NLS Congress: « Crisis, Trauma and Subjective Decision » / « Crise, trauma et décision subjective » by /par Yves Vanderveken

Crisis, Trauma and Subjective Decision 

Work-in-Progress 3
 Yves Vanderveken

Crisis is a signifier that is ever
present in contemporary discourse where it resonates everywhere. But, at
the same time, we could say that the notion of crisis accompanies
psychoanalysis from its very inception, in a way that is proper to it,
and which Freud circumscribed with the name of trauma. We could say that
trauma is a characterisation of crisis in the psychoanalytical field.
We know that the invention of psychoanalysis starts off from the study
and the therapy of symptoms, non-medical symptoms, in hysterical
subjects, at these moments of crisis. And what Freud discovers, by means
of allowing the subject to speak, is that in the origin of these
symptoms what we find is the trauma. That is to say, there is a trauma
that contributes to the formation of these symptoms. And what is trauma
if not a moment of major crisis? A moment of rupture that leaves the
subject to cope with the intrusion of something which he cannot account
for, something the subject is confronted with and which he cannot face
with the subjective reference points he has at his disposal at the time.
So the symptom comes as an effect, as a response to this.

But we must emphasise that in the field
of psychoanalysis, trauma is a moment of crisis that is absolutely
particular. It does not conform to the idea that common discourse or
common sense has about what trauma is. The trauma discovered by
psychoanalysis is not connected to an event which would intrude within a
dimension of causality that would be lineal, in the sense of ‘this
event, that effect’. Freud’s major discovery is to pose that, in
psychoanalysis, trauma as a principle concept is always linked to a
double movement, a double event; trauma is always founded on ‘two
times’.

This is, for instance, what Freud
discovers in the case of young Emma’s phobia -which Freud also calls
hysterical obsession. You may know this case which Freud describes in
the “Project for a Scientific Psychology”[3]. What happens to this young
girl? She has, we could say, a very simple symptom. She is very fearful
of going into shops alone. It is a little symptom which is both odd and
restrictive, and like we all do, she tells herself that this is
‘stupid’, it’s nonsense. She holds a critical judgement with regard to
this symptom. She knows that this is a purely subjective phenomenon and
that it is not grounded in a real danger that she might eventually
encounter in the shops. But, despite this, she can’t help it. Emma has
the recurring idea that if she goes into the shops alone, people might
make fun of her in relation to her clothes and how she is dressed. These
subjective ideas are accompanied by very real, very concrete effects in
the body such as intense anxiety, sweating and inhibition.

Freud discovers that this symptom is the
response to two events and what is essential is that it is the second
event that gives the first its traumatic value, retroactively. The first
memory that Emma connects with her symptom brings her back to her
thirteenth year, that is to say the moment when she reaches puberty. She
goes into a shop and she sees two shop assistants who laugh. She rushes
out of the shop convinced that they were laughing at the way she was
dressed. This event is accompanied by the incongruent idea (incongruent
with regards to reality), that she had liked one of the two men when.

However, this event is not sufficient to
account for the persistence of this symptom later in the life of this
young woman; she no longer dresses in the same fashion and she is older.
Thus, at this point we cannot really see very clearly what is traumatic
in this first memory. By encouraging further associations what emerges
is a memory from when she was eight years old. When she was a child of
eight, in the shop where she used to go to buy sweets, she tells of the
shop assistant twice making a move to touch her through her clothes. The
way in which she tells this is very important. What is remarkable is
the fact that this event did not prevent her from going back to the
shop. So we could say that this initial, traumatic and real event is not
subjectively experienced as traumatic at that point. What appears is a
certain culpability, a certain sense of guilt, related to the fact of
having found some pleasure in having been “appreciated” by someone. It
is only in the second moment, when she is thirteen, that the event which
took place when she was eight becomes traumatic and it is at this point
that this event delivers its sexual charge and sexual signification
which it did not carry at the time when it happened. What connects both
events or both scenes are two traits. One is the laugh of the shop
assistant which awakens the memory of the facial expression that the
original sales assistant in the sweetshop had; and the other is the fact
of being alone, because, in fact, when she is with someone she has no
problem going into shops.

