Difference between revisions of "Fantasy"

From No Subject - Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis
Jump to: navigation, search
(The LinkTitles extension automatically added links to existing pages (https://github.com/bovender/LinkTitles).)
 
(25 intermediate revisions by 4 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
 +
{{Top}}[[fantasme]]{{Bottom}}
  
fantasy ( fantasme)                  The concept of fantasy (spelt 'phantasy' in the
+
==Sigmund Freud==
 +
The [[concept]] of [[fantasy]] is central to [[Freud]]'s [[Works of Sigmund Freud|work]].<ref>"[[Fantasy]]" is spelt "[[fantasy|phantasy]]" in the ''[[Standard Edition]]''.</ref>  Indeed, the origin of [[psychoanalysis]] is bound up with [[Freud]]'s [[recognition]] in 1897 that [[memory|memories]] of [[seduction]] are sometimes the product of [[fantasy]] rather than traces of [[real]] [[sexual]] abuse.  This crucial [[moment]] in the [[development]] of [[Freud]]'s [[thought]] (which is often simplistically dubbed "the abandonment of the seduction [[theory]]") seems to imply that [[fantasy]] is opposed to [[reality]], a purely [[illusory]] product of the [[imagination]] which stands in the way of a correct [[perception]] of reality.  However, such a view of [[fantasy]] cannot be maintained in [[psychoanalytic theory]], since [[reality]] is not seen as an unproblematic given in which there is a single objectively correct way of perceiving, but as something which is itself discursively constructed.
  
    Standard Edition) is central to Freud's work. Indeed, the origin of psycho-
+
Therefore the [[change]] in [[Freud]]'s [[ideas]] in 1897 does not imply a [[rejection]] of the fundamentally discursive and imaginative [[nature]] of [[memory]]; [[memory|memories]] of [[past]] events are continually [[being]] reshaped in accordance with [[unconscious]] [[desire]]s, so much so that [[symptom]]s originate not in any supposed "[[objective]] facts" but in a [[complex]] [[dialectic]] in which [[fantasy]] plays a vital [[role]].
  
    analysis is bound up with Freud's recognition in 1897 that memories of
+
[[Freud]] uses the term "[[fantasy]]", then, to denote a [[scene]] which is presented to the imagination and which [[stages]] an [[unconscious]] [[desire]].  The [[subject]] invariably plays a part in this [[scene]], even when this is not immediately [[apparent]].  The [[fantasy|fantasized]] [[scene]] may be [[conscious]] or [[unconscious]].  When [[unconscious]], the [[analyst]] must reconstruct it on the basis of other clues.<ref>{{F}} "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|A Child Is Being Beaten]]," 1919e. [[SE]] XVII, 177.</ref>
  
    seduction are sometimes the product of fantasy rather than traces of real
+
==Jacques Lacan==
 +
===Protection Function===
 +
While [[Lacan]] accepts [[Freud]]'s formulations on the importance of [[fantasy]] and on its [[visual]] quality as a scenario which stages [[desire]], he emphasizes the protective function of [[fantasy]].  [[Lacan]] compares the [[fantasy]] [[scene]] to a frozen [[image]] on a [[cinema]] [[screen]]; just as the [[film]] may be stopped at a certain point in [[order]] to avoid showing a [[trauma]]tic [[scene]] which follows, so also the [[fantasy]] [[scene]] is a [[defence]] which veils [[castration]].<ref>{{S4}} pp. 119-120</ref>  The [[fantasy]] is thus characterized by a fixed and immobile quality.
  
    sexual abuse. This crucial moment in the development of Freud's thought
+
===Defence and Clinical Structure===
 +
Although "[[fantasy]]" only emerges as a significant term in [[Lacan]]'s [[work]] from 1957 on, the concept of a relatively [[stable]] mode of [[defence]] is evident earlier on. This concept is at the root both of [[Lacan]]'s [[idea]] of [[fantasy]] and his [[notion]] of [[clinical structure]]; both are conceived of as a relatively stable way of defending oneself against [[castration]], against the [[lack]] in the [[Other]].  Each [[clinical structure]] may thus be distinguished by the [[particular]] way in which it uses a [[fantasy]] [[scene]] to [[veil]] the [[lack]] in the [[Other]].
  
    (which is often simplistically dubbed 'the abandonment of the seduction
+
===Neurotic Fantasy===
 +
The [[neurotic]] [[fantasy]], which [[Lacan]] formalizes in the [[matheme]] ('''$ <> a'''), appears in the [[graph of desire]] as the [[subject]]'s response to the enigmatic [[desire]] of the [[Other]], a way of answering the question [[about]] what the [[Other]] wants from me. (''[[Che vuoi?]]'')<ref>{{E}} p. 313</ref>
 +
The [[matheme]] is to be read: the [[bar]]red [[subject]] in relation to the [[object]].  The [[perverse]] [[fantasy]] inverts this relation to the [[object]], and is thus formalized as '''''a'' <> $'''.<ref>{{Ec}} p. 774</ref>
  
    theory') seems to imply that fantasy is opposed to reality, a purely illusory
+
===Fantasy of the Hysteric and Obsessional Neurotic===
 +
Although the [[matheme]] ('''S <> a''') designates the general [[structure]] of the [[neurotic]] [[fantasy]], [[Lacan]] also provides more specific [[formulas]] for the [[fantasy]] of the [[hysteric]] and that of the [[obsessional neurotic]].<ref>{{S8}} p. 295</ref>  While the various formulas of [[fantasy]] indicate the common features of the [[fantasy|fantasies]] of those who share the same [[clinical structure]], the [[analyst]] must also attend to the unique features which characterise each [[patient]]'s particular fantasmatic scenario.
  
