1. Neurosis, understood as one of the three main clinical structures or diagnostic categories of Lacanian analysis, can itself be divided into three further structures, each of which is defined not simply in terms of different symptoms, but different subject positions. These subject positions, in turn, must be thought in terms of the fundamental fantasy, considered by Lacan as the staging of the position one takes with respect to an early, sexually charged and traumatising experience.
Freud already provides an account of trauma in his early thought, exploring the consequences of a kind of surplus or overload of sexual feeling in a specific incident in one's childhood. If you are revolted by what occurred, you may become a hysteric; if you feel guilty, an obsessive. Sexual sensations of this sort exceed the pleasure principle, and give rise to what Freud calls 'satisfaction' and Lacan jouissance.
In these cases, the position of the subject is given in terms of a defense against the excessive pleasure in question, and is reflected in the fantasy that stages desire.
Since it is a defensive feature, it is no surprise that desire, awakening in this context, abhors sexual satisfaction. Fantasy, says Lacan, 'provides the pleasure peculiar to desire' - a pleasure in which fulfilment of various kinds is hallucinated rather than sought in the real world.
For Lacan, we often gain pleasure simply from imagining satisfaction. The drives are thereby reined in so that the pleasure of fantasy can be indulged. For their satisfaction would entail an overwhelming, excessive experience that would kill desire, smothering it, whereas fantasy allows desire to continue its play. As such, desire operates as a kind of defence, and the subject likewise, as it holds itself against jouissance.
2. We can distinguish hysteria from obsession, the two most important clinical subdivisions of neurosis at the level of fundamental fantasy.
The main source of satisfaction to the infant is the mother's breast which, initially, is not considered by the infant as being separate from him or her. There is, at this point, no sense of self; subject is not divided from object, self from other; one experiences not separate entities but a continuum. Once the infant becomes aware of itself as separate from its mother, the breast is no longer thought of as being 'possessed' by him or her. Weaning involves separation, and the child loses the breast, the 'object' that provided it with pleasure. Thereafter, the child attempts to compensate itself for its loss.
The obsessive's fundamental fantasy sees it attempting to overcome separation as he (obsessives are characteristically male) constitutes himself in terms of the relation to the breast. It becomes what Lacan calls the cause of his desire insofar as it seems to promise that wholeness or unity that was lost with separation. But the obsessive will not acknowledge that the breast is part of the mother - that it comes from an Other.
The hysteric's fantasy sees separation overcome as the she (hysterics are typically female) constitutes herself in terms of the object the Other is missing - she is concerned not with the breast, then, but what she feels her mother has lost. Her loss is understood in terms of the mother's loss of her, the child, considered as the object she was for her own mother. The child senses her mother to be incomplete because of her separation, and thereafter constitutes herself as the object that could make her mother whole or complete.
The hysteric, in Fink's words (and I have been paraphrasing his work very closely here)
constitutes herself as the object that makes the Other desire, since as long as the Other desires, her position as object is assured: a space is guaranteed for her within the Other.
The hysteric, then, does not take the object for herself like the obsessive, but to become the object that fulfils the Other's desire. She seeks to constitute herself as the object a for the Other, divining what the other desires by way of her. As Fink sums it up,
the obsessive attempts to overcome or reverse the effects of separation on the subject, whereas the hysteric attempts to overcome or reverse the effects of separation on the Other.
3. Lacan characterises the fundamental question with which the neurotic is concerned is the question of being: 'What am I?' It is an answer to this question the child sought from its parents - 'what do they want of me?'; 'why did they have me?', but the answers it received were characteristically disappointing ('to be a good girl'; 'because mummy and daddy loved each other ...'), letting the question remain in its urgency. The child attempts to finds an answer to this question in its own way, by focusing on the inconsistencies in what its parents say and do.
Here we find the key to the neurotic's fundamental fantasy: it is an attempt on the child's part to constitute itself with respect to the desire of its parents.
The hysteric and the obsessive can be distinguished with respect to the questions they relate to being. The obsessive asks, 'Am I dead or alive?', being convinced that when he stops thinking he will also cease to exist. Lapsing into fantasy, musing, or gaps in thinking that might happen, for example, during the 'little death' of orgasm carry with them for the obsessive the threat that he might die; he loses what Fink calls his 'conviction of being'.
Above all, the obsessive wants to remain an intact, independent ego - a conscious, thinking subject who struggles to bring to light thoughts and desires that concealed from his conscious awareness. He does not acknowledge the lack present in his psychic economy, nor his own dependence upon the Other, maintaining a fantasmic relationship with a cause of desire that is detached from the Other of which it is a part (the breast detached from the mother, and, thereafter from any particular woman).
