Contrary to popular belief, psychoanalysis is least accessible to the very rich man, to the man who goes through life throwing money at his problems. It is precisely he who has no way to pay. Continue reading
It is true that psychoanalysis takes up questions of ‘sexuality’, and that, (scandalously!) in its Freudo-Lacanian iteration, it affirms the existence of infantile sexuality, and of sexual influence in aetiology. Continue reading
“The medicalization of love”[1] is one of a series of papers[2][3] in which Earp, Savulescu and others explore the ethical ramifications of administering neurochemical interventions to address problems of love. The authors rightly observe that love is, in many ways, already ‘medicalized’, and anticipate some ethical objections to neurochemical interventions in human relationships. Specifically, the authors reject charges of neural reductionism, and disagree that neurochemical interventions need necessarily increase “pathologization” and the expansion of medical-social control. I wish to argue that these conclusions are, from many points of view, misleading, to say the least. Continue reading
In psychoanalysis, there is a clear distinction to be made between guilt and shame. Guilt implies a relation to the law. The law is the flipside of desire*, since its instantiation generates the possibility of its transgression (and hence of enjoyment through transgression). Thus, the law limits and regulates the very enjoyment it makes possible.
Shame, by way of contrast, involves no transgression, but it does always imply a relation to an Other. Continue reading
France has been the center of lively debate on the topic of same-sex marriage (SSM), and many prominent psychoanalysts (Jacques-Alain Miller and Eric Laurent among them) there have contributed to the discussion. What can psychoanalysis contribute to this debate?
As early as Seminar XIV (The Logic of Phantasy), Lacan repudiates the notion of men and women possessing any ‘natural’ complementarity, as if they constituted something like a lock-and-key, or nut-and-bolt pairing. Indeed, such a pairing makes no sense unless one is operating from a position of some kind of transcendental teleogy. The notion of having an ‘other half’ – a typical expression in English to describe one’s partner – is itself an Aristophanic myth, as found in Plato’s Symposium. What is mythic, however, is by no means ‘natural’. (Incidentally, Aristophanes’ myth allowed for homosexual as well as heterosexual unions).
Indeed, opponents of SSM sometimes conflate the ‘normal’ with the ‘natural’. Heterosexual, genital sexuality may have once been a norm, but even so, a norm is a flimsy (and in this case, outdated and arbitrary) basis for legislating human sexual relations. As Pierre-Gilles Guéguen put it in a talk earlier this year, human sexuality is ‘deranged’. There is nothing ‘natural about it, which is to say, like all of the other ‘natural’, ‘biological’ functions (eating, sleep, excretion, etc), it is subject to rigorous socialisation, regimentation and codification from the earliest hours of life. There can be nothing natural about human sexuality, as, popular reifications notwithstanding, it doesn’t wander about unencumbered by historical context, unmediated by language.
For this reason, Lacan made the provocative argument in Seminar XX that ‘Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’, which is to say, there is no intrinsic rapport or sexual relation between the sexes, Aristophanic fantasies aside. Each couple must construct it, anew, and on an ongoing, partial, and provisional basis. And from this, it follows that, whatever one’s objections to marriage per se, there are no legitimate objections against SSM in particular, at least, not from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Archives of a Divided Subject 