Detachment Styles
On Coming to Nothing
Cassandra Seltman
“God’s transcendence is, for me, flight from my object.”
– Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche
“[T]o psychologists, mourning is a great riddle [. . . .] But why it is that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it.”
– Sigmund Freud, “On Transience”
When we talk about love these days, we talk about attachment. Conversations often revolve around ideas of compatibility and types, red flags, and personal histories. People declare “dealbreakers,” make checklists, and diagnose attachment styles. I won’t condemn these activities as neoliberal or unromantic, nor counter them with a story of love as surprise or divine accident, a singular event that appears from a blind spot. Love always has both dimensions: the predictable return to a familiar dynamic, until it feels like fate (How could I have ended up with someone like this again, the supposed opposite of my type?) and the unpredictable flash of the coup de foudre—the lightning bolt that makes falling in love feel like getting struck by God and somehow surviving.
Popular self-help books on attachment, like Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s 2012 Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love, typically focus on the hazardous dynamic and operate with a pragmatic epistemology. The problem is typological and the solution is behavioral and relational: difficulties in love stem primarily from mismatched objects of desire or misaligned interpersonal habits. Find a partner whose style complements one’s own; cultivate communication strategies to manage anxiety and avoidance. What remains uninvestigated in this framework is the possibility that the most tenacious aspect of attachment is not to a person or type, but an attachment to one’s attachment style.
Imre Hermann, a second-generation figure of the Hungarian school of psychoanalysis, proposed a distinct “clinging drive” (Anklammerungstrieb) from his ethological research on primates. His work is considered a precursor to attachment theory and greatly influenced John Bowlby, in addition to Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan. Hermann regarded the drive to cling and the drive to “go in search” as a neglected pair of drive opposites in psychoanalysis. He suggests the movement of the grasping hand as the model of the drive’s motion, curling in on itself without ever being able to take the object inside, as it would in oral incorporation. If clinging is the drive of all drives, and not the effect of some deprivation or excess in development, how does one loosen one’s grip? Analysis proposes itself etymologically, from the Greek ana, “up” and lyein, “to loosen, undo, dissolve.” But how does a grip loosen if we assume that clinging is also in the structural place of the object? Through what psychical action, what alteration in signs and materials? To further explore our modes of clinging and vicissitudes of detachment, we can look at the clinical figures of the smoker and the anorexic, who show us something about the paradoxes of addictions to the thing and the no-thing, respectively.
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In Alan Carr’s 1985 bestseller The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, he writes, “The main reason that smokers find it difficult to quit is that they believe that they are giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch. It is absolutely essential to understand that you are giving up nothing whatsoever.” Carr is correct in a technical sense. He has caught on that conscious willpower—what he calls the “Willpower Method”—is no rival for unconscious enjoyment, but rather an agent of its perpetuation. He understands the attachment to smoking as a kind of hypnotic descent into self-racketeering, an endless cycle of break and repair by way of a single instrument: a cigarette fills the void created by the previous cigarette. He figured out that addiction has to do with libidinal cathexis, self-deception, and the metonymy of desire. A psychoanalyst may only add that there is “nothing to give up” in the sense that “nothing” is exactly what there is to give up. This might sound easy, except for the logical necessity that “nothing” is governed by the rules of the absolute. While “something” can be an object of exchange, accepted, traded, and given up, “everything” and “nothing” are totals without parts that can attach and detach. The first requirement of detachment is a partition.
The act of sacrificing no-thing, as Wilfred Bion terms it, presents the subject with a morbid dilemma. For the anorexic, consuming nothing allows one to stay psychically alive as a desiring subject while also threatening one’s biological life as an organism. Lacan describes the anorexic as eating the object “nothing,” which is not the same as not eating anything. The anorexic does not simply refuse consumption but turns the nothing into a sustaining object. The subject becomes stranded between two annihilations: biological extinction through starvation and psychic extinction through saturation. In contrast, the addictive style of attachment is characterized by an attempt to extinguish desire by positing the existence of a definitive object that could satisfy it. Whereas the anorexic elevates lack to the level of a thing, the addict stuffs it with an illusory plentitude, turning absence into a site of enjoyment that borders death. What supports the continuation of life in these styles is the maintenance of an unbearable suspension—to circle without falling in, postponing ultimate satisfaction and total renunciation. Life persists only insofar as the subject delays the resolution of this impossible choice. Faced with the jaws of the absolute, we can only stall.