    product of the imagination which stands in the way of a correct perception of
+
===Fantasy and the Subject===
 +
These unique features express the [[subject]]'s particular mode of ''[[jouissance]]'' though in a distorted way.  The [[distortion]] evident in the [[fantasy]] marks it as a compromise [[formation]]; the [[fantasy]] is thus both that which enables the [[subject]] to sustain his [[desire]],<ref>{{S11}} p. 185; {{Ec}} p. 780</ref> and "that by which the subject sustains himself at the level of his vanishing desire."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref>
  
    reality. However, such a view of fantasy cannot be maintained in psycho-
+
===Fundamental Fantasy===
 +
[[Lacan]] holds that beyond all the myriad [[images]] which appear in [[dream]]s and elsewhere there is always one "[[fantasy|fundamental fantasy]]" which is [[unconscious]].<ref>{{S8}} p. 127</ref>  In the course of [[psychoanalytic treatment]], the [[analyst]] reconstructs the [[analysand]]'s [[fantasy]] in all its details. However, the [[treatment]] does not stop there; the analysand must go on to "[[fantasy|traverse the fundamental fantasy]]."<ref>{{S11}} p. 273</ref>  In other [[words]], the [[treatment]] must produce some modification of the [[subject]]'s fundamental mode of [[defence]], some alteration in his mode of ''[[jouissance]]''.
  
    analytic theory, since reality is not seen as an unproblematic given in which
+
===Image and Symbolic Structure===
 +
Although [[Lacan]] recognizes the [[power]] of the [[image]] in [[fantasy]], he insists that this is due not to any intrinsic quality of the [[image]] in itself but to the [[place]] which it occupies in a [[symbolic]] [[structure]]; the [[fantasy]] is always "an image set to work in a signifying structure."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref>
 +
<!--
 +
===Kleinian Account of Fantasy===
 +
[[Lacan]] criticizes the [[Klein]]ian account of [[fantasy]] for not taking this [[symbolic]] [[structure]] fully into account, and thus remaining at the level of the [[imaginary]]; "any attempt to reduce [fantasy] to the imagination      . . . is a permanent misconception."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref>  In the 1960s, [[Lacan]] devotes a [[whole]] year of his [[seminar]] to discussing what he calls "the [[logic]] of fantasy," again stressing the importance of the [[signification|signifying]] [[structure]] in [[fantasy]].<ref>{{S14}}</ref>
 +
-->
  
    there is a single objectively correct way of perceiving, but as something which
+
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==
 +
Like many of Žižek’s foundational theories, fantasy derives from the [[psychoanalytic]] work of Freud and Lacan. For Freud, fantasy emerged in his 1897 discovery that [[memories]] of seduction may be the result of fantasy as opposed to actual sexual [[violence]]. In common parlance, fantasy denotes a [[separation]] from reality, a [[construction]] that is fictional and therefore opposed to reality. Freud’s discovery, though, challenges this widespread [[understanding]]. For psychoanalysis, reality is problematic when it is assumed that it distinguishes authentic or unmediated [[experience]] for the subject. Reality is more properly [[understood]] as a way of perceiving that is already stained by the [[human]] subject’s desire. Therefore, reality is already a [[subjective]] [[process]] mediated by desire and constructed discursively. Fantasy, then, [[acts]] as a scene that stages desire in the imagination of the subject. For this [[reason]], Lacan states in his fourteenth seminar, ''The [[Logic of Fantasy]]'': “Desire is the [[essence]] of reality” (''S''XIV: 6). The principal point for Lacan, here, is that fantasy is the setting for desire where fantasy provides the [[matrix]] through which [[subjects]] begin to desire.
  
    is itself discursively constructed. Therefore the change in Freud's ideas in
+
For Žižek, fantasy is not an exercise in fulfilment, contentment or [[satisfaction]]. Instead, it provides a scene for a privileged yet [[arbitrary]] object that embodies the force of desire. The foundational premise of fantasy in this rendering lies in the [[claim]] that desire is not something that is given; rather, it is assembled. Therefore, fantasy acts as a structure that provides the coordinates for a subject’s desire. That is, fantasy provides the idea of a privileged object that desire fixates on in order to provide the subject with its [[position]] in relation to it. This privileged object acts as the ''[[objet petit a]]'' or object-[[cause]] of desire. This object [[structures]] the subject’s experience of the [[world]] in so far as this object is taken as more than its [[material]] property. The object that consumes desire and therefore occupies the fantasy of the subject must first fall prey to the [[illusion]] that it is more than its pragmatic material. The object is marked by this structure as being more than its materiality, as being endowed with the promise to [[satisfy]] the desire that necessitates it. Thus, fantasy acts as the mode whereby the subject learns to desire because through fantasy the subject is situated as [[desiring]].
  
