Com base na premissa de que o supereu corresponde a um mandamento que ordena um gozo impossível, o presente trabalho investiga o destino que a psicanálise é suscetível de conferir ao imperativo superegoico. Sua problemática consiste na coalescência entre comando e obediência, bem como na abertura, a ser sustentada pelo discurso analítico, de uma hiância entre ambos. O desenvolvimento parte do emparelhamento entre ouvir e obedecer, servindo-se da hipnose, de Pascal Quignard, La Boétie e Herman 1853. A variedade vocal do objeto constitui o eixo que conduz, em uma análise, à fenda do desejo e ao sintoma que remaneja o gozo.

Palavras-chave:
objeto vocal; discurso analítico

Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance: Enjoy! Where does that command derive from? Therein lays the axial point interrogated by the discourse of the analyst. (LACAN, 1972-1973/2010, p. 14).

INTRODUCTION

This study interrogates the possibilities of displacement of the superegoic imperative in the operation of analysis. The problematic inaugurated by the Freudian concept of superego implies in considering the risk of a short circuit between listening and obeying: the risk of destruction of the gap of which the subject is effect. According to what was noted by Lacan (1956-1957/1995, p. 308), in German, the terms for hearing and the ear (Gehör) are homophones to the words for obedience and docility (Gehorsam). In Romance languages, “to obey” origins from the linguistic root of the verb “to hear”, which originally had meant “to listen to”, “to give credit to”, “to believe” (HOLANDA, 2010).

The question imposed is to which extent does clinical psychoanalysis operate a cutting in the imperative voice coalescence with obedience. If this operation implies a transformation in the superego functioning, its incidence on the imperative cannot neglect the avatars of the object in superego’s voice.

Although the questions raised so far have as fundamental goal to produce a comment about the analytical experience, in order to advance in it, there is also an investment on the relevance of this debate within the polis, in a time when authoritarian discourses (“I am, really, the Constitution”, as the chair of the presidency of Brazil enunciates to his mass of followers) demonstrate the violence of his capturing force and call to blind obedience to a power that not only embodies someone, but also is reduced to that someone.

Today we witness a double movement comprised by, on the one hand, the nostalgic deploring of the collapse of authority, and on the other, a fascination for authoritarian drifts offered as solutions to the crises that 21^st century’s civilization encounter. The experience of the unconscious unveils in words a principle of commanding which is typical to the signifier. If such a principle is in the essence of the most absurd precepts, the same word, when sustained in the speech act, is precisely the source of authority which rules the speaker and, likewise, over the ones that are within their reach: “No authority statement has any other guarantee than its very enunciation” (LACAN, 1960/1998, p. 827).

The Other is the locus of the signifier - which does not imply in understanding it as a previous place. This means that the guarantee of authority is not found in anyone, and above all, in any other signifier placed elsewhere, which, as a matter of fact, does not exist. In equivalent terms, there is no metalanguage, which is the same as the “there is no Other of the Other” aphorism. Those who compromise to discourse of the analyst must count on a signifier that does not hold any guarantee other than its own enunciation. In that way, using this method and its characteristic resources, one can treat the superegoic voice whilst liberating the object from the jouissance fixations in which the repetition is carried out.

The discourse of voluntary servitude (LA BOÉTIE, 1549/2017) - with a characteristic vigor that some texts which are able to provoke effects of truth very after they were produced - gives voice to a more unfortunate than surprising observation: men, cities and nations are willing to endure anything and everything coming from a tyrant, whose power is granted to him by these same men. This servile obedience, which leads to the most miserable subservience, and submits it to atrocious domination, does not depend on a major force, on an exceptional power, but rather on the preference of conformation, in lieu of addressing domination. All harm and prejudice liable to affect servants can only be effective because they do not offer resistance, allowing to experience them resignedly. La Boétie refuses to attribute this inclination to a cowardly behavior and approximates it to an addiction which constrains to obedience, since all it would take would be to give nothing to the tyrant, granting him no prerogative, so that he would be powerless against the servant.