The obsessive usually achieves sexual satisfaction from masturbation, or, if sexually involved with women, treats them as exchangable repositories of the object a, being interested in them only insofar as they embody the cause of his desire. In the case of a more permanent partner, the obsessive will transform her (assuming a heterosexual model of sexual relations) into a mother figure who provides maternal love and commanding filial duty. Alongside this Madonna, other, dangerous women will embody the object a for the obsessive; the cause of his desire lies elsewhere.
4. By contrast, the hysteric's question is 'Am I a Man or a Woman?' How is this to be understood? She seeks to make herself the object of the Other's desire (in heterosexual relationships, the male partner) in order to control that desire. The hysteric will typically attempt to leave the Other's desire unsatisfied, granting her a permanent role as object. The hysteric would thus maintain herself as desire's lack, as the object that can never be grasped by the Other.
Fink emphasises the hysteric also identifies with her male partner, desiring as though she were him. The hysteric, in his words, 'desires if she were the Other'. Whence the hysteric's question: is she the male Other with whom she identifies or the woman he desires?
At the same time, the hysteric seeks to keep her own desire unsatisfied, often deliberately depriving herself of what she wants (as Fink notes, the pleasure self-deprivation affords the hysteric is particularly evident in anorexia). This is not something of which she is unaware - she consciously desires to remain unsatisfied.
This can manifest itself by her keeping her male partner's desire alive even by frustrating his desires. Lacan: 'Desire is sustained [in the person who incarnates the Other for the hysteric] only by the lack of satisfaction [the hysteric] gives him by slipping away as object'. The hysteric thus arouses a desire in the Other and then frustrates his satisfying it.
She is often driven to do more than this, constructing elaborate love triangles involving her partner in which she is able to maintain herself as the master of his desire, its cause, even as she attempts to avoid being the person with whom he satisfies his desire.
5. Interestingly, the hysteric typically finds the Other's sexual satisfaction distasteful, and carefully attempts to avoid being the object which sexual excites the Other. There is a fine distinction to be made: she wants to be the cause of his desire, but not of his jouissance. Even as she engages in sexual activity with a man, she will imagine to imagine that another woman, not she, is in bed with him - because, in thought at least, 'she is not there', emphasises Fink.
The hysteric, Fink notes, may well find sexual satisfaction with women ('the Other sex for both men and women'), in masturbation, in eating, in drug or alcohol use, or in other activities. In relationship to her partner, however, she wants to keep sexual satisfaction and desire apart. It is not the goal of the analyst, Fink advises, to bring them together; as Lacan suggests, love, desire, and jouissance occupy structurally different levels; a problem may lie in the analysand's sacrifice of desire and sexual excitement in favour of an idea such as 'the perfect love', but the analyst must treat the patient's overall eros.
6. A pattern is emerging: both the hysteric and the obsessive may be seen to refuse joussance for the Other. The hysteric does not want to be the cause of the Other's jouissance (even as she wants to be the cause of his desire). The obsessive seeks to annihilate the Other by masturbation or the treating his sexual partners as indifferent repositories for the 'object a'.
Neurosis in general, Fink suggests, can be understood in part 'as a strategy regarding jouissance - above all, the Other's jouissance'. As he writes, 'both the hysteric and the obsessive refuse to be the cause of the Other's joussance'. And yet, says Fink, we must not be too quick in drawing this conclusion. Lacan suggests that the neurotic's fundamental fantasy 'takes on the transcendental function of ensuring the Other's jouissance'.
How should we understand this apparent rehersal? The pages in which Fink explores this question are thorny and dense. He notes that the fundamental fantasy of the neurotic forms in response to the Other. It is in response to the Other as the symbolic father or as superego who seems to prohibit desire that joussance awakens.
Prohibition eroticises what it forbids - the symbolic father thus eroticises what falls outside the law. At the same time, however, there is a kind of threshold within fantasy, Fink explains, 'beyond which it turns to horror', and claims is familiar to us in dreams in which what we are pursuing seems to turn into something horrible. Desire finds itself unexpectedly drawn towards a kind of obscene jouissance (Zizek, of course, has written a great deal about this.)
This is linked, says Fink very quickly, to the superegoic injunction which, far from forbidding us to enjoy, actually commands it, in order to satisfy the sadistic Other within us. Such satisfaction does not unfold at the level of the ego - certainly we are seeking jouissance, but it is not, in this case, for ourselves, but for the Other.
Here, Fink's account, tantalisingly and frustratingly, breaks off.
The general point seems to be that the subject's position in the fundamental fantasy of the neurotic may seem to be one of refusal of the Other's jouissance, but in fact forms in response to the Other, understood as the symbolic father or superego who lays down the law.
Our desire is always in accordance with the law, certainly, but an obscene jouissance can break out at any moment, causing desire to veer unexpectedly towards something that horrifies us. Is it in these moments that the neurotic understands how his or her jouissance is always in some sense for the Other?