    1897 does not imply a rejection of the veracity of all memories of sexual
+
The role fantasy plays is twofold: [[universal]] and particular. Fantasy is a universal structure that indexes, points or directs our desire towards a [[physical]] manifestation that occupies desire. Yet, what is particular to each and every subject is the way fantasy structures the relation to the trauma of lack predicated by desire. This constitutive lack that the privileged object promises to fulfil acts as a screen that orients each fantasy, which in turn supports desire in order to shield the subject from the trauma of lack itself. In this way, fantasy bestows reality with a fictional [[coherence]] and consistency that appears to fulfil the lack that constitutes [[social]] reality. Hence, Žižek’s foremost contribution to this long-theorized notion lies in showing how fantasy serves as a [[political]] structure. He reveals how fantasy can fill in [[ideological]] gaps and provide access to [[obscene]] ''[[jouissance]]'', and he contends that a failure to explicate the essence of political beliefs does not imply any failure in the hold these beliefs have over us. Instead, political [[ideologies]] serve to give subjects a means of envisioning the world in which such a failure emerges as evidence as to how transcendent is their particular [[ideology]]. Fantasy serves [[politics]] precisely in that each political group must recognize its point of view as manifested in the extrapolitical fantasy [[objects]] customary within that specific [[nation]], [[culture]] or [[religion]]. If not, these groups must displace the sitting ideologies’ fantasy objects with their chosen manifestations. Consequently, for Žižek, fantasy goes beyond the usual symbolic coordinates, so that [[traversing]] the fantasy does not mean getting rid of the fantasy but being even more taken up by it.
  
    abuse, but the discovery of the fundamentally discursive and imaginative
+
Fantasy, therefore, acts as a way for the subject to envisage a way out of the [[dissatisfaction]] produced by the [[demands]] of [[social reality]] through these objects or ideas (e.g. [[freedom]], brotherhood, the [[Church]]). In this [[sense]], fantasy is a [[psychological]] structure that manifests itself in a [[phenomenological]] [[form]]. And, while fantasy might not provide us with the object itself, it can provide something of equal consequence: the scene of attaining the privileged object that renders attainment as a possibility. Fantasy organizes and domesticates the ''jouissance'' that provides the framework through which we experience reality; therefore, this structure – and the arbitrary object that animates it – acts as a defence against the [[traumatic]] [[loss]] of ''jouissance'' that occurs through entering [[the symbolic]] order. In turn, fantasy can surface in a more evident socio-symbolic way in which it assuages unrest by depoliticizing the social [[body]] for the purposes of accepting a ruling ideology. Fantasy thus serves as a way to distract, even encourage, the [[social body]] from directly engaging with the dissatisfaction of lack. Although lack is constitutive of every human subject, the political advocacy of a social body can [[help]] organize a [[society]] better to manage dissatisfaction as a by-product of the demands of that social reality. Therefore, fantasy acts as a way to fracture political [[unity]] by focusing attention on [[individual]] satisfaction imagined to be the promise of a unique privileged object.
  
 +
Because fantasy offers the promise of satisfaction as part of a privileged object, we [[understand]] this object as being apart from our [[self]]. [[Enjoyment]] derived from this fantasy image is therefore projected onto the Other. As a path to [[repress]] the idea of a non-[[lacking]] subject, the subject we fantasize and therefore imagine as a possibility, we [[project]] onto the Other the enjoyment we lack. Žižek argues that this places the subject in a position of understanding the Other obtaining enjoyment at our expense. Because we are able to fantasize an [[impossible]] enjoyment, we also misattribute this [[impossibility]] to an Other that seems to [[enjoy]] in a way we cannot experience but only imagine. Since fantasy provides us with the coordinates to domesticate our [[desire,]] in order to fulfil lack we rarely attribute lack as an experience beyond our self. The [[distinction]] between our own lack of impossible enjoyment and the non-lacking status of the Other opens the possibility of a violence predicated on destroying the enjoyment we fantasize this Other to possess at our expense. [[The logic of fantasy]] in relation to lack suggests that, if I am lacking, it is because some other nefarious [[figure]] has stolen it, and thus the lack of lack, as it were, becomes an object of possession under [[capitalism]]. This rendering is consistent with Žižek’s assertion that fantasy leads to all varieties of discrimination: [[racism]], sexism, ageism and [[homophobia]], among [[others]]. Th is non-lacking status takes the form of a person or [[thing]] we understand through [[cultural]] [[myth]] or [[capitalist]] ideology.
  
