Symptom and Jouissance
Symptom and Jouissance

Summary/Abstract: In Freud’s example of the rat man, the symptom is jouissance: the signifying sequence of the story with the rats had awakened in the patient’s body a jouissance of which Freud managed to read the horror of a jouissance ignored by him. If the symptoms are at the origin of a demand for an analysis, then the symptoms bear witness to the existence of the unconscious and, also, the way in which they are formed pertains to the encounter between the words and the body. At the beginning of psychoanalysis, the symptom disappears under the effect of the interpretation, but some subjects, faced with the possibility of curing the symptoms that made them suffer, preferred to preserve them. Thus, the interpretation of the symptom as metaphor only suits its definition of belonging to the symbolic register, but it neglects satisfaction. Or, precisely satisfaction is an essential axis because the symptom is a sort of reparation, that is a way of saying that it constitutes an option of satisfying what has not been satisfied in the drive circuit. The notion of “real of the symptom”, as Lacan puts it, brings coherence between the symptom and the unconscious starting from the real. By inscribing the symptom between the symbolic and the real, Lacan does not define it anymore as metaphor, but by the effect of the symbolic on the real, insisting on the notion of jouissance in the symptom. In this way, the sense of a psychoanalysis is given by the reduction of the meaning that was masking the jouissance. The Lacanian perspective defines the unconscious as a means of jouissance of symptom, hence the analytical operation modifies the subject’s program of jouissance.

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