Regarding the question of voluntary servitude, it becomes a matter of the nature, as well as the motive of obedience, which compels those who surrender to it to an excessive subordination. The servitude informs the extrinsic characters of power and will to which obedient is submitted. Likewise, the subject gives in to the imperatives of the superego as if to a foreign will. In the subjective case, however, the obedience accommodates an intimate exteriority, as we will develop in the following pages. According to psychoanalysis, the submission to the superegoic imperative embodies the paradoxes of pulsion satisfaction, along with the principle of pleasure, not always successful in putting up barriers to jouissance. Following the ethical duty enunciated by Freud, there where the it was, as subject, I must arise from (Wo es war, soll Ich werden). The question that unfolds in the discourse of the analyst, when resulting of the analytical practice, is how to break the imperative circuit which produces an obstacle to the subject’s response as such.

1 Superego and voice object

The problematic concerning the superego must now be put into place. Without trying to elude the paradoxes that are within Freud’s concept, but, contrarily, aiming to explore them, we shall make some fundamental distinctions. After all, what do we mean when we speak of superego?

The phenomenon of hallucination, a return in the real of what has been foreclosed in the symbolic realm, allows for some interrogations on the dimension of imperative contained in the voice. When it addresses the subject with insults and disdainful comments, the hallucinated voice demands obedience to the unreasonable commands he expresses. How is it possible to misunderstand the demand conveyed by the voice’s tyranny? Early in his work Freud discovers the acts of a voice that makes comments, menaces and censors the movements and acts of the patients he accompanies. When working on Mrs. P.’s case, noted in Further observations on the defense-neuropsychoses (FREUD, 1896a), he concluded that the voices that tormented his patient originated in self-accusations. Once the blow by Verwefung had happened, displacing not only the affection but also the mnemic representation of the psychic sphere (FREUD, 1894/1996), the self-accusating affection returns from the outside, as a recrimination coming from the Other. The act of circumscribing that which returns as a recrimination of the Other constitutes a way to address the real, since it locates in the Other - not in the body or in the ego - the jouissance’s return that imposes itself.

The account of the hallucinated voice stands out as a privileged starting point to the introduction of superego by Freud, a stage that marks the “great innovation of the second topica” (LACAN, 1971/2009, p. 166). When they complain they are being watched by a stranger, who comments and criticizes their every thought and intention, psychotics reveal a truth that would otherwise be inaccessible (FREUD, 1933/1996): the presence of an all-knowing power, present in every talking being psyche, that watches our actions and is pleased when insults and punishes the subject. While the description of the superego as an observant and critical creature defies its distinction to the idea of a moral conscience, the tight connection established by Freud between the superego and death drive promotes a rupture in which one could presume an equivalence. This connection, which ought to be highlighted - Freud affirms that the superego reaches the state of “pure culture” of this drive (FREUD, 1923/1996) -, supports a Lacanian formulation according to which the categorical imperative transmitted by the critical stage consists in a jouissance imperative (LACAN, 1972-1973/2010).

This means that this is a stage associated to the demands of pulsional renunciation which, nonetheless, strengthens the constant and unwavering force of pulsion when it organizes an unmeasured satisfaction and throws the subject in the field that is beyond the principle of pleasure: the impossible field of das Ding. In the superego’s imperative of jouissance, there is an impossible at stake, as explained by Lacan when he highlights the homophony in French of the words jouis (enjoy) and j’ouïs (I listen). “If the law demanded ‘Enjoy’, the subject could only respond to this with an ‘I listen’ and so the jouissance would only be implied” (LACAN, 1960/1998, p. 836). An isolated element in the Complex of the Neighbor, in the Nebenmensch experience, das Ding corresponds to something that is excluded in the subject’s interiority, making up an intimate exteriority, in such a way that the one that is closest is, at the same time, the strangest. Hence the term extimité, extimacy, coined by Lacan to designate this excluded center, around which the Vorstellungengravitate, that is, all that is flocculant and becomes a signifier. The closest one is the intolerable imminence of jouissance. Therefore, the equivalence between the closest and the Other, which corresponds to a clean jouissance terrain, is the same terrain of the signifying articulation that defines the unconscious (LACAN, 1968-1969/2008).