The anorexic and the addict are separated from the universal subject only insofar as they make a certain dimension of impossibility conspicuous. We all cling to the object evermore because nothing ties us to it. Since nothing actually secures us to the object, separation should in principle be simple, as Carr suggests. Yet it is this very absence that renders separation so hard. In fact, if it were a little harder, it would be easier. The subject’s intractable attachment is not to the object, as it appears to be, but is an attachment to attachment itself.
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In her latest book, Disavowal, Alenka Zupančič diagnoses how contemporary catastrophizing functions as a way of maintaining the status quo. She describes our fascination with the apocalypse as a kind of coulisse or spectacular stage “on which we can simultaneously go on with our business as usual.” This global dynamic, in which the fantasy of the end defends against the end of fantasy, also appears in the more mundane figure of the smoker and the fantasy of the last cigarette. Italo Svevo unfolds this fantasy with particular brilliance in La coscienza di Zeno, published in Italy in 1923 and in English as both Confessions of Zeno and Zeno’s Conscience. Considered one of the first modernist Italian novels,Zenois a fictional memoir written at the behest of the character’s psychoanalyst. A great obsessional protagonist of literature, Zeno Cosini enjoys, suffers, and philosophizes by way of an infinite series of last cigarettes:
You strike a noble attitude, and say: “Never again!” But what becomes of the attitude if you keep your word? You can only preserve it if you keep on renewing your resolution. And then Time, for me, is not that unimaginable thing that never stops. For me, but only for me, it comes again.
One could imagine Zeno’s fictional analyst punctuating his exclamation to reveal the division between the two words: “Never! Again!” He articulates the dilemma: one must choose between honoring the attitude and honoring the word, and it is the attitude that is nobler. His attitude is elegant in its simple irony: he enjoys not the cigarette but an endless lastness, each cigarette a failed promise to terminate the whole series. In the repetitive forming and breaking of his resolution, Zeno feels the pounding of his singular drive against circular time. “Never” is merely the token of repression. It comes again.
“Ironically, it’s easier to imagine forfeiting everything than just a part, since forfeiting only something is, both colloquially and in Kleinian terms, depressing.”
The end of fantasy is a much more dubious notion. Lacan spoke of the traversal of fantasy—not so much that fantasy ends but that we may take a different position concerning it, in which some elements get reordered. The idea of a sudden and imminent catastrophic end obscures the slow, difficult process of change. Ironically, it’s easier to imagine forfeiting everything than just a part, since forfeiting only something is, both colloquially and in Kleinian terms, depressing. The fantasy of catastrophe produces a scene from which the subject removes themselves—much like the passive grammar “a child is being beaten.” A world is ending. A last cigarette is being had. The passive grammar of all fantasy, in this sense, functions to make God exist. By removing themselves from the active position, the subject creates a scene of desire and catastrophe that requires an external guarantor to stabilize it. This sustains the fantasy by protecting the subject from agency and ensuring the place of an external cause and witness.
the fantasy of the end of clinging, an imitation of weaning is performed while the traumatic dimension of loss that accompanies weaning is disavowed. Following Zupančič’s reflexive logic that in perversion castration is used as a defense against castration (castration is castrated), we can say that weaning is used as a defense against weaning. In The Shell and the Kernel, Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham locate a similar dynamic in the relationship between two of their major concepts: introjection and incorporation. They read incorporation as both a defense against introjecting loss and, at the same time, a wish to introject desire. As a loss that is accepted and worked through requires major transformations, incorporation simulates profound transformation through magic. The potent dimension of the process of introjection is removed, and the form is employed without its actuating dimension.