The reason I come back to this, one of
Freud’s first cases, is to emphasise the singular value of the trauma in
the neurotic symptom. In fact, for Emma, the moment of crisis occurs
when she is thirteen but in a way that is disconnected from the real
event to which this symptom is connected. It is at this moment that
Freud can isolate the main trait of the neurotic symptom: what he calls
‘substitution’ or even its ‘overdetermination’. That is to say that the
symptom is never connected to just one cause. From the very beginning
the symptom is captured in a whole network of connections. Substitution
means that an event, A, conceals or masks or is linked to an event, B.
In the case of Emma the event is retroactively connected to another
event which conceals the cause. So we can say that the charge of excess,
of disgust and of the repressed sexual abuse, linked themselves
afterwards to another event which renders the cause unrecognisable. The
charge of anxiety was transferred from one to the other because there
were three discrete elements, three signifiers, which repeated
themselves: the laughing, the clothes and being alone. We must highlight
here that in the second event, it is the sexual dimension that Emma is
confronted with which she experiences. It is this actualisation that
reactivates the traumatic value of sexuality, as an encounter with
something “coming from outside”, produced when she was eight, but
without, at that point, producing the effects that will arise at
thirteen, when she has become pubescent.

So, the symptom is the response that is
created in order for the subject to assimilate something that, at the
time of this encounter, was impossible to assimilate in the subjective
economy and which overwhelms his or her capacity of symbolic
reabsorption. It is what allows for a compromise. We could say that the
symptom is a necessary response, a creation effect which is necessary to
overcome this moment of crisis in the encounter with an unchained real –
in this case, for this young woman, the sexual encounter.

The constitution of the symptom as a
response to this point of traumatic encounter, to the moment of
subjective crisis, according to a logic that has two times implies, as a
consequence, that there is no linearity between cause and effect. In
fact there is, rather, a rupture in the chain of causality, as we can
see in the triggering of the hysterical obsession in Emma. This
hysterical obsession is in fact triggered through an event which only
has a link to the previous event in relation to the substitution in the
signifying metonymy; there is no connection except for these signifying
traits that connect the two.

This is also what explains the profound
singularity of each traumatic event. An event only takes a traumatic
signification within subjective unconsciousness coordinates that cannot
be compared to anybody else’s. This is in complete opposition to the
idea that such event produces such trauma.

This is very well demonstrated in a
small volume that perhaps some of you may know which is entitled ‘Quick
Therapeutic Effects'[4], in which you will find the case of a subject
who was one of the victims of the bombings at the train station in
Madrid. This woman, who was not herself seriously injured, found herself
in the midst of the explosions and their effects on others. So what we
have here is the irruption of a pure real: a moment of crisis that could
not be more real. What Jacques-Alain Miller remarks in relation to this
case is that when this person goes back to her analysis, immediately
she begins to tell her dreams and nightmares and that, from the very
beginning, free association recommences. What Miller emphasises is that
this teaches us two things. On the one hand, that the work of the
unconscious is immediately trying to veil, to cover up this real again
by means of meaning or sense. The work of the unconscious is activated
in order to recover a certain homeostasis there. But also what this case
proves is that from the very beginning, the actual real event is taken
up within very singular subjective coordinates by the subject. From the
very beginning this real event, which we could consider an objective
event, is taken up in the subject’s signifying chains in connection with
very singular elements of her own history. What is demonstrated there
is that there is something at work in order to place this event is a
series of signifying elements and all of this work aims at trying to
reabsorb or assimilate this pure real which has no meaning whatsoever –
it’s a bomb that has exploded.

From a certain point of view, we could
say that these are two opposite examples. The first one, Emma, is a case
that shows how the traumatic event is always taken up in a
signification that is absolutely personal. On the other hand, the second
example of the attacks shows how, from the very beginning, a pure real
is reabsorbed into the personal significations of subjectivity. So we
can see that these moments of subjective crisis are the consequence of
moments of rupture in somebody’s subjective configuration, absolutely
singular, and how at the same time, this calls for a work of reweaving
of the subject’s signifying tissue with regard to this lawless real that
has been met.

The analyses that Lacan makes of Little
Hans and Hamlet allow us to take a step further, a supplementary step,
and to orient ourselves towards the structural dimension of trauma. This
means that, in fact, there is a traumatic encounter for each of us and
that what we call moments of subjective crisis are, indeed,
reactivations of this. They are reactivations of a structural point
which is traumatic for every speaking being.