According to Lacan (1959-1960/1998), in a resumption of the “basics of the analytical truth”, even if the superego can serve as a support for moral conscience, “it has nothing to do with the moral conscience as far as its most obligatory demands are concerned”, since the thing that demands in no way is a “universal rule of our actions” (LACAN, 1959-1960/1998, p. 363). This functions as an explanation that the superego, a psychoanalytical concept, cannot be reduced to the idea of a moral conscience - this impossibility is already found in Freud and becomes evident in the assertion that superego represents the it [das Es] and plays a triple function. While representing the it, the superego is distinguished by its pulsional dimension and by its unconditional demand to an impossible jouissance that the imperative constantly renews, each time more vehemently. On the other hand, when the superego attributes a triple function to this stage - self-observation, moral conscience and maintenance of the ideal [Idealfunktion] (FREUD, 1933/1966) -, it leads to the variety of clinical manifestations capable of emphasizing the monitoring look, the commenting voice, the oppressive ideal, without the opening of an interval so that the subject emerges.

The superego is a type of superior being that inexorably distributes punishment (FREUD, 1923/1996), and consequently, according to Freud’s observation, it opposes the analysis’ purposes, when it rises “the most powerful of all obstacles to the cure” (p. 62): a fatefully unavoidable feeling of guilt (FREUD, 1930/1996) that encounters some satisfaction in disease and suffering. As stated by Freud (1923/1996), the acting of a superegoic stage is responsible for the determination of the gravity of an illness and should be taken into account in every form of psychic illness (FREUD, 1923/1996). The Freudian experience has verified that the analysand did not feel guilty, but ill, while in current times the unconscious guilt proliferates where he listens to himself say that he feels depressed, extenuated, never enough etc. Whilst they are not always evident and loud, the forms of presentation of the neurotic superego are not less atrocious. In this sense, the superegoic intervention goes against the dialectic of desire, in which the analysis strategy leans. The superegoic imperative favors an inertia factor over the dimension of the lost object that incites desire and its circuits.

From the very beginning of his teaching, Lacan approaches the matter of superego, marking its specificity regarding other Freudian concepts, but starting from Seminar 10: the anguish we encounter the formulation that we wish to explore. Lacan (1962-1963/2005) situates the object dimension of the psychic instance discerned by Freud, demonstrating how the object a indeed assumes many functions but is never in a position of an object pursued by desire (LACAN, 1964/1979, p. 175). It is the clinical experience, especially the one with the experience of psychosis, which leads to the extension of the Freudian list of objects, with the introduction of the gaze and the voice. From the observational delirium, Lacan extracts the scopic object; from the mental automatism phenomena distinguished by Clérambault, he extracts the vocal object. Although immaterial, the voices are perfectly real, in the view of the subject who experiences them, because they constitute precisely the thing of which the subject cannot doubt. In so being, they do not admit an interpretation, and demand from the listener an arduous treatment of distancing and, especially, a refusal to obeying.

The voice of the Other should be considered an essential object. Every analyst is required to give it its due and to follow up on its varied incarnations, both in the field of psychosis field and, in the most normal of cases, in the formation of the superego. Many things will perhaps become clearer if we situate the source of the superego. (LACAN, 1963/2005, p. 71).