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The subject of detachment is then constituted by at least two riddles: the relation to nothing as an object that can(not) be possessed and therefore can(not) be given up, and the deadlocked enjoyment derived from a meta-relation, a relation to relation, that unfolds without recourse to any true externality. If we assume a developmental trajectory, these riddles begin to collapse into a single puzzle: how does one get from two to three? The developmental project of psychoanalysis essentially asks, how does the subject go beyond the clinging dyad to accommodate the third, the social, the Other, the symbolic? The familiar analogy for this hurdle is the Oedipal drama. The zero-sum Oedipal game requires vigilant exclusion and destruction of an ever-intruding third party that would threaten to depose the child, rupture the dyadic union, and nullify the wholeness of the two.
And then there is the relatively neglected question of how to escape the traps of three. Freud’s 1924 paper Der Untergang des Ödipuskomplexes has been translated in multiple ways: Untergang is translated alternately as “passing,” “dissolution,” “downfall,” or “going under.” In the body of the essay, translators use words such as “demolition,” “abolition,” “decline,” and “destruction.” Just over a half century later, Hans Loewald, following Sándor Ferenczi, who believed Untergang to be too strong a word, offers us a revision: “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” a paper in which he questions the possibility of the “definitive destruction” of a complex that he believes only awaits its emergence in adolescence and later life in both the normal and the neurotic person. While Freud was writing this paper, Otto Rank sought to replace the theory of the Oedipus complex with birth trauma as the central etiological factor in neuroses. In addition, theoretical interest waned in Oedipal conflicts, as the field of psychoanalytic research saw a growing shift in focus to the mother and preoedipal dyad. Thus, Freud was concerned with both the dissolution of the complex in the child and the threat of dissolution and displacement of the Oedipus complex as theory. In a letter to Ferenczi in which Freud discusses his dissatisfaction with Ferenczi’s alignment with Rank, he writes, “the Oedipus complex is normally not simply repressed but demolished, canceled (by means of identification and superego formation), and [. . .] its mere repression creates the pathogenic disposition.” Here we see Freud’s tendency toward obsessional fantasies of completeness, which oscillate in other moments with the insistence from his clinical observation that what’s primitive never truly passes.
If detachment was ever conceived as a clean break or developmental achievement, the first generation of analysts complicated this picture. They saw detachment as entangled in the myths that allow and prevent it, the identifications that uphold and replace it, and the bodies that seek and resist it as a fate that precedes them. Alongside the explanation of prolonged frustration, Freud offers an innate biological and developmental explanation for its dissolution, likening it to the falling out of milk teeth. Freud states that these two explanations are not incompatible, as ontogeny and phylogeny coexist. Ferenczi takes the idea of natural obsolescence further, suggesting that it is the rigor of the taboo that is the cause and not effect of its fixation, and that incest is the child’s fantasy only to protect the image of the adult. He writes,
[T]here is something in children that abhors real incest, finds the mother old, ridiculous, in any case unsuited to be loved. One must not show that the incest is imposed, so as not to offend the parent. (Analogy in psy-choanalysis the treating of incestuous desires as real.) Without the rigors of the taboo, the impulses to transgress against the taboo would probably, by themselves, partly “have been grown out of” and have vanished.
This inversion shifts the burden of attachment, suggesting that the taboo serves to obscure the adult’s difficulty with separation by making the child appear pathologically attached. Here we see Ferenczi’s quintessential transformations of Freud, which one could call regressions back to Freud’s origins, reversals that are largely re-reversals—the movement away from fantasy and into the real, the shift of sexual desire from the child to the parent, the identification with the aggressor, the bedrock of the phylogenetic as etiology, and a critique of the hypocrisies central to the field of psychoanalysis.
