Month: June 2021

In Couple therapy we ask ourselves the following question to make a reflection: Do you believe in love?

The cancel culture would like to erase certain imaginary references that allowed children to be told what cannot be said about horror.

If Prince Charming’s kiss can no longer be inscribed, since Sleeping Beauty or Snow White have been put to sleep by a spell and therefore cannot give their consent, the wicked witch or the stepmother who ravages, are not excluded from cultural transmission.

Goodbye to the dreams of young girls, Prince Charming will no longer be able to wake you up!

Only the mother will be able to continue to ravage you. All you had to do was to leave a contract, signed by you, stipulating your perfect health and your non-vulnerability.

That said, when you agreed to eat the poisoned apple, were you in perfect health? You had trusted the wicked witch, this mother whose apparent goodness moved you.

Did you have all your faculties not to see, behind all this great goodness, the ineffable witch?

Couple theraphy: Reality vs Popular Culture

When the real is no longer veiled by the fictions of popular culture, it is the great plunge into horror.

This is the principle of reality! Why veil what will come together? After the father, what remains is the worst.

So, let’s have some more, let’s take back some culture, and let’s come back to Lacan: let’s go from “cancel culture” to “Lacan is culture”.

For all that, there is no reason to believe in love with Lacan, except to give it back its dignity. That of transference, of course.

In his Seminar Encore, on feminine sexuality, Lacan gives a new dimension to love and indicates that all love tends to make contingency (stop not being written) pass into a necessity (does not stop being written) and this is what makes its drama.

The drama of love is to believe in this illusion that the sexual relationship could cease not to be written, thanks to an encounter.

For a moment, there is the illusion, through the affections that results from the encounter, that the sexual relationship can be written, it is a moment of pure contingency, that of an encounter between two partners.

This, however, can only fail. Love, by taking the place of fiction, makes it possible to avoid the inexistence of the writing of the relationship between the sexes. They are in fact two exiles who meet, by contingency.

And love tries to put a veil over this contingency to transmute it into a necessity. When the veil of love is lifted, its drama emerges: each is exiled from the sexual relationship, and for each, the necessity is that of his or her symptom.

The subject, in fact, carries within himself a native flaw, that of his exile from the sexual relationship.

He fills it by means of identifications: “Sexual identification comes in place of the sexual rapport that does not exist, which comes in place of the flaw marked with the acronym $.” Lacan, in his Seminar “…or Worse,” asks the question “What is a necessity?” to which he replies, “to cobble together […] your day-to-day bricolage, […] by repeating it, by tirelessly repeating this bricolage. This is what is called […] the symptom”.

He goes on to indicate that the inexistence that lies behind the principle of the symptom is that of truth. It is thus in the principle of the “supposition of inexistence”  that a necessity is inscribed.

This supposition of inexistence is that of the sexual rapport that cannot be written, the real that the subject confronts producing the necessity of the symptom as the writing of a jouissance.

The symptom is a necessity, writing that does not stop, a bricolage in the face of the encounter with the inexistence of the relationship between the sexes.

It does not stop being written in the encounter with the other.

This need for the symptom leads the subject to the analyst: “that’s enough… it’s stronger than me”, because the jouissance at stake, does not stop writing itself, propels the search for a piece of knowledge about what takes place in the body.

The necessity of the symptom and knowledge are thus linked; there is an unknown knowledge that does not stop being written in the body through the symptom.

There may not be a need to love your neighbor, but there is a need to analyze yourself and ultimately deal with your own exile from knowledge.

The fictions of fairy tales, just like the novels, soften our exile. They are not knowledge but fictions, a hand extended from the Other to ward off the horror of the non-relationship between the sexes while awaiting the necessary writing of symptomatic bricolage.

To use the words of Jacques-Alain Miller during his recent video conference with Russian colleagues from the Freudian field on the occasion of the release of their international review: “If we erase any difference between the child and the adult, it is the very foundations of democracy that are called into question”.

Christine Maugin Psychoanalist

Psychoanalyst Madrid