Let us examine Hamlet, of whom Lacan
says is not a clinical case but that we nevertheless have there the
“neurotic desire in every instant of its incidence”[5]. Undoubtedly,
Hamlet goes through a moment of subjective crisis when his admired
father dies. But what Lacan insists on and what he demonstrates is that
what really makes Hamlet suffer, what actually plunges Hamlet into
despair is, in fact, the encounter with his mother’s desire. The “desire
of the mother”[6] is revealed in its whole dimension -as something
detached from the bond with the father, something outside of the law of
the father-, once the father disappears. As you know she is sleeping
with the main suspect of Hamlet’s father’s death and Shakespeare does
not conceal the erotic exchanges. It is the encounter with this
“unchained” feminine desire in the mother –“unchained” or “triggered” in
the sense that it no longer responds to the law, it exceeds her
position as mother in the relationship with the father and makes of her a
woman whose desire exceeds that of ‘towards’ or ‘regulated’ by the
father-, it is Hamlet’s encounter with this desire that plunges him into
total despair.

Lacan actually makes fun of this scene
where Hamlet beseeches his mother to calm down and to toe the line, of
Hamlet’s appeal: “Refrain tonight, take the path of morality…”[7] We can
say that it is the encounter with the feminine dimension of the desire
of the Other, outside the phallic law, which provokes a crisis for
Hamlet, the son, as it does for every neurotic. It is at this point that
Lacan situates the true death of the father and it is in relation to
that point that Hamlet, through his grief, through his work of mourning,
is called upon for a reconstruction, “a massive intervention in
relation to the whole of the symbolic game”[8] – everything has to be
reconstructed and for Hamlet this means passing through a moment of
desubjectivisation. We can say this is a moment of crisis that we
encounter, structurally. The mother is a woman. For the obsessional
subject this is, particularly, his trauma.

This is not without a connection to the
phobia of Little Hans to which Lacan devotes an entire Seminar[9]. For
Little Hans it is also less a matter of the desire for his mother[10]
-what has been retained from the vulgarisation of the Oedipus complex-,
it is not about him being attached to his mother, but about being
confronted with the desire of her mother, which Hans’ father cannot
‘master’. Also, in this case, it is the encounter with the feminine
dimension of the desire of the Other, what Jacques-Alain Miller calls
the “the mother’s knickers”[11], it is this which leaves this little boy
completely without resources (with regards to the “father’s lack
[carence du père][12]), confronted with a panic point, as Lacan will say
later[13], a panic point where something needs to be rewoven, a new
signification that the paternal signification cannot cover up
completely, cannot fill up. It is this point that the phobic object
comes to signify, in its various strands, of which the essential trait
is the famous krawall.

This other desire, which escapes the
control and the law of this desire, Lacan will at the end of his
teaching localise it, for Hans, in his own organ[14]. So evidently, we
have, on the one hand the encounter with the desire of the Other which
provokes the moment of crisis but, on the other hand and at the end of
his teaching, Lacan goes on to say that this encounter with the desire
of the Other, was encountered by Little Hans in his own body. At the
time of the encounter with his first erections, this part of the body
suddenly becomes uncontrollable, starts to live its own life, not at all
under the control of the body; this is why Lacan says that phallic
jouissance is “outside the body”[15]. It is the encounter with this
other jouissance, which inhabits one’s own body without being reabsorbed
in it, which will be the trigger, according to Lacan, of the moment of
subjective crisis that Little Hans goes through. His phobia will be the
treatment, the attempt at cure for this hole encountered in knowledge.
An attempt at cure, as Freud had already qualified delusion in
psychosis, and which we can expand to symptom and fantasy. On purpose, I
am putting together these three terms, symptom, fantasy and delusion,
in continuity. Even if there are some differences of course, all three
of them are there to cover and treat this hole in the symbolic.

Trauma, being at the same time the
encounter of the body with the signifier and with the outside-of-the-law
[hors-loi] of sexuality, has a structural dimension for the speaking
being. This is what Lacan manages to reformulate with this later
analysis of Hans’ phobia. For each speaking being, by the very fact that
he speaks and that speaking is what denaturalises instinct, there is
structurally an encounter with jouissance which is never the jouissance
that should be. This is what Lacan’s sentence: ‘There is no sexual
rapport / relation’ means. Here we have the fundamental crisis. This
jouissance presents itself always as an excess or unsatisfying, too much
or too little, carrying disgust or not, present always when it should
not be and absent when it should there. This is always encountered
within singular coordinates for each subject. In this sense, the moment
of subjective crisis, the trauma, is always second, or in any case, the
traumatic events have always a singular connection with the initial
trauma of being born into language, which repetition commemorates. The
traumatic events or bad encounters redouble this initial trauma and only
take their meaning from the mark that the signifiers have left in a
contingent manner on the singular being of each of us, and which
determine us in our own traits. It is these determinations, all of which
are at the same time signifying marks carrying an other jouissance,
that an analysis aims at isolating and circumscribing.