A contemporary in the Hungarian school and a translator of Ferenczi, Nicolas Abraham extends and further revises Ferenczi’s critique of the Oedipus complex, incest prohibition, and the use of myth. To take myth literally is to grant it excessive dignity at the expense of metapsychology. For Abraham, by formalizing the Oedipus complex, we have been “duped by a child theory.” Like Ferenczi, he believes the myth is ad-dressed to the mother, to reassure her of the child’s faithfulness, that she is not to be abandoned, and the incest prohibition is made use of merely as an alibi, a last tribute to the mother.
“Detachment here is not prevented by the persistence of desire, but by the need to maintain the illusion of loyalty.”
Detachment here is not prevented by the persistence of desire, but by the need to maintain the illusion of loyalty. The myth becomes a form of clinging to the style of relation under the cover of forced renunciation. In this account, detachment is no longer the child’s private struggle, but a negotiated fiction that masks the adult’s difficulty with relinquishment. Abraham states incest is “impracticable before puberty” and goes so far as to doubt its existence, arguing that the prohibition is truly of the “excessive prolongation of mothering” and that this prohibition affects primarily the mother, castrating her from the pleasure of mothering. Who is responsible for the difficulty of separating? It’s shunted back to the mother, who is construed here as without her own “natural” inclination to separate or relinquish mothering. But who is this prototypical mother who gets only pleasure, who does not tire of servicing the little tyrant? This fantasy of the all-giving mother masks a ubiquitous discomfort with the detachment process itself: someone must be blamed for the endurance of the bond because we are often unable to recognize that there is a mutual defense against loss.
Ferenczi describes introjection in active terms, as a dilation of the ego that through love extends and expands, pulling objects into the ego. For Ferenczi, transference, externalization, projection, and displacement are all distorted forms of introjection, a shared telos differing by more or less circuitous paths. Freud likened the ego to an amoeba with pseudopodia; the ego projects arms, temporarily, in the direction of movement. The elusive process of dissolution can, too, be construed as an extension of matter and border. It is as much a falling intoas out of: breaking down into fragments until condensation begins again. Dissolution as disintegration splits along its chemical and legal terms—a chemical integration and legal separation. Here, detachment is neither surgical nor final, but an ongoing reconfiguration of psychic borders. But if the ego has an elegiac formation and introjection occurs primarily in the lost object’s absence, what can happen for the patient, trapped between the painful and soothing repetition of the early impressions and the foreign and overstimulating radical alterity of the analyst who is present?
Despite the obsolescence induced by development, the threat of castration, the incentives outside of the family, the natural disgust of incest, and the prolonged years of discouragement, what we often find in the consulting room is the persistence and insistence of a longing for this impossible love, transposed in the transference onto the figure of the analyst. Whether the desire is for the real parent or the fantasied parent of early childhood, whether oedipal or preoedipal, and whether originating from the child or introjected by the parent, are conceptual disjunctions that allow this scene to become available to thought and discourse.
The child can become fixated in the wounded position of the jilted lover, freshly experiencing the exciting rejection again and again. As we know from Freud’s work on beating fantasies, the resourceful child can transform sadism, aggression, and absence into love or, at the least, into an experience and locale of stimulus to which to remain invested. The patient becomes frozen in a state of interminable waiting, shot through with failed attempts at seduction. The stakes could not be higher: giving up on the ideal love with the object paradoxically experienced as giving up on oneself, what Freud would call His Majesty the Baby, that primary narcissistic representation which is the wonderful child created through the mother’s nostalgic gaze. Between suicide and homicide, to give it up is to die, to forfeit one’s raison d’être. But to retain it is to be condemned not to live.
There is a question of the degree of violence essential to the Oedipus complex and necessary for its resolution. Is a child merely beaten or are they murdered? Is the complex waning or getting destroyed? Is something falling away or being violently abandoned under threat? Does falling out of love necessitate murder? While patricide is an idea that easily reaches consciousness, the murder of the child is only begun to be thought; even analysts before Serge Leclaire figure this idea only at the level of beating. But for Le-claire, the child as apple of the parent’s eye, equated with their pupil, must fall not only from the parent’s eye but also from the child’s phantasies—the infant-king (Lacan’s ideal ego) who must be killed. It was the failure of baby Oedipus to be killed that sealed his fate, and perhaps it was the apple of his mother’s eye that he sought to vanquish in his blinding.
