The
psychoanalytic symptom has a meaning and a fantasy is subjacent
to it, Freud teaches us in speaking of the obsessional�s ritual
or the hysteric�s conversion. For Lacan, the symptom is the
bodily metaphor of the fantasy.
This
year we will be adressing the clinic of the symptom to the extent
that the symptom is the formal writing of a real from which the
fantasy organizing the subject�s life may be deduced.
-
The symptom And Its Function -
Why,
at one point, does the dream not suffice to sustain what is insisting
within repression? The dream as a chain of representations fails to
support the return of the repressed, hence anxiety and symptom. In
anxiety, the subject is faced with a jouissance unable to be represented.
As for the symptom, it is the writing in the social link of the jouissance
resisting repression.
-
The Writing of the Symptom -
With
the symptom, interpretation meets its limits because interpretation
falls within the logic of the signifier. The symptom carries with
it a dimension, irreducible using the logic of the signifier, that
assumes the form of the writing of something else. In the treatment,
how is interpretation stymied by the letter? And what about the bodily
dimension thus put at stake by the symptom?
-
The Symptom As a Metaphor -
The
symptom introduces a formalism of writing. How, from the formal envelope
of the symptom, can we deduce the fantasy of which the symptom is
the bodily metaphor? Providing formal consistency to what the signifier
fails to represent, the letter of the symptom carves out the furrows
of the fantasy.
In
the treatment of the real at stake in the symptom, the analyst�s man�uvre
is what operates the Freudian "pass" from the symptom to
the fantasy. As Freud teaches, analysis organizes the treatment of
the symptom by freeing up the rigorous modeling of which the symptom
is the writing. What then appears is a formulation that calculates
the subject�s singular relation to the irreducible that the writing
of the symptom misses.