By designating the voice object as the most original, Lacan (1962-1963/2005) compares the constitution of the superego to the introduction of external particles inside the crustaceans’ vestibular system, mentioning an experience reported by Isakower. The experiment was conducted with crustaceans, marine animals which introduce in their own body, through their auditory sphere, sand grains to ensure their balance. The experimenter replaced the sand grains for iron filings, demonstrating that, when doing so while using an electromagnet, he begins to control the animals’ movements. In different moments of his teaching Lacan refers to Isakower in order to comment on this experiment. Initially, he highlights the action of the elements that were incorporated (LACAN, 1955-1956/1985); he later explains the centrality of an area that does not admit an excessive proximity. This so-called forbidden area is a field of jouissance. The proposal of an anatomy to the vacuole of jouissance comes from the idea of vacuole Lacan established regarding das Ding. In a daphnia’s equivalent to a hearing organ, which also has a vestibular or counter-balancing function, the experimental resource to the iron filings and to the magnet shows that they cause jouissance, which is comparable to man in his moral life: “The object a plays the same role in relation to the vacuole. In other words, it is what tickles from the inside in das Ding” (LACAN, 1968-1969/2008, p. 227).

We have to keep in mind that the quote above grants us the context to the affirmation according to which the merit of a work of art is in the possibility to shake the vacuole, to stir the field of the jouissance, as is verified in the pulsion’s avatar known as sublimation. It is only a vicissitude or a pulsion adventure, since the fundamental function of this object in relation to the vacuole is to function as a place to capture jouissance. The object connects to the function of surplus enjoying in its attempt to regain the jouissance. In the view of the subject, this capture is made at the expense of the function of the desire cause to be accomplished by the object in its dimension of a lost object.

Using the letter a, Lacan recovers the real of das Ding. There is, in this operation, a displacement from the epistemological field to the ethical field, through which the object becomes a fundamental operator of the analysis (VIDAL, 1984). Lacan (1962-1963/2005) clarifies that he calls this object by a sole letter, since this notation allows to recognize the object’s identity in its various shapes. He hands it over to the analysts like a sacred Host and suggests that, afterwards, we shall partake of this tiny a. “It is in this new term that resides the point that introduces the dialectic of the subject qua subject of the unconscious” (LACAN, 1964/1979, p. 229).

We shall then explore the following articulation: according to Lacan, something is clarified from the moment the source a of the superego becomes situated; the object a is a Host of which the analyst must partake, embody. How to situate the incidence of the object at the moment the transference occurs? If the position occupied by the analyst is substantially made of the object (LACAN, 1969-1970/2007), it is necessary to question how she can become detached from the superegoic intervention. One can foresee that the place of the semblance in the discourse of the analyst, occupied by the object holding a place of an agent, is decisive when considering this operation.

2 From obedience to the gap

In the essay La haine de la musique (1996), Pascal Quignard explores the possibility of there not being a distinction between listening and obeying, claiming that “listening is obeying”. He emphasizes the violence of the fact that the ears - differently from other body cavities - are not closed. When referring to the testimonies of Primo Levi and Simon Lasks on Auschwitz, and specifically about the presence of music in extermination camp, Quignard sustains that the hearing carries something terrible: the power to annihilate, since that which is heard cannot be distinguished from a simple order to be carried out. Quignard’s essay, promoting an opening, invites to the reading of Levi’s work.

In If this is this a man, a book that was born out of the urgency to tell others the horrors behind the rigorous logic put into action in extermination camp, Primo Levi asserts that, when writing about the presence of music in Auschwitz, he can recreate it in his memory “no longer obeying to it, without yielding to it anymore” (LEVI, 1947/1988, p. 71). He explains the once imperative character of that which entered his ears. As Levi affirms, music is the voice of the camp and expresses it is determined to annihilate. By being infernal, this music has a hypnotic effect, allows for an erasure which precedes death, because its capacity to fascinate and enchant extinguishes the thought, the desire and the pain; on the camp, music makes each pulse to sound like a “reflex contraction of destroyed muscles” (LEVI, 1947/1988, p. 70). According to his testimony in The drowned and the saved, the possibility to keep thinking was the chance of having “an ephemeral rest, but not blunt; on the contrary, libertarian and different: it was a way to reencounter myself” (LEVI, 2004, p. 119). The approximation Levi causes between the musical effect and the mechanism put into play into the hypnotical procedure should be stressed. In this approximation, a common ground can be found: the coalescence between hearing and obeying, the imperative circuit, sustained by the voice’s enchantment.

