The creature gazes into the Open with all its eyes. But our eyes are as if they were reversed, and surround it, everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.
Freud in On Narcissism (1914) can be read as saying that loving, as opposed to being loved narcissistically, forces one to tolerate a depletion in the opening of the self onto the other. Narcissistic love, which uses the object to inflate the ego or prop up one's sense of self, does not forfeit a part of itself necessary in the act of loving, and Freud goes on to wonder whether this cost is not emblematic of the cost (to satisfaction) that is at the heart of any possible sublimation. This distinction between a love that borders on sublimation and narcissistic love can also be found in Freud's separation of the work of mourning from its failure in the fall into melancholia. In the latter, we cannot mourn because while we may know whom we have lost, we do not know what we have lost in them, which I read to mean that in a narcissistic attachment we cannot situate the other enough in their difference to begin to know what we loved and what we had to lose.
In my work more generally, I have followed this trajectory within Freud's thought in terms of what I would call being open to the other—this opening in the self takes the form of a kind of depletion, a willingness to sacrifice preciously held ideas and identities, and a submission to outside forces be they those of the world, the loved other, or even the unconscious itself. As Lacan puts it, in 1973:
I suggest that there is a radical distinction between loving oneself through the other—which, in the narcissistic field of the object, allows no transcendence to the object included—and the circularity of the drive, in which the heterogeneity of the movement out and back shows a gap in its interval.
In the passage above, Lacan points out that to follow the circularity of the drive—this movement that does not immediately return to a reinvestment of the self—opens up a gap at the place of the object. The heterogeneity of movement is the tension of multiple possibilities when traversing this field of the other, outlining a kind of interval or absent space. The radical distinction between these two economies relies on the creation of this opening: one transcendent, one not; one that moves, one that maintains a kind of stasis. I would say that this distinction, in itself, constitutes the markers of a kind of value system in psychoanalysis.
What would it mean to be able to tolerate this opening and to work towards it? This opening outward is one that psychoanalysis recognizes as inherently difficult. It is felt subjectively as dangerous, as tension inducing, and so easily gives way to closure and resistance. Furthermore, what we work towards, the outcome, we cannot know in advance. This is the marvelous trick of narcissism wherein you find exactly what you are looking for, namely, what will fill this felt gap. This is also perhaps why Freud sees sublimation as one of the most difficult solutions to the problems of libido but also one of the most important and indeed sublime. I would say that this opening is not only a value within our work as psychoanalysts, but also one we can hold for our theoretical work and research.
But there are a few snags here. If we push these ideas in Freud and Lacan, it seems to me that the question of value in psychoanalysis itself must always be open; that what we cannot do is solidify answers too quickly. We must always be ready to destabilize and scrutinize whatever answers we do happen upon (perhaps first off for their potential narcissism). Is this not a starting point for all ethical questions, questions that stand at the beginning of psychoanalysis and the idea of cure?
Placing at the forefront problems concerning what is ethical forces one to begin with its negative possibility, the fact that “value” is something that has not been realized. History is this constraint, that failure. While this may be a given for Lacanians (intrinsic to the way they read Freud), even for most critical theorists or philosophers who theorize beginning with this kind of negativity—the only positive value being accorded to a kind of open space—it does not always seem to be the route traveled by the psychoanalysts themselves.
Does an underlying positivism inevitably put psychoanalysis on a different track than the one beginning to be outlined here? Does any ideal of mental “health” regardless of one's model of the psyche inevitably mean a kind of closure, situating an object on a future horizon that was to remain open? Does psychoanalysis, whenever it forms an idea of its end, inevitably fall into the traps of an ideal? I wish it were not so.
Jamieson Webster, Ph.D., is an advanced candidate at The New York Psychoanalytic Institute; assistant adjunct professor at The New School; supervisor at City University's doctoral program in clinical psychology.
For Freud, the possibility of desire inherent in love and work can only be understood through its own mythic origin—the killing of the father, a first desire to possess one's mate, women entering into an economy of exchange, humans banding together in small communities, acceptance of a problematic division of labor, establishment of guilt and law—namely what Lacan calls the humanization of sexuality. Failure is always first this failure. The failure is the failure of civilization and the attempt to transform or translate desire into a stable communal structure. It is, as Freud has shown, always predicated on an impossible equilibrium between possession of the good and expulsion of the bad. The universal failure of neurosis, our enduring discontent, is the failure inherent in the relation between desire and these sedimented repressions of culture. Extending backward, we find a mythical past where man was first and forever divided from nature.
Love and work, for Freud, are almost of equal necessity as failure. Sublimation is the most narrow of solutions, itself coming at a great cost to the satisfaction of the drive. The prolonged period of infantile helplessness, Hilflosigkeit, the diphasic nature of sexuality, the strangulating effects of the family, and the subsequent personalization of disappointment in the realm of human relations, colored sadomasochistically, is our lot. Psychoanalysis begins here and the solutions it provides, the so-called cure, is unknown. It is what is not yet, but what is to come by the work of analysis alone. Perhaps it is a contribution to a culture where, as Freud says, “every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.” No positive conclusions should be sought. Theoretically psychoanalysis is descriptive not proscriptive.
Any good in an analysis that is not the patient's own or, even further, one that does not spring directly from the passions of the symptom is therefore, for Lacan, an imaginary function. We have a psychoanalytic ethic of the open and we have the closure of orthopedic therapeutics. The disagreement about essentialism behind this split is so fundamental it practically seems irresolvable. For now, I would have to admit that this is painfully true, particularly to the extent that any kind of essentialism is read by Lacanians to be an act of closure, the neurotic symptom par excellence. The neurotic demand is always a demand for an essential relation, for an object that does not challenge one's sense of self but props it up, that closes down the space of desire. If psychoanalysis takes up a position that deems this possible or even merely positive, even theoretically, then it cannot submit a neurotic demand to analysis, at least not in good faith.
I do not want to end on such a bleak note. I think that this value of the open is absolutely critical, that psychoanalysis alone is in the position to speak to this kind of ethical transformation, of the difficulties of maintaining it and the points it goes awry, as well as the marvelous and singular solutions our patients come to, the opening through analysis of new ways of living and loving. I see the value of the open in psychoanalysis as one that always remembers what Eros makes possible and how tirelessly it has to be given room in order to fight off the forces of the death drive.