Can we believe Freud, whose economic model follows the thermodynamic law of the conservation of energy, that a complex is indeed demolished? What lines the long passage away from the family romance? And what does this have to do with the fall of transference allegedly possible at the end of treatment? A patient recently reproached me with a question certainly familiar to analysts: “You cultivated all these strong feelings in me. Now what? It all comes to nothing?” Here is the question that Freud’s Oedipal child, in disbelief, asks the beloved parent who presents them (ideally) with this very coming to nothing. Freud gives us a clue about how this happens: rarely in one fell swoop. He depicts a scene of the child “hurled to earth from her cloud-castles.” Yet this hurling to earth is never a single instance, but the accumulation of a long series of painful disappointments, frustrations, and descents into ever-increasing hopelessness?
“The Oedipal subject smites lest they remain smitten.”
At its worst and most caricatured the Oedipal moment is depicted as a father of separation intervening in the relation to a mother of attachment. While this moment has crises around what one can call attachment, it’s certainly a fantasy of symmetry that psychical life could correspond so directly to the literal parents split cleanly into these two functions with one operation to be performed—an operation that claims to sever the child from an Edenic preoedipal paradise that could only be ever retroactively constructed by a neurotic adult. The Oedipal subject smites lest they remain smitten. What gets forfeited in addition to desired relations to this and that object is a subjectless project, an allegiance to a style in which a One is at the center. This is why envious fantasies are so easy to come by—“I may not be centered and whole, but at least one can be.” To move from having one’s throne to losing one’s throne to envying someone else on the throne is a series of side steps, a lateral shuffle within the same genre. To live in a world without a throne (if there is such a world) might constitute another style of configuring relation and drive. The Oedipal moment is the moment of differential diagnosis. Beyond competing models of conflict and deficit, we diagnose a dialectic of clinging and mediation concerning the drives and their objects. Awakened in the analytic situation, the patient returns to her point of fixation, demonstrating privation and resentment in front of a closed door.
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The feature of detachability differs from decathexis to an external object. Detachability introduces a structural operation in which an object is not simply abandoned or embraced, but moved into a mediating position in the symbolic field. This operation becomes especially clear in the phenomenon classically called phobia. In Freud’s case study of the five-year-old Little Hans, we witness the invention (or discovery) of detachability via Hans’ elevation of the horse to the status of a phobic object. The horse does not merely localize anxiety and turn it into fear but acts as a symbolic operator, an intermediary figure in his world. The horse for Hans functions similarly to the totem in the social. In his seminar on the object relation, in which he considers the Hans case, Lacan further draws a parallel between the horse as a phobic animal and the heraldic horse found on a coat of arms, which installs distance and supports an organizing taboo. In this sense, phobia is paradoxically sociable, aiming at a sustainable collectivity.
Detachability appears at multiple registers in Hans’ case. Lacan develops Piaget’s notion of an image signifier in order to describe how a cut between signifier and signified occurs, allowing the signifier to shift into a detachable and mobile element within symbolic play. In one of the major turning points in the case, Hans tells his father about a bathtub fantasy of a plumber who comes and “unscrews” the bath, then uses a “big borer” to pierce his stomach. In a later version of this fantasy, Hans elaborates that the plumber first removes his behind with a pair of pincers, and then gives him a replacement, performing the same operation with his “widdler.” While Hans’ father, keen to impress Freud, interprets the bath as buttocks and borer as penis, Lacan invites us to attend to the formal operations: the screwing, unscrewing, removal, and substitution. This sequence indicates not simply a fantasy about castration but about the logic of symbolic ex-change and the possibility of detachable parts. The detachable organ is no longer a strictly private or fixed entity and, like the horse, can be used to regulate proximity in his field of relations.