Just like the iron particles introduced in the daphnia’s auditory sphere in Isakower’s experiment, which allows the experimenter to control the animal’s movements through an electromagnet, the hypnotizer’s voice has the power to act as an external body that tyrannically commands the thoughts and movements of the hypnotized. There is something terrible about this procedure: between the pronunciation of the order and the fulfilment of this action, the hypnosis suppresses the possibility of dialectization; when facing the hypnotizer’s speech, to listen is to obey. Explaining his procedure, Freud provided a precise description:

[…] a person is put into a hypnotic state and is subsequently aroused. While he was in the hypnotic state, under the influence of the physician, he was ordered to execute a certain action at a certain fixed moment after his awakening, say half an hour later. He awakes, and seems fully conscious and in his ordinary condition; he has no recollection of his hypnotic state, and yet at the prearranged moment there rushes into his mind the impulse to do such and such a thing, and he does it consciously, though not knowing why. (FREUD, 1912/1996, p. 147).

In 1921, Freud rediscusses the hypnosis when exploring mass phenomena. While the concept is previous to the emergence of the greater dangers of fascism, the work Mass psychology and ego analysis provides information on the basic structure of such demagogy, as Adorno (1951/2007) observes, as well as Lacan himself (1956/1998). In this context, Freud’s emphasis in hypnosis, qualified as a mass formation comprised of two people, brings forth the coincidence between the hypnotizer’s and the demagogue’s techniques: fascination and servitude are fused in the both of them, following a mechanism in which the ego ideal and the object are tied together in a sole knot. As a result of this conjoining, a kind of expropriation of the unconscious takes place.

According to the Freudian formulation, group phenomenon is about a revival of the primal horde, this mythical state, prior to the surging of social bonding. As the hypnotizer, the mass leader evokes the presence of a primordial father, which dominated the horde with absolute strength. “He, at the very beginning of the history of mankind, was the superman whom Nietzsche only expected from the future” (FREUD, 1921/1996, p. 119). We should then highlight that the prohibition of jouissance, tyrannically imposed on the children, echoes its contrary, that is, incites them to an unrestrained and therefore impossible jouissance. In this sense, Adorno points out (1951/2007) that there is only an apparent inconsistency between the typically fascist leader and Freud’s theory of the leader as a primitive father. It is not difficult to realize that the demagogue, when rising up as the instrument for law and order, materializes the superego’s command: Enjoy!

Freud’s inaugural act, the invention of psychoanalysis itself, promotes a radical displacement of the voice function. To put the unconscious into act, when transference is installed, causes effects on the superegoic command. The rise of psychoanalysis, as is known, coincides with the abandonment by Freud of the seductive suggestion of hypnosis, towards which he claims to observe a muffled hostility (FREUD, 1921/1995). In this inaugural moment of psychoanalysis, it is a fundamental ethical step which, as we see it, encompasses the decision to relinquish tyranny, to do without the mastery imposed by the voice, and to abandon the flattering reputation of being able to operate miracles (FREUD, 1925/1996) in order to give a unique place for speech, pain as well as the voice. While the hypnosis was successful through suppressing the possibility to separate listening and responding, psychoanalysis was founded in the interval gathered between what was heard and what to do with the thing that entered the ears. As Lacan would declare, analysis has a “medial, chance status, in the gap opened up at the center of the dialectic of subject and the Other” (LACAN, 1964/1979, p. 251).