 +
Consequently, fantasy offers us the illusion that the object we pursue will assuage the discomfort of lack. In this formulation, desire is separated from [[drive]] because it privileges the object of our fantasy that presents itself as the [[cure]] for lack. Desire, in this [[case]], predicates its function on the attainment of the object of our fantasies, while drive reaches satisfaction through the continual pursuit of this object. That is, drive functions through the [[repetition]] of this cycle whereas desire places [[faith]] in the redeeming quality of the object. The privileged object of our desire and the fantasy that supports it act in two ways: (a) as the site where the human subject invests in the hope for an enjoyment (''jouissance'') that will [[return]] the subject to a non-lacking [[state]], which allows each human subject to tolerate this status; and (b) as a fantasmatic, and thus arbitrary, promise of a non-lacking status that does not [[exist]], which replaces a [[partial]] and obtainable enjoyment by holding out the idea of a [[total]] enjoyment that it ultimately cannot produce or [[guarantee]]. Desire constantly moves forwards from object to object because each new instantiation of our fantasy fails to provide the satisfaction the human subject believes it will provide. In this sense, fantasy remains the same, but our desire forces us to continue the [[search]] for the impossible owing to the inherent failure each object represents. Because the subject does not lack an experiential object, lack is misattributed as a [[negative]] [[category]] that can be overcome by addition.
  
 +
The subject [[lacks]], but what it lacks is [[nothing]] and each new object fails to satisfy because it can only offer something.
  
 +
==See Also==
 +
{{See}}
 +
* [[Castration]]
 +
* [[Hysteria]]
 +
* [[Image]]
 +
||
 +
* ''[[Jouissance]]''
 +
* [[Lack]]
 +
* [[Matheme]]
 +
||
 +
* [[Neurosis]]
 +
* [[Obsessional neurosis]]
 +
* [[Structure]]
 +
||
 +
* [[Subject]]
 +
* [[Treatment]]
 +
* [[Unconscious]]
 +
{{Also}}
  
      nature of memory; memories of past events are continually being reshaped in
+
==References==
 
+
<div style="font-size:11px" class="references-small">
      accordance with unconscious desires, so much so that symptoms originate not
+
<references />
 
+
</div>
      in any supposed 'objective facts' but in a complex dialectic in which fantasy
+
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
 
+
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]
      plays a vital role. Freud uses the term 'fantasy', then, to denote a scene which
+
[[Category:Practice]]
 
+
[[Category:Dictionary]]
    is presented to the imagination and which stages an unconscious desire. The
+
[[Category:Treatment]]
 
+
[[Category:Sexuality]]
      subject invariably plays a part in this scene, even when this is not immediately
+
[[Category:Concepts]]
 
+
[[Category:Terms]]
      apparent. The fantasised    scene may be conscious      or unconscious. When
+
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]
 
+
{{OK}}
      unconscious, the analyst must reconstruct it on the basis of other clues (see
+
__FORCETOC__
 
 
    Freud, 1919e).
 
 
 
        While Lacan accepts Freud's formulations on the importance of fantasy and
 
 
 
      on its visual quality as a scenario which stages desire, he emphasises the
 
 
 
      protective function of fantasy. Lacan compares the fantasy SCENE (OR fTOZen
 
 
 
      image on a cinema screen; just as the film may be stopped at a certain point in
 
 
 
      order to avoid showing a traumatic scene which follows, so also the fantasy
 
 
 
      scene is a defence which veils castration (S4, l 19-20). The fantasy is thus
 
 
 
      characterised by a fixed and immobile quality.
 
 
 
        Although 'fantasy' only emerges as a significant term in Lacan's work from
 
 
 
      1957 on, the concept of a relatively stable mode of DEFENCE iS evident earlier
 
 
 
      on (see, for example, Lacan's remark in 1951      on 'the permanent modes by
 
 
 
      which the subject constitutes his objects'; Ec, 225). This concept is at the root
 
 
 
      both of Lacan's idea of fantasy and of his notion of clinical structure; both are
 
 
 
      conceived of as a relatively stable way of defending oneself against castration,
 
 
 
      against the lack in the Other. Each clinical structure may thus be distinguished
 
 
 
      by the particular way in which it uses a fantasy scene to veil the lack in the
 
 
 
      Other. The neurotic fantasy, which Lacan formalises in the matheme (SO a),
 
 
 
      appears in the graph of desire as the subject's response to the enigmatic desire
 
 
 
      of the Other, a way of answering the question about what the Other wants from
 
 
 
      me (Che vuoi?) (see E, 313). The matheme is to be read: the barred subject in
 
 
 
      relation to the object. The perverse fantasy inverts this relation to the object,
 
 
 
      and is thus formalised as a OS (Ec, 774).
 
 
 
          Although the matheme (SO a) designates the general            structure of the
 
 
 
      neurotic fantasy, Lacan also provides more specific formulas for the fantasy
 
 
 
      of the hysteric and that of the obsessional neurotic (S8, 295). While the various
 
 
 
      formulas of fantasy indicate the common features of the fantasies of those who
 
 
 
      share the same clinical structure, the analyst must also attend to the unique
 
 
 
      features which characterise each patient's particular fantasmatic scenario.
 
