Hello, from the American Midwest.
Since the last time I wrote a CP I attended the Clinical Study Days 13 conference of the Lacanian Compass, where I spent a lot of time talking with other Lacanians about a variety of topics. One of those topics was object a, another was the idea of surplus jouissance [EN0].
THERE ARE FOUR TERMS:
After writing up the editions of CP that focused on S1 and S2, I felt like I was in a real roll with explaining the four terms that are a part of each of the four discourses.
Then I tried to write about term $ and found I could not get into the right headspace to attempt to explain what $ signifies. So I moved into the only remaining term, the term a (object a).
I’ve had a tough time attempting to write up my understanding of this term as well. Part of the reason is what these terms contain is vast and flexible, and as such, it is impossible to render them in writing (the symbolic) any complete fashion. (Even if you're good at rendering things in the symbolic via writing [EN1], these terms are very difficult to describe without going all inside-baseball in your descriptions.)
Additionally, the concept of objct a has a long history in Lacan’s work. It was introduced in Seminar X (1962-1963), seven years before it Lacan works through the four discourses in Seminar XVII (1969-1970). Jacques-Alain Miller has pointed out in the text Paradigms of Jouissance that object a’s relationship to jouissance changed a great deal over Lacan’s work [EN2].
As a result of the long (complex?) history of object a, I’m going to do two editions of CP around a within the four discourses.
a AS THE “LOST OBJECT”
When I encountered the a in Lacanian theory, I most often “translated” the term object a in my mind as a signifier for the lost object. But what does that mean? There are so many ways to explain it. Here are just a few that I can describe as I sit writing this in the airport.
The lost object = childhood, youth, time.
We (unconsciously) believe that we had something when we were younger, that our lives were better when we were children, and lived our lives in accordance with the pleasure principle without the responsibilities of adulthood. Then the reality principle kicked in and kicked our asses when people started making demands of us. (Toilet training, “Use your words!” No hitting!, etc.) This is evident in the way that many subjects say they wish they could return to childhood when they could free-roam through our days blissfully devoid of adult responsibilities.
Another way to think about what we all lose as we get older has to do with time. As time goes by and we move from childhood into adolescence and beyond, we lose time. As we lose time, as the pile of yesterdays grows and the collection of tomorrows shrinks, people stop telling us, “you are the future.” In effect, we lose our future as a seemingly limitless horizon as time goes by. We all have to learn that we are limited (i.e. castrated) by time. None of us have enough time to do all the things we want to do, to learn all the things we want to learn, to get all the things we want to get. When we are younger, we can, somewhat reasonably, assume, “I’ve got lots and lots of time. I’ll get to it (whatever it is) later.” As we get older time starts to run out, we lose the ability to reasonably believe we will get to whatever we want to do later [EN3]
We all want to get this back. We want to be able to have what we believe we had (but did not appreciate enough) when we were younger.
Another way we can see people try to replace their lost childhood, and the time that we had when we were children, is by having children of our own. In this way, a parent’s child might function as the parent’s lost object.
The lost object as the m/Other [EN4].
When we are infants, we are taken care of in as complete a way as another person can care for us. This other person caring for us is our mother (i.e. m/Other). As we get older, our m/Other reduces the level of care they provide to us, and as a result, we need to create ways of caring for our selves.
In this way, the lost object is the lost care we had as children.
Many people will (unconsciously) try to re-find this lost object in their romantic relationships.
The fantasy of omnipotence/specialness.
Again, when we are children, we believe we are omnipotent. We think we're the center of the universe and that all things revolve around us. At some point, we are forced to reckon with the fact that we are not special (or we are special… but so is everyone else, so even if we are special our specialness is not special).
The lost object as the phallus, or ϕ (the Greek letter phi) [EN5]
One of the many ways we can think about the lost object is to think of it as “the phallus” or as the Greek letter phi ϕ.
Lacan would use ϕ to signify the phallus in his mathems. One of the reasons that ϕ is useful as a signifier is that it signifies the phallus without using the world phallus, which many people have a negative reaction to.
ϕ = The “object” (object being used in the loosest sense of the term here) that lets a subject believe they have the power to do what they want and that other people can’t stop you from doing it. (Imagine He-Man holding up his magic sword saying, “I HAVE THE POWERRRRRRRRR!”
Theoretically, we all have ϕ when we are children, but this belief that we have ϕ is a fantasy. Over time it becomes clear that we don’t have ϕ, and the fantasy breaks down. This is the start of the subject (S) becoming the barred subject ($).
Over time we all try to recover ϕ, and one of the ways we do that is by recovering bits of it by getting object a. In this case, object a is the thing that will give us the lost power (ϕ) we unconsciously think we use to have. (Imagine He-Man lost his sword and kept trying to find a replacement for it.)
Let’s wrap up this section.
I hope that the examples above have made a few things clear. But just in case it did not let me spell out what I want to communicate as clearly and succinctly as I’m able.
That we can believe we had something before and lost it.
However, the reality is that what we think we had is not something that we had.
Even if we remember having it, our memory is not accurate. The reality is that it only seemed to us like we had the object, but in fact, we never did.
Be that as it may, we tend to search for something, for some new object (object a) to replace what we think we lost (the lost object).
Finding is always re-finding (& then re-losing).
Even if we chase and then catch object a we will not remain satisfied with it. Sure, we will be satisfied for a little bit, but only a little bit. Eventually, (sooner than we’d like) we will grow bored of having the thing we worked so hard to get, and then the status of object a will slide onto a new object.
To put it another way: Every time we get/find something we think will make us “happy,” we are just re-finding a version of the lost object/lost experience from before we were castrated (from when we were S as opposed to $).
And every time we get/find object a we will always lose it again. Even if we don’t lose the thing we got/found the thing we have will lose its status as object a, and new thing/experience we don’t yet have will become the new object a.
Every time we get/find object a we lose it. Every time we get/find object a it is just refinding the thing we had before and lost.
Clinical Tie in: a AS A PARTICULAR FORM OF A DREAM
To wrap up this edition of CP, I want to talk about how I see object a as a lost object in my clinical work.
The last example I want to give of object a is how it feels, and (I think) the best way to explain how chasing object a feels is to describe a dream that most people have had at some point in their lives.
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ENDNOTES:
[EN0] — Writing this newsletter took me way longer than I thought it would. I kept thinking that it was not good enough. Eventually, I decided it was never going to feel like it was good enough for me, and I decided I would just send out what I had…
I hope that even though I don’t think it’s good enough that you, dear reader, find it to be useful in some way.
[EN1] — I’m not the best at writing (at rendering abstract things in the symbolic). I’m not bad, but I’m not great.
[EN2] — Here is a summary of Millar’s Six Paradigms of Jouissance.
[EN3] — In addition to coming to know how time works and affects us, we also learn about how money works. This involves learning how we are limited (i.e. castrated) by how much money we have access to. Time and money: two examples of stand-ins (i.e. semblants) for the lost object.
[EN4] — The signifier m/Other can be anyone who “mothers,” rather than only signifying the person who gives birth.
[EN5] — Phi can trip people up when they see it in things like this: