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According to Jean Guillaumin (1997), a substantial, if not interminable, amount of work remains to be done on the question of the subject and the object. The anxiety surrounding experiencing oneself as a subject and being considered as a subject, which are preconditions for subject-object differentiation, is so intense in early experiences that it can only be checked by an auto-erotism of anxiety that can very naturally develop into a form of masochism, which thus becomes a matter for sharing and communicating with others on a minimal basis of a joint denial of difference. The sharing of the subject's anxiety with two or several individuals creates silences, attacks, and complicities in lack that seem to be the most authentic form of relationship between human beings (Angélo Hesnard).
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Objet Petit a and L'Autre
L'autre is, in a sense, the key term in understanding Lacan's treatment of the unconscious. It is those aspects of an encounter not captured by signification but affecting the psyche of the subject in potentially important ways. Lacan remarks that it is "stuck in the gullet of the signifier" (1994/1997, 270) and therefore indicates the gap between the symbolizing subject and the subject as subjectivity. "The object a is the remainder from the operation of being constituted as a speaking being; it cannot be assimilated because it is Real" (Marks, Glowinski, and Murphy 2001, 125). [End Page 69]That is to say, words are not the actual things that they indicate; an encounter is never completely captured discursively. When two people interact, both are affected in ways not captured by the "text" of the conversation. The effects on speaker and listener are different, but both are affected by aspects of their encounter that do not form content for conscious experience and are part of l'autre. If, later, these effects "tug at the psyche," a person may use an object a to try and give tangible form to this elusive aspect of the encounter. Freud discusses the child's game of losing and retrieving a physical object (such as a toy) in trying to deal with the repeated losses and reappearances of the mother by "concretizing" (and thereby making accessible to cognition) what is going on. For Lacan, the psychic dimensions of this challenge become symbolically "located" in that object that serves as a model or icon for the development of object relations in the unconscious.
Although aspects of experience may be addressed by manipulating the object petit a, the object petit a cannot adequately be symbolized by any public system of signifiers; nor can it be eliminated. The object a is a joint creation of the world and my subjectivity as it grapples with the world and reflects both the need for signification in the psyche and its inevitable incompleteness and insufficiency to both the tuché and the object of desire.
Object a lies beyond the signifier, it cannot be expressed in signifiers but it can be distinguished as the object cause of desire precisely because desire endlessly shifts through a chain of signifiers; it never coincides with them.
(Marks, Glowinski, and Murphy 2001, 125)
In this passage, the interaction between signification and the tuché continually draws the subject back to the locus of the tuché to try and find some closure—a doomed search. The tuché cannot be just an object (because it is a product of my engagement with the object) and cannot be possessed.
Consider an example: a young man is contemplating asking a young woman from his university class to date him. He muses upon his possible love life and builds fantasies on his picture of her. He is disturbed at one point when he notices that she has a birth mark on her neck and thereafter feels unhappy about his reveries. He forsakes her as his imaginary partner and looks for another, scanning the face of any young woman he sees for something he knows not what until he becomes aware that every woman he meets has some defect which he cannot overlook.
What is the relationship between this search for a perfect partner and the search for a perfect object corresponding to a signifier? Neither is attainable because of the nature of the tuché and the nature of fantasies he builds. That which is desired is signified by the individual and the actual world can never actually match the signified desire. No matter what happens: whether the individual continues to find new objects that will inevitably be part of an unsatisfactory tuché; or changes the desire he will find that the gap is unbridgeable.
For Lacan (and, by implication, psychoanalysis in general) psychopathology arises when the mismatch between the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real intrudes on and disrupts the unfolding of a life story. It is not unusual for people to put symbolic labels to things when those labels poorly represent those things or even to idealize things and experiences because they do not fulfill the significations ideally associated with them. If Uncle Joe was an abuser and yet the child symbolizes Uncle Joe in a good light because of the residues of speech by other trusted people (Mum and Dad), then there is a mismatch close to the center of the child's being. The mismatch is at a strategic point where the entire narrative needs to be coherent in the right kind of way. For Uncle Joe's victim the sexual abuse escapes into l'autre because it has no place in legitimate narratives around here.
Unacceptable experiences can end up confined to l'autre without any symbolic markers to fix them in the memory explicitly or in any recoverable form. It is as if the ego says, "That experience was nothing important, I'd be silly to take too much from that." But the unconscious "knows" otherwise. Despite the conscious message that that man does not really have anything to do with me, there is associated but inchoate psychic material conveying a very different message [End Page 70] (on the basis of a psychic association with a tuché from my past). We might understand something like "repression," in this kind of circumstance, by exploiting Lacan's analysis.
See also: Abandonment; Addiction; Alienation; Allergic object relationship; Amae, concept of; Ambivalence; Anaclisis/anaclictic; Antilibidinal ego/internal saboteur; Asthma; Autism; Bizarre object; Cathexis; Childhood; Counter-identification; Counterphobic; Cruelty; Dead mother complex; Depersonalization; Depression; Depressive position; Drive/instinct; Ego; Envy; Envy and Gratitude; Externalization-internalization; Female sexuality; Femininity; Fetishism; Hatred; Idealization; Identification; Internal object; Libidinal stage; Lost object; Love-hate-knowledge (L/H/K links); Manic defenses; Mastery, instinct for; Maternal; Melancholia; "Mourning and Melancholia"; Narcissistic withdrawal; Object a; Object, change of/choice of; Object relations theory; Orality; Pain; Paranoid position; Paranoid-schizoid position; Partial drive; Passion; Pictogram; Primary object; Projection; Psychosexual development; ; Reparation; Rivalry; Self-hatred; Self-object; Splitting; Splitting of the object; Subject; Sublimation; Substitute/substitute-formation; Symbiosis, symbiotic relationship; Symbolization, process of; Transference relationship; Transitional object; Transitional object, space; Transitional phenomena; Turning around upon the subject's own self.
Bibliography
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* Freud, Sigmund. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. SE, 14: 109-140.
* ——. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1-66.