As Hans continues to recognize that elements of his world can attach and detach, he is captured by the hitching and unhitching of the cart from the horse. Appropriately, the analysis unfolds against the back-drop of Vienna at the turn of the century, with its growing network of transport and urban reorganization. Throughout the case, Hans travels with his family between winters in Vienna and summers in the country town of Gmunden, which provides material for Hans’ fantasies about transport and circulation. Hans is particularly afraid of loaded carriages, into which we read the mother as loaded with baby, the body as loaded with feces, perhaps even the load that the heavily condensed signifier carries. Because the unconscious economizes, Hans’ horse becomes what Lacan calls an “all-purpose signifier,” with different features ca-pable of permutating many different conflicts. The horse that falls may represent the mother falling preg-nant, the father’s potential death, or Hans’ own fall, since the birth of his sister, from his previously central position as only child and exclusive object of maternal desire. Lacan reads Hans’ phobia as a way of incorporating the mother into the realm of detachable objects. The mother is thus brought under the law of substitution and exchange. In this model, detachability has a provincializing effect, demoting the mother and her desire into, as Lacan says, “an object like any other.” Detachability then operates as a detachable element to a theory of detachment.
Feishism, in contrast, performs a kind of inverse maneuver. Where phobia introduces the object into the circuit of the detachable, fetishism seeks to freeze the object in a special, non-circulating position. It exalts and isolates the object, saving it precisely from becoming an object in the world: one among many under the law. A similar dynamic is observable in the contrast between narcissism and object cathexis. Narcissistic libido resists the detachment required for object cathexis, preferring instead to conserve and elevate the object beyond the field of substitution. Untarnished with traces of death from within or without, the fetish is that mythical object that never disappoints the libido and thus isn’t ushered into an economy of exchange. The shine of the object indicates this touch of apotropaic magic that protects one from loss, death, and impotency. If phobia is an initiation into symbolic circulation, fetish is a defense against it, an attempt to preserve a residue of narcissistic omnipotence where the object is kept safe from an indifferent law.
The object of the fetish is detached but not detachable.The fetishist is struck by the coup de foudre every time they see the fetish; they have taken the coup onto their side. Zupančič formulates the mechanism of disavowal as something akin to appropriating castration: turning the dreaded cut into the lovely stroke, inventing it as a tool to enjoy with. The detachment of fetishism involves a hatred of movement, a worship of the stillness of the statue. The phobia is to the totem what the fetish is to the idol.[1] If the phobic shows us something about the terror of succumbing to a particular kind of loss, then the fetishist shows us the transient euphoria of mastering it, a pairing comparable to the manic-depressive dialectic.
The strategy of the fetish offers a costly solution to the problem of an encroaching other, acting as a halting point in a dialectical movement scheduled to unfold. By sacrificing sacrifice, the fetishist creates a loophole (la boucle, meaning both lock and loop; boucler la boucle: to close the loop), dodging the intervention of a third, warding off the limit, and preserving the cherished object in a timeless, unchanging form. The detachment between the part and the whole takes place with the telos of wrenching the object from the Other’s grasp and remastering it. Austrian aphorist Karl Kraus writes, “There is no unhappier creature under the sun than a fetishist who longs for a woman’s shoe but has to make do with the whole woman.”
th fetish and phobia have been considered diagnostic border objects, either between psychosis and neurosis or neither one nor the other. In the holy trinity of Lacanian diagnosis, perversion has been granted the status of its own structure, neither psychotic nor neurotic, and the construction of a phobia has been considered a potential transition to neurosis in childhood. Phobia is, then, one model of how a subject potentially shifts from one style to another. In his discussion of the case of Little Hans, Lacan states that anxiety is correlative with “the instant when the subject is suspended between a moment at which he no longer knows where he is, and a shift toward a moment when he will become something in which he will never be able to find himself again.” This is a subject of anxiety without sliding doors, suspended between spatial and ontological disorientation, between losing his place in the world and losing continuity in time, a subject who is terribly free. If phobia serves as a waystation, it is not merely a point of passage but a kind of scaffold, a provisional structuring that holds the subject at the threshold of a determination.
