Transgression and the Limits of Enjoyment: Approaching a Psychoanalytic Ethics

On entering a supermarket K., a patient in his early fifties, finds himself faced with a torturous decision that concerns itself with the tension between denial and submission: whether or not to indulge himself with some chocolate and in so doing risk suffering the consequences of self-loathing and guilt at giving in to his strict prohibitions. He buys one bar of chocolate—not insignificantly named ‘Divine’—eats it immediately on leaving, and then rushes back to buy another two. Enthralled by a self-imposed moral law, his enjoyment is always transgressive and causes a painful distress that is always on the side of excess; the law that chokes him derives from his inability to meet the transgressive demands of this internal ethical force.

Psychoanalysis recognises that the subject's discourse is in the service of infantile identifications which pay scant heed to accepted, albeit culturally specific, moral and ethical standards. In other words, the psychoanalytic space is one in which transgression against the social, cultural and religious ethics of the day is always already at play. What then of the equally insistent demands of the social sphere, of culture and civilization - the need to do good? This, too, is evident. But this urge towards the moral, Freud suggests, can cause nervous illness that could well be eased by a little transgressive behaviour. To those who find themselves unable to bear the demands of a ‘noble-minded’ life he ventures, ‘They would have been more healthy if it could have been possible for them to be less good’ (1908: 191). The structures that are responsible for both a malevolent urge to please oneself, and the moral urge to please others, share a space within an often transgressive framework allowing for the formulation of something that approaches an ethical relativism of the subject.

This has implications for the practice of psychoanalysis. In the first place it obliges the analyst to recognise the validity of all judgements (conflicting or otherwise); therefore ethical conflicts cannot be easily settled. Secondly, psychoanalysis has something to say about the way in which psychical conflict is often intricately linked to the inability to transgress without feeling the full force of the moral law; or, conversely, the inability to adhere to the moral law without a turn to the transgressive.

In some senses it seems clear that the analyst, in many areas of work done with a patient, is always dealing with the question of ethics. To suggest, as Freud (1908) has done, that many neuroses stem from the inability to loosen the constricting forces of a prohibitive morality, could give rise to the possibility of an approach that highlights transgressive alternatives. The role of psychoanalysis, however, is not to be on the side of the moral good, any more than it should aim for a conflict-free alternative. To suggest that the goals of analysis lie in the direction of a happy and healthy life is to privilege the view that all moves to this end are controlled by the autonomous being of the Cartesian subject, who is not bound by and to the exigencies of the outside world.

According to Althusser, the subject is brought into being through processes of identifications and introjections, which are marked by what

he terms the interpellative nature of ideological apparatuses. These structures of ideological recognition, like the policeman's cry of ‘hey, you there!’ hail a subject qua subject, in an operation of ideology that chisels out ‘concrete individuals as concrete subjects’ (Althusser, 1970: 55). For Freud, the superego constitutes the subject not only through parental introjections, but also by acting as a ‘substitute for the Oedipus complex’ and a ‘representative of the real external world’ (Freud, 1924: 167), while for Lacan, the symbolic locus of the Other, itself propped up by an imaginary relation, allows for the potential of desire and hence the formation of a subject who becomes fragmented at the moment when ‘the specular I turns into the social I’ (Lacan, 2006 [1949]: 79). All these structures, however defined, operate mainly within the register of an unknown and unknowable unconscious, and therefore do not, on the whole, fulfil a command to do good.

