In a letter to Fliss, Freud famously stated that the ‘aim’ of an analysis is to transform a person’s neurotic misery into everyday unhappiness. This rather poignant quote mutated over the years, and is now often cited as the ‘aim’ of an analysis is to help a person ‘love and work’. While I love the optimistic-nihilism of Freud’s words, its later iteration has always grated me. Why work? Why must my symptom – the very piece that refuses to bend to the Other’s will – come to work for me? Is it not quite late-stage capitalist to demand that my useless enjoyment be made useful?
Then again, like any good neurotic, I’ve always hated being told what to do. I recently watched a small child sobbing in a supermarket, as she pleaded with their mum for an ice cream. Her mother, clearly exhausted, said ‘No, we’re about to have dinner’. And just like that, I was right back there: remembering that blood-boiling fury and humiliation of having your desire denied by that big Other whose life you depend on. Like any even better neurotic, I learnt to manage that frustration by becoming charmingly pathetic. If I couldn’t have what I wanted, I’d make sure you felt terribly guilty for saying no. I’d be so lovely, so fragile, so self-depreciating that denying me would seem cruel. Now, of course, I wasn’t doing this consciously. But looking back, I can see how I adopted a kind of manipulative appeasement strategy to manage this frustration. So, I guess my symptom – in this case, charmingly low self-esteem to try and bypass the Other’s authority – was, in a sense, already working for me.
And, while I hate to break it to you, we all do this, in our own way. From a Lacanian point of view, the issue isn’t even the ‘no’ itself. On the contrary, prohibition installs a boundary which can then be crossed, transgressed, even eroticised. In other words, without that ‘no, you can’t have the ice cream,’ I wouldn’t be able to enjoy ice creams nearly as much as I do today. They would lack that law-breaking enjoyment. In fact, without these boundaries, I’d have nothing to enjoy crossing, no strategies in store for navigating the Other at the gates, and as a result, that fury would be felt in a far more stressful manner. No, the issue is far more subtle – it’s the ways in which prohibition positioned me as a subject within a discourse. For instance, nowadays, as the responsible adult I am, I can see that yes, ice cream before dinner is quite a bad idea – but that belief grates me all the same because it isn’t mine. I didn’t author it, nor did I authorise it; I did not get to decide how my own experience of the world works. But, for Lacan, this division speaks to the question of subjectivity in us all. Simply put, we are spoken before we speak, and our desire is shaped in relation to an Other – parent, teacher, society, culture. We learn to want through them, against them, because of them. We spend our lives navigating which “no” we’re going to cross, and how guilty we’ll feel for doing so. This, I believe, is our shared common unhappiness.
Tragically, then, that neurotic misery Freud speaks of might arise when this common unhappiness stops working for us and starts enjoying beyond us. When those boundaries we cross become compulsive rebellions, and we find ourselves back again and again in the same painful place. But, if I take Lacan to be right and if desire is always desire of the desire of the other, it makes my ‘self’ a kind of endless negotiation – caught between conflicting ideals, wants, wishes, humiliations, enjoyments, on it goes. I can never have that pre-dinner ice cream that the Other denied me and as a result resurrected itself as perfect bliss in my dreams, but I can enjoy the wish for it all the same.
In the end, I suppose, I have to navigate this “no”, but I can do it a little more knowingly. Not because I’ll ever transcend it, but because maybe it can be folded into the structure of one’s life. This symptom—with its endless irritation, craving and discomfort with authority – has, in its own twisted way, become the very thing I work from.
Which is why, of course, I remain absolutely annoyed by this re-writing of Freud’s dictum.
Written by Molly Fitz