This enigma of the Other’s desire is an enigma for the Other itself. Only at this level do we reach ‘symbolic castration’ which does not stand for the subject’s ‘castration’, for his/her being at the mercy of the big Other, for his/her depending on its whims, but for the ‘castration’ of this Other itself. The barred Other is thus not just the depersonalized Other but also the bar which cracks this depersonalized Other itself.

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Hysteria emerges when a subject starts to question or to feel discomfort in his or her symbolic identity

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What is enigmatic for the Other is myself, i.e. I am the enigma for the Other, so that I find myself in the strange position (like in detective novels) of someone who all of a sudden finds himself persecuted, treated as if he knows (or owns) something, bears a secret, but is totally unaware what this secret is. The formula of the enigma is thus: ‘What am I for the Other? What for an object of the Other’s desire am I?’ Because of this gap, the subject cannot ever fully and immediately identify with his symbolic mask or title

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the subject is the retroactive effect of the failure of its representation. It is because of this failure that the subject is divided – not into something and something else, but into something (its symbolic representation) and nothing, and fantasy fills the void of this nothingness. And the catch is that this symbolic representation of the subject is primordially not its own: prior to speaking, I am spoken

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Is making people ‘see what it is they do feel’ not bringing about a kind of self-knowledge? (An elementary case of ‘seeing’ would be to discern the ambiguous hatred beneath which the analyst suspects there is hidden love [or vice versa].) The answer is that knowledge gained in analysis is a knowledge to be forgotten, discarded: once I ‘see what it is that I feel’, I don’t go on dwelling in it, I just leave it behind – why? Not because of some decisionist mystique (‘to be creative, one should overcome Hamlet-like procrastinations, too much self-analysing, and just do it!’) but because the true task of analysis is to open up a void in the midst of our subjectivity: when we discard the knowledge gained in analysis, we open ourselves to this void. Therein resides the link between analysis and love: in love we really do know the other person in some profound sense – and also we really don’t. And you could think that the fantasy of knowing is spurred by or prompted by something like ‘this person has a powerful effect on me and it’s so overwhelming that I’m going to manage this through a fantasy of knowledge’. For Proust, for example, knowing people is often very much about dealing with the anxiety that one can’t control them.3 Disparities (Slavoj Žižek) 4132-4135Wednesday, 18 January 17:44:34 the subject is the retroactive effect of the failure of its representation. It is because of this failure that the subject is divided – not into something and something else, but into something (its symbolic representation) and nothing, and fantasy fills the void of this nothingness. And the catch is that this symbolic representation of the subject is primordially not its own: prior to speaking, I am spoken

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Psychoanalysis does not aim at replacing the false or cyphered self-knowledge with the real one, but at getting rid of the need for self-knowledge, at enabling the patient to act without self-knowledge. Does this bring us back to the ancient wisdom, ‘Just do it, don’t think about it!’ Does it amount to a return to naiveté? The (negative) answer is provided by Phillips’s second point about suffering: Patients come because they are suffering from something. They want that suffering to be alleviated. Ideally, in the process of doing the analysis, they might find their suffering is alleviated or modified, but also they might discover there are more important things than to alleviate one’s suffering.

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By deceiving others through politeness and social pretence, we in fact deceive ourselves and transform our pragmatic, polite behaviour into virtuous behaviour.

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