What of the possibility of a conflict-free transgressive alternative? Well this, too, is barred. The Lacanian concept of jouissance denotes the excess of pleasure (a primary aim of the happy and the healthy in traditional ethics), which at the same time is unbearable and causes suffering. This unbearable, painful ‘enjoyment’ is bound by the demands of the law and is thus always already prohibited, ensuring that the satisfaction of pleasure is accompanied by suffering or, at the very least, by a sacrifice of desire in the service of the law. In his seminar on Ethics, Lacan does not hesitate to emphasise the point that the transgressive urge is firmly rooted in a pleasure that is always restricted, ‘Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principal, by the forms of the Law’ (Lacan, 1992 [1959–60]: 177). Since it is only ever able to operate within a prohibitive framework, this is much more a jouissance of transgression than a transgressive jouissance, in other words jouissance, rather than manifesting itself as a transgressive adjunct to the Law, operates within the prohibitions imposed by the Law and is therefore inseparable from its structure. The forms of the law to which Lacan refers regulate desire; to satisfy the law, to act in the service of the moral good, is to sacrifice desire, just as a satisfaction of desire involves a sacrifice in the direction of the good (Lacan 1992 [1959–60]: 322).

The moral law, as exemplified by the Ten Commandments, offers a guide to this relationship to desire where the subject is at odds with the prohibitions of the law:

We will have to explore that which, over the centuries, human beings have succeeded in elaborating that transgresses the Law, puts them in a relationship to desire that transgresses interdiction, and introduces an erotics that is above morality. (Lacan, 1992 [1959–60]: 84)

Lacan here is not directly referring to the sexual; the notion of an erotics certainly includes the sexual, but it seems also to encompass the broader conceptions of enjoyment and pleasure that are invoked by his concept of jouissance. That which exceeds the limits of morality is a forbidden enjoyment and, as such, is always transgressive.

This notion of a transgressive enjoyment was a key aspect of the thinking of Georges Bataille, who throughout his writing attempted to turn towards and define an expenditure of excess that operated beyond the law. Like Lacan, Bataille nevertheless accepted that enjoyment can only operate within the structures of the law; the urge to transgress originates and depends upon a need to break free of a prohibitive, taboo-filled morality where transgression exists because of the law and in spite of the law. It is not denied by the law, but situated at the limits of that which is prohibited: it ‘transcends and completes’ the taboo without which there is no desire (Bataille, 1962: 63). For Bataille, not only can there be no transgression without taboo, but enjoyment itself is achieved via an acknowledgement of and reliance on the taboo. The purity of the ‘inner experience’ which Bataille evokes is presented with obstacles in ‘the reconciling of what seems impossible to reconcile, respect for the law and violations of the law, the taboo and its transgression’ (Bataille 1962: 36). Echoing the Freudian superego, Bataille is adamant that prohibitions can originate from an internal as well as an external source; what served as guilt for Freud is apprehended by Bataille as an ‘anguish of mind’ felt at the moment of transgression and experienced as sin (see Bataille. 1962: 38).

We shall now return to K., who cannot resist the lure of the forbidden pleasure, the divine enjoyment, which constitutes chocolate. The commandment to abstain is overridden and the asceticism through which he feels he needs to live his life is put into question by a desire for that which is beyond the reaches of the Law, yet intricately knitted to it. He is torn between conscious and unconscious ethical ‘pulls’, between giving in and giving up. K. abstains from any form of pleasure that he feels he hasn't ‘deserved’ and only allows himself enjoyment once he has undergone the suffering of deprivation. Without this ‘noble suffering’ (itself a form of perverse satisfaction for him) pleasure is barred and inaccessible. The urge to please himself is strong in terms of the conflicting lures of his prohibitions, notwithstanding his need for an ‘erotics’ of pleasure; all of which are governed by a powerful internal ethical agency.

Introducing the notion of an internalised ethical agency is to approach Freud's formulation of the superego, more specifically the way in which it operates as a demanding voice with dominion over both conscious and unconscious life. Conscious awareness of social, moral and cultural issues comes from the commandments of the outside world, from God and the law. On an unconscious level, the superego acts as an agency that maintains an ethics that derive from infantile identifications with parental and other authority figures, but presents itself in the subject where there is ‘no mastery over the system of directions and investments that regulate his behaviour in depth’ (Lacan, 1992 [1959–60]: 72). Thus, it is not what I know, but something that knows that is above me, Freud's Über-Ich (literally ‘Over-I’ in the original German). So, in this formulation, the superego can be seen to act as a transgressive agency, placing the subject in a pitched battle on two fronts, firstly with the aims of traditional morals—enjoyment of the good, beautiful and fulfilled life—and secondly with the painful excesses of enjoyment.