By promoting a cut in that which was qualified by Lacan as a “monstruous capture” (LACAN, 1964/1979, p. 259), Freud chooses to inaugurate the tracking of the analytical adventure when he favors the discourse of hysteria and not the closed circuit of hypnosis. By recognizing that his knowledge is incomplete, without ever boasting about the wholeness or the definitive character of his expertise, he remains faithful to this choice. Grappling with the hardships of the struggle against the obstacle of the guilt, which, by clarifying the almightiness of the pulsion, imposes the need for punishment found in suffering, Freud observes that, facing this barrier on the way of the treatment, the therapeutical success could happen in the analyst allows themselves to occupy the place of the ego ideal. “This involves a temptation for the analyst to play the part of prophet, saviour and redeemer to the patient.” (FREUD, 1923/1996, p. 63). Freud is categorical: “the rules of analysis are diametrically opposed to the physician’s making use of his personality in any such manner” (FREUD, 1923/1996, p. 63). When the physician - so as not to say, the analyst - occupies the place of the ideal, he mobilizes one of the aforementioned functions of the superego, the one that maintains the ideal, therefore it cannot, consequently, treat the superego as would be necessary to the deployment of jouissance.

The function of the object a in the analysis movement requires that we go back to Mass Psychology (FREUD, 1921/1996). Lacan (1964/1979) draws attention to the fact that the hypnosis is defined by the confusion of the ideal (I) with the object a - a confusion which starts the function of the hypnotizer. Diversely, the analytical operation has, as a fundamental springe force, the action of keeping the distance between this distinct signifier (I), which promotes the identification, and the lack of the object, in which the subject must recognize himself. When called to embody the ideal and conduct the process from the demand to the identification, becoming an accomplice to the deceiving side of transference, the analyst has to, contrarily, fall out of idealization “to be the support of the separating a” (LACAN, 1964/1979, p. 258). Lacan indicates that the analyst’s desire should aim at a contrary sense in relation to identification, that is, it should be reconducted to the demand, a plan in which the pulsion can be made present. Given that the idealization promotes an identification of the subject to the praised object (LACAN, 1959-1960/1998, p. 136), when it is absent from the ideal and becomes a representative of the lack, the analyst has the power to stimulate the contrary of the mass: the absolute difference, “a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it” (LACAN, 1964/1979, p. 260).

We then see that the analytical operation can reserve to the superego the destiny of a transfuge¹: from the place where the superego commanded comes the function which sustains an opening to desire and to the deployment of jouissance. “It is to where surplus enjoying was,theenjoying of the Other, me, insofar as I am producing the psychoanalytic act, that I must come” (LACAN, 1969-1970/2007, p. 62).

3 Neither obeying nor disobeying

What is it that imposes itself between order and obedience? A literary character by Herman Melville, Bartleby, the scrivener, guides us with respect to the role of disobedience. Newly admitted to his job, he is diligent in his chores, silently and uninterruptedly, working in a dull and mechanical fashion, not manifesting any liking to what he does. At the first time he is called by his boss to check a document with him, the scrivener, moderately but firmly, refuses to execute the requested assignment - which was in fact a very coherent task to be undertaken with the work’s attributes. He denies it, declaring repeatedly that he “Would prefer not to”. Without offering any justification, he only claims to prefer not to engage in what he is demanded.

Bartleby is someone who does not take the orders that are dictated to him. He refuses to analyze the documents, saying “I would prefer not to” until he drives his boss to exasperation. His disobedience and indifference regarding his boss’ authority are incomprehensible, since he does not show anger, impatience, insolence or any human feeling. While the office’s owner reaches this conclusion, through a passive and obstinate resistance, in the absence of restlessness or impertinence, the scrivener does not give in, shows to be inflexible, and stays in the office refusing to leave, even after his dismissal. The employer’s mission is to abandon the building where his office was located in order to be free from the disobeying employee who nonetheless does not agree to leave. The former employee has no other choice but to be segregated in the city jail, kept as a bum or to be taken to the shelter for poor people, waiting for death, to which he lets himself be dragged.