 
 
      These unique features express the subject's particular mode of ./OUISSANCE,
 
 
 
      though in a distorted way. The distortion evident in the fantasy marks it as a
 
 
 
      compromise formation; the fantasy is thus both that which enables the subject
 
 
 
      to sustain his desire (Sll, 185; Ec, 780), and 'that by which the subject
 
 
 
      sustains himself at the level of his vanishing desire' (E, 272, emphasis added).
 
 
 
          Lacan holds that beyond all the myriad images which appear in dreams and
 
 
 
      elsewhere there is always one 'fundamental fantasy' which is unconscious (see
 
 
 
      S8, 127). In the course of psychoanalytic treatment, the analyst reconstructs
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
the analysand's fantasy in all its details. However, the treatment does not stop
 
 
 
there; the analysand must go on to 'traverse the fundamental fantasy' (see S11,
 
 
 
273). In other words, the treatment must produce some modification of the
 
 
 
subject's fundamental mode of defence,            some alteration in his mode of
 
 
 
jouissance.
 
 
 
      Although Lacan recognises the power of the image in fantasy, he insists that
 
 
 
this is due not to any intrinsic quality of the image in itself but to the place
 
 
 
which it occupies in a symbolic structure; the fantasy is always 'an image set
 
 
 
  to work in    a signifying structure' (E, 272). Lacan criticises the Kleinian
 
 
 
  account of fantasy for not taking this symbolic structure fully into account,
 
 
 
and thus remaining at the level of the imaginary; 'any attempt to reduce
 
 
 
[fantasy] to the imagination      . . . is a permanent misconception' (E, 272). In
 
 
 
the 1960s, Lacan devotes a whole year of his seminar to discussing what he
 
 
 
calls 'the logic of fantasy' (Lacan, 1966-7), again stressing the importance of
 
 
 
the signifying structure in fantasy.
 
 
 
 
 
== def ==
 
 
 
Fantasy (fantasme)
 
 
 
The concept of fantasy is central to Freud’s work.
 
 
 
Indeed, the origin of [[psychoanalysis]] is bound up with Freud’s recognition in 1897 that memories of seduction are sometimes the product of fantasy rather than traces of real sexual abuse.
 
 
 
This crucial moment in the development of Freud’s thought seems to imply that fantasy is opposed to reality, a purely illusory product of the imagination which stands in the way of a correct perception of reality.
 
 
 
However, such a view of fantasy cannot be maintained in psychoanalytic theory, since reality is not seen as an unproblematic given in which there is a single objectively correct way of perceiving, but as something which is itself discursively constructed.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
While Lacan accepts Freud’s formulations on the importance of fantasy and on its visual quality as a scenario which stages desire, he emphasizes the protective function of fantasy.
 
 
 
Lacan compares the fantasy [[scene]] to a frozen image on a cinema screen: just as the film may be stopped at a certain point in order to avoid showing a traumatic scene which follows, so also the fantasy scene is a defence which veils [[castration]].<ref>s4 119-120</ref>
 
The fantays is thus characterized by a fixed and immobile quality.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
60
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
== def ==
 
 
 
Lacan's Conception of Fantasy
 
 
 
If the neurotic subject does not to forego the Oedipal supposition that there is some Thing that would fully satisfy the desire of the mother, it is because s/he constructs fantasies about the nature of this lost Thing, and how s/he stands towards it. The primary means s/he deploys in this process is what I recounted above, when I noted how the difficulty in knowing the referent of the phallic master signifiers obliges subjects to construct their beliefs concerning it in a 'decentred' manner, through the Others. While the subject accepts that the Real phallic Thing is lost to him/her, that is, in his/her fantasmatic life s/he yet supposes that there are Others who do know what it is that phallic signifiers refer to, and have more direct access to the Real of jousissance. In line with this, Lacan's further argument is indeed that the deepest fantasmatic postulation of subjects is always that the Real Phallic Thing that s/he has been debarred from must be held in reserve by the 'big Other' whose law it is that discernibly structures the mother’s desire.
 