The moments of subjective crisis are
those moments when the veil of the fantasy is torn back. Because, in the
end, what is the fantasy? It is your own system of personal
signification about the world that you have constructed. It is your own
way of reading the world. Moments of crisis are precisely moments where
this ‘reading system’ fails and encounters a point that cannot be
assimilated and which renders the function of the symptom inoperative.
It is a reactivation of this moment of traumatic encounter which leaves
the subject without resources and which calls upon the subject for a
work of reconstruction, of reweaving, of reinvention. These are moments
where the taking up of a position and the making of a decision is
necessary.

From the perspective outlined above, all
speaking beings are situated on the same side with regards to this
point. This is what, at the end of his teaching, Lacan is going to call
‘generalised foreclosure’. For every speaking being there is a hole in
knowledge in relation to sexuality: a troumatisme, for everybody. It is a
hole about which and around which everybody has built a signification,
that is to say, a delusion.

Let us say that it is the modality of
response to this hole, to this structural point, which can determine a
difference in terms of psychical structure such as neurosis or
psychosis. However, even though this is a distinction which one has to
take into account, it is not so operative. There used to be classic,
standard modes of response to this hole, which were transmitted by
tradition. There were ways of doing, ways of behaving, which were
transmitted and constituted the paths of laws. They were standard
solutions. This is why Lacan includes them more on the side of
feeblemindedness [débilité]. Something of this ‘out-of-law’ was
regulated by the symbolic and by the law of the Father; that is what
tradition is. Only these traditions have been shattered or perhaps, to
put it differently, that the nature of semblance of these traditions has
been revealed and, therefore, devalued. This is due to the effects of
science, of capitalism and globalisation which sweep tradition away; but
also, due to psychoanalysis[16]; to bring back these constructions to
their status of semblances with regards to the real is one of
psychoanalysis’ great gestures.

One last point. You can find this very
well condensed in a recent text by Sophie Marret-Maleval[17]. In this
short text, she puts forward how there is an approach to the symptom,
which is the one that I have just developed here. It is the symptom
understood as the response, the invention that comes to calm, to temper
this encounter with the real outside of law. But, at the same time and
by that very fact, the symptom is that which is in direct contact with
this real.

She reminds us that Lacan calls “a
symptom everything that comes from the real and the real is everything
that does not work out”[18]. So this opens up a different conception of
‘moments of crisis’. Up until now we have seen moments of crisis as
something that needs to be reabsorbed, reassimilated, in its dimension
of therapeutic treatment. But the emergence of a moment of crisis is
also a sign of the real, which calls for a response from the subject. To
go back to the title of our Study-Day today, it is a moment which calls
for a decision from the subject, a decision by the subject to confront
himself with, to respond to this point of real by means of something
other than what Lacan calls feeblemindedness. In other words, it calls
for a response that would not be to misrecognise and cover up the real,
but one that would rather lead the subject to orient himself or herself
by it in order to decide. From this, I could say that an analysis, when
it is taken to a certain point, can undoubtedly lead to an increase of
freedom with regard to the straitjacket of the fantasy; but it also
implies that the subject is more and more confronted with what Lacan
calls ‘the forced choice’. The forced choice which is mine, which does
not exist except from that mark inscribed in my own being, but which
indicates, when this signal emerges, that I cannot flee and a response
is required.

The moment of crisis emerges there as
that moment which we can no longer authorise ourselves to avoid, the
sign that there is a real at play. This is what Lacan meant when
defining what the only ethics of psychoanalysis is, when saying: ‘not to
give ground on one’s desire’. And this is also what Jacques-Alain
Miller referred to in a formula that made waves: ‘Do your duty'[19].
Evidently, this is not a ‘do your duty’ connected to imposed and
superegoic ideals, but to that which each one –for oneself- can no
longer afford to avoid. 

Transcribed and edited by Tom Ryan from the simultaneous translation by Florencia F.C. Shanahan 

Notes:

Crise, trauma et décision subjective 

Work-in-progress 3 
Yves Vanderveken