At the end to the short story, an account taken by the narrator as a mere information, who we find to be his ex-employer, leads the reader to meet him again in a previous time of his life, working in a subordinate job at the Dead Letter Section of a post office. The lost mail, destinated to be burned, resonates in the author’s writing, as stories of lives deprived of hope. The disagreement between, on the one hand, the news of lives brought by the letters, their promises to meetings and happiness, and on the other, the fate of those who died in abandonment, without having received them - this is the sign of hopelessness, of a misplaced life.

The classical Kantian questions are considered by Lacan an effort of rationalizing everything. He does not fail to confront them, nonetheless, maybe because they constitute an occasion to discern that which the discourse of the analyst introduces us to. The object’s avatars raise again the questions: What can I know? What should I do? What should I wait for?

Insofar as the unconscious knowing is the one to concern psychoanalysis, what can be known and elaborated in the analytical experience does not accommodate the knowledge. It cannot be an object of appropriation, cannot be possessed. As with the discovery of the unconscious, it can only be known that which has a language structure. With regards to what one should do, Lacan highlights that ethics relate to the discourse and that the benedictory ethics has been extracted from his practice. About what one should wait for, the preliminary answer given by him is that he has watched the hope for a bright future lead people to suicide. This articulation between hope and the act of suicide shows in the latter a pathology inscribed in the former, which always depends on casuistry, as is required when analyzing all passage to the act of suicide. Since it is the first act capable of reaching success without fail, it remits to the first question - this act takes the side of not knowing. Hence the need to pose the question: from where do I wait for? Lacan (1973/2003) said: let one hope for that which they expect or what is convenient to them. We would say in return: to hope for, yes, but actively, not hope for from the Other, but from the engaged desire.

Side by side with faith and charity (or love), hope is one of the three theological virtues. While they are virtues, they consist of exclusively human moral qualities, which attribute to man the gift of doing good, in the same proportion that they fundament moral action. They can be considered symptoms, whose positive aspect - “this allows things not to go so bad” (LACAN, 1974, p. 30) - resides in promoting submission to the principle of reality, and it is worth to say, to fantasy. The analysis demands that several steps are taken beyond that state of the symptom, a state that falls short from interpretation.

Hope is not effective, it can be futile, and it is not a matter of being in compliance with it, since it can postpone or escape desire, to which one can accede, however with a cost. In this sense, Paulo Freire develops the concept of “esperançar” [to actively have hope]. Instead of hoping and waiting, the hope in “esperançar” is practicing the desire. The bond of the discourse cannot be addressed only by oneself, without the Other, even though each step is given at one’s own expense. The chance depends on the good hour (LACAN, 1973/2003, p. 541), a wordplay with the term for happiness [bonheur], which refers to the contingence and to the encounter.

IN CONCLUSION

Hope depends on trusting and betting on what is promised. Therefore, it is about knowing what the analytical speech can promise someone, that is, to make a fair copy out of the unconscious to which one is a subject. This implies to consider a double submission: both to the signifiers as well as to the object that escapes them and in which the jouissance is brought together.

Just as the transfuge, which means a deserter during a war, or a politician that leaves one party for another, or even someone who abandon their religion or its principles, the object’s avatars, in psychoanalytical experience demand from the superego something that is of the order of desertion. The desertion allows for the opening of the gap between listening and obeying, which, in turn, does not translate into mere disobedience, but into the opportunity to revise that which is susceptible of making authority to the subject.

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• 1
  Recuperation of a term used by Lacan in the écrit “Kant with Sade”. “[…] we now know that humor is the betrayer [transfuge] in the comic of the very function of the ‘superego’”(LACAN, 962/1998, p. 780)

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  19 Apr 2021
• Date of issue
  Jan-Apr 2021

History

• Received
  04 Aug 2020
• Accepted
  20 Jan 2021