What follows from this is the position that the manifestations of the unconscious represent small unconscious rebellions of the subject against the loss that s/he takes him/herself to have endured when s/he acceded to socialization. They are all under-girded by the more basic fantasmatic structuration of identity as constituted by the loss endured at castration. This is why Lacan talks of a fundamental fantasy, and argues that it is above all this fundamental fantasy that is at stake in psychoanalysis. Lacan strived to formalize the invariant structure of this 'fundamental fantasy' in the matheme: $ <> a. This matheme indicates that: '$', the ‘barred’ subject which is divided by castration between attraction to and repulsion from the Object of its unconscious desire, is correlative to ('<>') the fantasised lost object. This object, designated in the matheme as 'a', is called by Lacan the ‘object petit a’, or else the object cause of desire. Lacan holds that the subject always stabilizes its position vis-à-vis the Real Thing by constructing a fantasy about how the debarred Thing is held in the big Other, manifesting only in a series of metonymic or partial objects (the gaze or voice of his/her love objects, a hair style, or some other 'little piece of the Real') that can be enjoyed as compensation for its primordial loss of the maternal Thing. Lacan's argument is that the fundamental psychological 'gain’ from the fundamental fantasy is the following. The fundamental fantasy represents what occurred at castration in the terms of a narrative of possession and loss. This fantasm thus consoles the subject by positing that s/he at one point did have the phallic Thing, but that then, at castration, it was taken away from him/her by the Other. What this of course means is that, since the Thing was taken away from the subject, perhaps also It can be regained by him/her. It is this promise, Lacan maintains, that usually structures neurotic human desire. What the fantasy serves to hide from the subject, then, is the possibility that a fully satisfying sexual relationship with the mother, or any metonymic substitute for her, is not only prohibited, but was never possible anyway. As I recounted in Part 1, the Lacanian view, which is informed by observation of infantile behavior, is that the mother-child relationship before castration is not Edenic, but characterized by imaginary transitivity and aggressivity. This is why Lacan quips in Seminar XX that 'there is no such thing as a sexual relationship' and elsewhere that the ‘Woman’, with a capital ‘W’, 'does not exist'. Note then that the deepest logic of castration, according to Lacan, is a profoundly paradoxical one. The 'no!' of the father prohibits something that is impossible. Its very prohibition, however, gives rise in the subject to the fantasmatic supposition that the Thing in question is one that is attainable but only being debarred. Lacan thus asserts that the fundamental fantasy is there to veil from the subject the terminal nature of its loss at castration. This is not simply a speculation, however. It is supported by telling evidences that he adduces. The key point that supports Lacan's position is the stipulation the objet petit is an anamorphotic object. What this means can be seen by looking at even the most well-known exemplar of the Lacanian objet petit a: the 'object gaze'. Contrary to how it is sometimes read, the Lacanian 'gaze' is anything but the intrusive and masterful male gaze on the world. For Lacan, gaze is indeed a "blind spot" in the subject's perception of visible reality, “disturbing its transparent visibility". [Zizek, 1999a: 79] What it bears witness to is the subject's inability to fully frame the objects that appear within his/her field of vision. The classic example of the object-gaze from Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the floating skull at the feet of Holbein's Ambassadors. What is singular about this 'thing’ is that it can literally only be seen from 'awry', and at the cost that the rest of the picture appears at that moment out of focus. From this point on the canvas, Lacan comments, it is as if the painting regards us. What he means is that the skull reminds us that we, and with us our desires and fantasies, are implicated in how the scene appears. Here then is another meaning to $ <> a: the objet petit a, for Lacan, as something that can only operate its fascination upon individuals who bear a partial perspective upon it, is that object that 're-presents' the subject within the world of objects that it takes itself to be a wholly 'external' perspective upon. If a subject thus happens upon it too directly, it disappears, or else- as in psychosis and the well-known filmic motif of what happens when one encounter one's double- the cost is that one's usual sense of how the rest of the world is must dissipate. What this indicates is that the object petit a, or at least the fascinating effect the object which bears it has upon the subject who is under its thrall, has no 'objective' reality independently of this subject. The logical consequence of this, though, as Lacan stipulates, is that this supposedly 'lost' object can never really have been lost by the subject, since s/he can never have possessed it in the first place. This is why Lacan argues the apparently chimerical position that the objet petit a is by definition an object that has come into being in being lost.
 

Latest revision as of 07:09, 24 May 2019

French: [[fantasme]]

Sigmund Freud

The concept of fantasy is central to Freud's work.[1] Indeed, the origin of psychoanalysis is bound up with Freud's recognition in 1897 that memories of seduction are sometimes the product of fantasy rather than traces of real sexual abuse. This crucial moment in the development of Freud's thought (which is often simplistically dubbed "the abandonment of the seduction theory") seems to imply that fantasy is opposed to reality, a purely illusory product of the imagination which stands in the way of a correct perception of reality. However, such a view of fantasy cannot be maintained in psychoanalytic theory, since reality is not seen as an unproblematic given in which there is a single objectively correct way of perceiving, but as something which is itself discursively constructed.

Therefore the change in Freud's ideas in 1897 does not imply a rejection of the fundamentally discursive and imaginative nature of memory; memories of past events are continually being reshaped in accordance with unconscious desires, so much so that symptoms originate not in any supposed "objective facts" but in a complex dialectic in which fantasy plays a vital role.

Freud uses the term "fantasy", then, to denote a scene which is presented to the imagination and which stages an unconscious desire. The subject invariably plays a part in this scene, even when this is not immediately apparent. The fantasized scene may be conscious or unconscious. When unconscious, the analyst must reconstruct it on the basis of other clues.[2]

Jacques Lacan

Protection Function

While Lacan accepts Freud's formulations on the importance of fantasy and on its visual quality as a scenario which stages desire, he emphasizes the protective function of fantasy. Lacan compares the fantasy scene to a frozen image on a cinema screen; just as the film may be stopped at a certain point in order to avoid showing a traumatic scene which follows, so also the fantasy scene is a defence which veils castration.[3] The fantasy is thus characterized by a fixed and immobile quality.