“[B]oth the psychotic subject and the neurotic social act in a way that indicates an underlying belief in psychosis as central to the integrity of the group.”
The Lacanian line on psychosis suggests the absence of any detachable element: the psychotic subject lacks lack and therefore suffers from a terrible wholeness. By the 1960s, Lacan had shifted from reading psychosis strictly through the logic of the signifier to emphasizing the limits of the symbolic order, particularly through the concepts of jouissance and objet petit a (or the “object cause of desire”). As is often repeated, Lacan said the psychotic has the objet petit a “in his pocket,” indicating that the object has not fallen or been expelled. The psychotic becomes a kind of poster child for the subject who cannot lose. With the non-extraction of the object, the gaze and the voice are never far off, boomeranging back in the form of auditory and visual hallucinations. One could say that without havinga detachable element, they arethat element in the social: forming and deforming links, fixing and unfixing from a social fabric. In this light, non-detachment, taken up as praxis by places like Le Centre 388, a psychoanalytic center for the treatment of psychoses in Quebec City, is not anti-social. Taking it further: in becoming the detachable element, the psychotic functions as a kind of phobic object for the group—an element that maintains the group’s precarious neurosis, an object whose proximity localizes anxiety and organizes the jouissance of the social body. The delusion of being God or Jesus stages this structural role of an exceptional center, the outside inside that holds the world together. Nonpsychotic sociality approaches psychosis as that which must be excluded for the social to function and maintain itself. In this sense, both the psychotic subject and the neurotic social act in a way that indicates an underlying belief in psychosis as central to the integrity of the group. Psychosis might then be named as extimate to the social, excluded interior, like the Thing, the gaze, or the drive, whose marginalization shores up the integrity of the normalized group. In a letter to André Breton, Antonin Artaud writes, “Bewitchments are what made Gérard de Nerval go mad and forced him to commit suicide the day when, in a crisis of lucidity, he realized he could never get rid of his madness because all on earth were interested by it.”
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Neurosis presumes an internal space, a Möbius movement of libidinal energies cathecting and synthesizing objects “inside” and “out.” For this to be the case, a division must be affirmed, the psyche dissected. Following Lacan’s reading of Freud’s paper “Negation,” a moral judgment must be made about what is good and bad, and what is bad or unpleasurable (a sum of jouissance) must get expelled. In the absence of this dividing line (Lacan’s “primordial signifier”), the supposed subject is constituted by an endless surface without holes or immanent means of distinguishing spaces on the body. The contemporary French discourse on autism assumes no dissection, rendering irrelevant the concepts of internal and external spaces, introjection and projection. Thus, the style of detachment in the non-neurotic topological universe means something quite different. One of the problematics of detachment in this “mode of generating experience” (as Thomas Ogden calls it) involves the use of an element of mediation to detach a modicum of jouissance from an object, since enjoyment has not been lost (whether we say it is drained, sacrificed, or stolen) in the way it purportedly has for the so-called neurotic.Detachment in this style does not involve the creation and dissolution of love triangles, as with Oedipus, but rather is relevant at the level of the expulsion of a quota of drive tension. Jean-Claude Maleval writes that for the autistic subject, the word and the invocatory jouissance of the voice must be mediated, “whether it is a phone, a radio, a television, or a written medium.” The gaze is avoided for the same overstimulating quality due to an excess of jouissance. In some styles of the nonneurotic, the word and mental image are glued together in a use of signs that precludes generalizability and necessitates mobilization to happen elsewhere. When this fusing happens a child may, for instance, call their red backpack “red,” but the word will only refer to the specific red of their own backpack and won’t be extended to a general class of reds. A red car would not be recognized as belonging to the signifier. Between an unlocalizable jouissance and the object of the drive is where the French school (including Rosine & Robert Leforts, Eric Laurent, and Maleval) positions the problematic of detachment as it persists in what they call autism.