The superego is not just a conscience playing Jiminy Cricket to the Pinocchio of the ego; for Freud, the superego is a ‘structural relation and is not merely a personification of some abstraction as that of conscience’ (Freud, 1933: 64). The superego also incarnates its opposite, a brutal force that is unaccountable to the interests of anything that might be called a conscience. Freud came to understand that the demands of a conscience, in the traditional sense of the word, cannot be satisfied by

the subject's adherence to moral law. By means of the suppression of unconscious drives, the demands of the superego grow ever more vicious, even when all the criteria are met (see Freud 1924: 170). The superego then, is both ‘supermoral’, mediating between a striving towards morality and a complete denial of it, and ‘cruel’, creating demands that are aggressively directed towards the subject's relationship to the internal and external world (Freud 1923: 54). The aggression that marks the function of the superego is a result of a repression and denial of unconscious drives, ‘as much a reflection of the id as of the external world’ (Freud 1924: 167).

Lacan understood Freud's formulation ‘where id was, there ego shall be’ (Freud 1933: 80) as an idea that had bearing on the question of ethics. What Freud posited as an action of civilising ‘culture’, was relocated by Lacan as a shift towards the I that in its action ‘is a duty in the moral sense’ (Lacan, 2006 [1955]: 347). Rather than interpreting this as a straightforward strengthening of the ego —a bringing to consciousness of that which was once unconscious— it can instead be read as a formula in which the subject finds itself in a position where the primal and insistent pulls of the unconscious are suppressed in order to defend the subject against that which is contrary to its very nature—the urge towards transgression, itself a moral force. The demand of the subject is situated ‘in the place where strange, paradoxical, and cruel commands are suggested to it by its morbid experience’ (Lacan, 1992 [1959–60]: 7). In other words, the unity of the subject is threatened by a drive that acts in transgressive ways and is mediated by the agency of a superego whose energy stems from an aggression that shows itself in the subject's relation to itself (see Lacan, 1992 [1959–60]: 194). The ego finds itself in the place of the id, not merely to replace its unpalatable demands, but to unwillingly assume the mantle of that which seems most alien to it—its unconscious desires.

How then, are we able to understand this formulation of the aggressive and cruel superego as acting both as an imperative of the law and as an agency that makes demands of the subject that are outside of the law? For Lacan ‘the superego is at one and the same time the law and its destruction’ and becomes identified with ‘the ferocious figure’ of that which is ‘most devastating, most fascinating, in the primitive experiences of the subject’ (Lacan, 1988 [1953–54]: 102). This ferociousness manifests

itself within the subject as a sadistic, punishing force resulting in guilt-ridden suffering and self-admonition. As an apparently ethical agency, the superego sets up an opposition between the urge to do good to others (and in the process harms the psyche through the suppression of transgressive drives, causing the ‘nervous illness’ alluded to by Freud) and a need to do good for the self-same psyche, in other words benevolently tolerating destructive feelings of shame and guilt. Lacan's reading of Freud's second topography portrays the superego as essentially malevolent in its aims and responsible for an ethics of the subject that can only ever be relative and contingent. The role of the analyst is not to modify the patient's transgressive urges to conform to established notions of ethics, but rather to recognise that what is at stake is what could be called ‘an ethics of transgression’ that, when surrendered to, can only result in a powerful sense of guilt.