Defence and Clinical Structure

Although "fantasy" only emerges as a significant term in Lacan's work from 1957 on, the concept of a relatively stable mode of defence is evident earlier on. This concept is at the root both of Lacan's idea of fantasy and his notion of clinical structure; both are conceived of as a relatively stable way of defending oneself against castration, against the lack in the Other. Each clinical structure may thus be distinguished by the particular way in which it uses a fantasy scene to veil the lack in the Other.

Neurotic Fantasy

The neurotic fantasy, which Lacan formalizes in the matheme ($ <> a), appears in the graph of desire as the subject's response to the enigmatic desire of the Other, a way of answering the question about what the Other wants from me. (Che vuoi?)[4] The matheme is to be read: the barred subject in relation to the object. The perverse fantasy inverts this relation to the object, and is thus formalized as a <> $.[5]

Fantasy of the Hysteric and Obsessional Neurotic

Although the matheme (S <> a) designates the general structure of the neurotic fantasy, Lacan also provides more specific formulas for the fantasy of the hysteric and that of the obsessional neurotic.[6] While the various formulas of fantasy indicate the common features of the fantasies of those who share the same clinical structure, the analyst must also attend to the unique features which characterise each patient's particular fantasmatic scenario.

Fantasy and the Subject

These unique features express the subject's particular mode of jouissance though in a distorted way. The distortion evident in the fantasy marks it as a compromise formation; the fantasy is thus both that which enables the subject to sustain his desire,[7] and "that by which the subject sustains himself at the level of his vanishing desire."[8]

Fundamental Fantasy

Lacan holds that beyond all the myriad images which appear in dreams and elsewhere there is always one "fundamental fantasy" which is unconscious.[9] In the course of psychoanalytic treatment, the analyst reconstructs the analysand's fantasy in all its details. However, the treatment does not stop there; the analysand must go on to "traverse the fundamental fantasy."[10] In other words, the treatment must produce some modification of the subject's fundamental mode of defence, some alteration in his mode of jouissance.

Image and Symbolic Structure

Although Lacan recognizes the power of the image in fantasy, he insists that this is due not to any intrinsic quality of the image in itself but to the place which it occupies in a symbolic structure; the fantasy is always "an image set to work in a signifying structure."[11]

In the work of Slavoj Žižek

Like many of Žižek’s foundational theories, fantasy derives from the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Lacan. For Freud, fantasy emerged in his 1897 discovery that memories of seduction may be the result of fantasy as opposed to actual sexual violence. In common parlance, fantasy denotes a separation from reality, a construction that is fictional and therefore opposed to reality. Freud’s discovery, though, challenges this widespread understanding. For psychoanalysis, reality is problematic when it is assumed that it distinguishes authentic or unmediated experience for the subject. Reality is more properly understood as a way of perceiving that is already stained by the human subject’s desire. Therefore, reality is already a subjective process mediated by desire and constructed discursively. Fantasy, then, acts as a scene that stages desire in the imagination of the subject. For this reason, Lacan states in his fourteenth seminar, The Logic of Fantasy: “Desire is the essence of reality” (SXIV: 6). The principal point for Lacan, here, is that fantasy is the setting for desire where fantasy provides the matrix through which subjects begin to desire.

For Žižek, fantasy is not an exercise in fulfilment, contentment or satisfaction. Instead, it provides a scene for a privileged yet arbitrary object that embodies the force of desire. The foundational premise of fantasy in this rendering lies in the claim that desire is not something that is given; rather, it is assembled. Therefore, fantasy acts as a structure that provides the coordinates for a subject’s desire. That is, fantasy provides the idea of a privileged object that desire fixates on in order to provide the subject with its position in relation to it. This privileged object acts as the objet petit a or object-cause of desire. This object structures the subject’s experience of the world in so far as this object is taken as more than its material property. The object that consumes desire and therefore occupies the fantasy of the subject must first fall prey to the illusion that it is more than its pragmatic material. The object is marked by this structure as being more than its materiality, as being endowed with the promise to satisfy the desire that necessitates it. Thus, fantasy acts as the mode whereby the subject learns to desire because through fantasy the subject is situated as desiring.