Among British thinkers (e.g.,Frances Tustin, Donald Meltzer, and Esther Bick) the concept of “adhesive identification” prevails as the autistic attachment style. In this type of relating, the defensive adherence to an object allays the anxiety of disintegration. One attempts to defend by sticking bits of the surface of the object to one’s own surface. A woman might press a metal spoon against her cheek when frightened by a new experience or environment, using it not as a utensil or symbol or Winnicottian transitional object but strictly for its textural quality and allowance for surface-to-surface adhesion. Tustin suggests the term “adhesive equation,”as the subject is presumed not to feel separate from the object, so it better describes how individuals equate themselves with the surface of the object. As in psychosis, mimicry may be more global in this mode, as opposed to an identification that appropriates a unary trait of the loved object (the most famous example of which is Dora’s cough). These two schools take opposing stances on the value of the construction, whether it is used as a barrier or a bridge. Tustin typically views the use of the autistic object as defensive, the “shell of autism” interfering with a progression toward a more flexible and fluid form of relatedness. Maleval, on the other hand, articulates the use of objects to construct synthetic rims as solutions to be supported by the clinician. What is at stake in this mode of generating experience is the encounter with the Winnicottian primitive agonies, the very cause of defense in the first place.
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In the third section of The Ego and the Id, Freud generalizes the operation of melancholia, in which an object cathexis is replaced by an identification, stating “[i]t may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects.” The id never truly surrenders its libidinal investments, which forces a new configuration in which the cathexis survives in altered form. We thereby become a kind of historical mon-tage composed of the traces of our erotic object choices. The love relation is conserved through a recreation between the ego and the id. Freud tells us that the ego imi-tates the object, forcing itself upon the id, “trying to make good the id’s loss by saying ‘Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object.’” The quality of the bond takes precedence over the entities by which it articulates itself. The style, or stylus, writes the entities into their positions. In this formulation, we never lose but only relocate objects.[2] When loss is refused at the level of the economy, the style of attachment continues despite the absence of the object proper. Lacan opens the Écrits by quoting Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon: “The style is the man himself.” He ends the short overture by displacing this notion: “In the place man marked for Buffon, I call for the falling away [chute] of this object.” He replaces style as the ontological essence of the subject with a trace of the object in its fall. In this sense, “detachment style” is redundant.
One could say that people go to analysis to lose things—time, money, a modicum of their enjoyment. Lacan speaks of the end of analysis as involving subjective destitution. At times, he suggests that the subject dissolves or, in moments such as the passage à l’acte, where the subject falls like the object, becomes pure object. There’s the notion that we might cross the planes of identification, confront our radical lack and divided desire, accept mediation, and cease demanding gifts and guarantees from the other. In other words, we lose our lost causes. (Would we invest so much paranoid speculation around the cause if the cause were not always already lost?) This is the rosy side of the breakdown fantasy, though it is not without its caveats. One might ask whether this proposition for the end of analysis installs a new telos: the ideal of changing our assigned position in relation to ideals.
While the deals and ideals are being formed and forfeited between them, the subject and object are always falling, never reaching ground. We fall from grace, fall pregnant, fall ill, fall in and out of love. The transference falls, the milk teeth fall out, the horse falls, the gaze falls, the symptom falls away, Oedipus has his big downfall. Fallingis only one favored word for existential movement. We might just as easily say we are forever revolving, returning, flickering, dissolving, scattering, fusing, suspending, clinging, looping, knotting, undulating, and hesitating. When the motion stops, we aren’t there for it, and while it occurs, some-thing far stranger than loss happens. We change, topologically reconfigure ourselves under altered ex-igencies, demands, and desires. We find ways to “detach” from cherished styles; we make a couphere and there. Perhaps the belief that we can lose anything remains our fundamental fantasy.
[1] Lacan calls the curtain in fetishism “the idol of absence.”
[2] Freud states this very clearly in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1908): “[W]e can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another.”