For K., this surrendering takes the form of giving-in to that which he knows will cause a short-lived and intense pleasure; giving-in to what is always followed by a sense of disappointment and self-recrimination. A persistent bed-wetter in his childhood, he suffered pain and humiliation when he was beaten on each occasion by his father. The enjoyment in letting-go is short-lived, transgressive and becomes taboo; to disobey the law of the father—a law that is reinforced through the prohibitive function of the Oedipus complex—produces anxiety and guilt. K.'s guilt in his day-to-day life lies in a number of directions: at earning more than his sister, in allowing himself to reach orgasm, in his sexual attraction to others, in ambivalence and conflict regarding his emerging (and for many years suppressed) homosexuality and, of course, the divine and excessive guilt engendered by his desire for chocolate, which in itself is a stand-in for the sexual enjoyment he has denied himself. Pleasure is barred through the fear of disappointment and pain; disappointment becomes the only pleasure left to him—a transgressive urge to enjoy one way or another, to find a satisfaction in his suffering in the moment that pleasure becomes a transgressive jouissance. Freud spoke of the masochistic urge for punishment and its relationship to guilt in the case of the Wolf Man who attempts to elicit punishment from his father in order both to achieve a sexual aim and to satisfy the guilt he felt regarding his desire (see Freud 1918: 28). In his later paper on masochism, Freud elaborated on this theme when he insisted that the idea of an

unconscious sense of guilt should be translated as the notion of ‘a need for punishment at the hands of a parental power’ (Freud 1924: 169), a retreat away from the sense of ethics instilled in the subject via the demands of the external world towards the prohibited desires of the Oedipus complex.

When the analyst is faced with the patient's guilt, he is not always in a position to deny or try to assuage its effects; instead he may understand that guilt stems from the subject's relationship with the truth of its desire:

[F]rom an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.

Whether it is admissible or not in a given ethics, that proposition expresses quite well something that we observe in our experience. In the last analysis, what a subject really feels guilty about when he manifests guilt at bottom always has to do with—whether or not it is admissible for a director of conscience—the extent to which he has given ground to his desire (Lacan 1992 [1959–60]: 319).

There is an ambiguity here in the idea of a ‘giving ground’ in relation to desire, implying both a ceding to desire and a surrender to the law; both placing a block on desire in the service of the law, and bypassing the law through the mechanisms of jouissance. Guilt can be present as a result of an excess of enjoyment as well as a surplus of the law, but can only exist within the confines of the law. Guilt in this instance is not a product of a superegoic ‘director of conscience,’ but comes about because of the subject surrendering to his desire. It operates in opposition to the law, which insists that we don't enjoy too much, and in this sense is always at the level of transgression.

If the proposition that guilt stems from a giving-in to desire is ‘admissible in a given ethics,’ it is within what I have called an ethics of transgression and it is through this notion that a psychoanalytic ethics can be contrasted with the aims of a traditional ethics:

And it is because we know better than those who went before how to recognise the nature of desire, which is at the heart of this experience, that a reconsideration of ethics is possible, that a form of ethical judgment is possible, of a kind that gives this question the form of a Last Judgment: Have you acted in conformity with the desire that is in you? (Lacan 1992 [1959–60]: 314)

A psychoanalytic ethics, then, is not concerned with the aim of a moral good but, as with the case of the ‘Wolf Man,’ it seeks to understand and uncover the unconscious, repressed machinations of our desire and how we have acted under its control. Guilt, as expressed by the patient in analysis, is the product of this unconscious desire and must be addressed as such with the question, ‘How are your symptoms and defences connected to a particular unconscious conflict between your desire and your idea of the good?’ (Fryer, 2004: 213).

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud begins a footnote by quoting Hamlet's assertion that ‘conscience does make cowards of us all,’ before lamenting that the young are ill-prepared in their education for the aggressive drives of their own sexuality; that they are bound to fail in life if there is no recognition that the ethical demands of civilization can never successfully be met and only result in a sense of unhappiness. This is, he elegantly states, ‘a false psychological orientation’, akin to ‘starting on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian Lakes’ (Freud 1930: 134, n.). The subject's enjoyment, always in conflict with the demands of the moral law, cannot be anything other than transgressive; jouissance is ‘evil’ and is in its nature a form of suffering (see Lacan, 1992 [1959–60]: 184). The ethical approach on the part of psychoanalysis is not to ask how the subject has acted in respect of the moral law, but to understand how they have acted in relation to their unconscious drives and desires—ensuring that they are adequately equipped for the journey, however transgressive it might prove to be.