The role fantasy plays is twofold: universal and particular. Fantasy is a universal structure that indexes, points or directs our desire towards a physical manifestation that occupies desire. Yet, what is particular to each and every subject is the way fantasy structures the relation to the trauma of lack predicated by desire. This constitutive lack that the privileged object promises to fulfil acts as a screen that orients each fantasy, which in turn supports desire in order to shield the subject from the trauma of lack itself. In this way, fantasy bestows reality with a fictional coherence and consistency that appears to fulfil the lack that constitutes social reality. Hence, Žižek’s foremost contribution to this long-theorized notion lies in showing how fantasy serves as a political structure. He reveals how fantasy can fill in ideological gaps and provide access to obscene jouissance, and he contends that a failure to explicate the essence of political beliefs does not imply any failure in the hold these beliefs have over us. Instead, political ideologies serve to give subjects a means of envisioning the world in which such a failure emerges as evidence as to how transcendent is their particular ideology. Fantasy serves politics precisely in that each political group must recognize its point of view as manifested in the extrapolitical fantasy objects customary within that specific nation, culture or religion. If not, these groups must displace the sitting ideologies’ fantasy objects with their chosen manifestations. Consequently, for Žižek, fantasy goes beyond the usual symbolic coordinates, so that traversing the fantasy does not mean getting rid of the fantasy but being even more taken up by it.

Fantasy, therefore, acts as a way for the subject to envisage a way out of the dissatisfaction produced by the demands of social reality through these objects or ideas (e.g. freedom, brotherhood, the Church). In this sense, fantasy is a psychological structure that manifests itself in a phenomenological form. And, while fantasy might not provide us with the object itself, it can provide something of equal consequence: the scene of attaining the privileged object that renders attainment as a possibility. Fantasy organizes and domesticates the jouissance that provides the framework through which we experience reality; therefore, this structure – and the arbitrary object that animates it – acts as a defence against the traumatic loss of jouissance that occurs through entering the symbolic order. In turn, fantasy can surface in a more evident socio-symbolic way in which it assuages unrest by depoliticizing the social body for the purposes of accepting a ruling ideology. Fantasy thus serves as a way to distract, even encourage, the social body from directly engaging with the dissatisfaction of lack. Although lack is constitutive of every human subject, the political advocacy of a social body can help organize a society better to manage dissatisfaction as a by-product of the demands of that social reality. Therefore, fantasy acts as a way to fracture political unity by focusing attention on individual satisfaction imagined to be the promise of a unique privileged object.

Because fantasy offers the promise of satisfaction as part of a privileged object, we understand this object as being apart from our self. Enjoyment derived from this fantasy image is therefore projected onto the Other. As a path to repress the idea of a non-lacking subject, the subject we fantasize and therefore imagine as a possibility, we project onto the Other the enjoyment we lack. Žižek argues that this places the subject in a position of understanding the Other obtaining enjoyment at our expense. Because we are able to fantasize an impossible enjoyment, we also misattribute this impossibility to an Other that seems to enjoy in a way we cannot experience but only imagine. Since fantasy provides us with the coordinates to domesticate our desire, in order to fulfil lack we rarely attribute lack as an experience beyond our self. The distinction between our own lack of impossible enjoyment and the non-lacking status of the Other opens the possibility of a violence predicated on destroying the enjoyment we fantasize this Other to possess at our expense. The logic of fantasy in relation to lack suggests that, if I am lacking, it is because some other nefarious figure has stolen it, and thus the lack of lack, as it were, becomes an object of possession under capitalism. This rendering is consistent with Žižek’s assertion that fantasy leads to all varieties of discrimination: racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia, among others. Th is non-lacking status takes the form of a person or thing we understand through cultural myth or capitalist ideology.

Consequently, fantasy offers us the illusion that the object we pursue will assuage the discomfort of lack. In this formulation, desire is separated from drive because it privileges the object of our fantasy that presents itself as the cure for lack. Desire, in this case, predicates its function on the attainment of the object of our fantasies, while drive reaches satisfaction through the continual pursuit of this object. That is, drive functions through the repetition of this cycle whereas desire places faith in the redeeming quality of the object. The privileged object of our desire and the fantasy that supports it act in two ways: (a) as the site where the human subject invests in the hope for an enjoyment (jouissance) that will return the subject to a non-lacking state, which allows each human subject to tolerate this status; and (b) as a fantasmatic, and thus arbitrary, promise of a non-lacking status that does not exist, which replaces a partial and obtainable enjoyment by holding out the idea of a total enjoyment that it ultimately cannot produce or guarantee. Desire constantly moves forwards from object to object because each new instantiation of our fantasy fails to provide the satisfaction the human subject believes it will provide. In this sense, fantasy remains the same, but our desire forces us to continue the search for the impossible owing to the inherent failure each object represents. Because the subject does not lack an experiential object, lack is misattributed as a negative category that can be overcome by addition.

The subject lacks, but what it lacks is nothing and each new object fails to satisfy because it can only offer something.

See Also

References

  1. "Fantasy" is spelt "phantasy" in the Standard Edition.
  2. Freud, Sigmund. "A Child Is Being Beaten," 1919e. SE XVII, 177.
  3. Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre IV. La relation d'objet, 19566-57. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. pp. 119-120
  4. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p. 313
  5. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p. 774
  6. Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 1960-61. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p. 295
  7. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p. 185; Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. p. 780
  8. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p. 272
  9. Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 1960-61. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p. 127
  10. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p. 273
  11. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p. 272