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Despite the fact that meaning and interpretation appear to be central to psychoanalysis, the most often overlooked contribution of psychoanalytic theory is arguably its endorsement of that which lies beyond any justifying realm of meaning. While paying specific attention to the notion of the death drive in Freudian and Lacanian theory, this paper offers a critique of the centrality of meaning in psychoanalysis by positing an Empedoclean struggle between the meaning engendered by the Symbolic
John J. Connolly is a Senior Research Clinician at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Acknowledgments. The author is especially grateful to both Professor David Aiken of Ferris State and to Mario Beira for quickening his writing to greater clarity. The author is also grateful to Professor Debra Bergoffen of George Mason University, Professor Bruce Fink of Duquesne University, and Dr. Carl Bonner, for reading the early manuscript and offering both criticism and encouragement.
Order of thought, and the more subversive consequences that stem from thought's radical insufficiency to symbolize the Real. The Hegelian doctrine of the immediacy of Sense-Certainty is presented as a limiting idea to what can be thought and as that within which the Lacanian Real is rumored to exist. The immediacy of Sense-Certainty is propounded both as founding the subject's acquaintance with the Real, and as haunting the subject's nonsubstantial being with a lure to embody an existence that is impossible to signify. This limit to signification is used to characterize desire, and desire's relation to the death drive, as structured around the gap between the immediacy of Sense-Certainty and the mediation of meaning.