Paradoksy symptomu w psychoanalizie
The Paradoxes of the Symptom in Psychoanalysis

Summary/Abstract: The author demonstrates in what manner Jacques Lacan creates successive definitions of the symptom (the symptom as message, signification, jouissance and the Real). At the end of his teaching he arrives at a definition of the symptom as jouissance of pure letter. On the basis of this formulation Lacan creates a new symptomatology, illustrating it with the case studies of Joyce and Pessoa. In the end, the symptom turns out to be a supplement making up for the lack of the sexual relationship. This lack is a consequence of the invasion of speech into the body. On the one hand, the symbolic order via speech inscribes itself into the Real as the impossibility of achieving unity of any sort in the sexual relationship which has no representation in the unconscious. On the other hand, in form of the letter in the symptom it is an element enjoyed and enables thus to create a substitute of a bond with the other. This is the meaning of the famous phrase “partner as symptom”.

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