The Discourse of the Hysteric
The Hysteric’s Discourse is in play when a speaker’s discourse is dominated by their symptom – i.e. their unique form of jouissance – shown in a full range of symptomatic experience. The analysand’s Desire has been positioned as their unconscious Truth, making for an ever unstable identity and ever insisting desire. The symptom also comprises the Divided Subject’s failure to comply with society’s Master Signifiers or dominant values. But in that refusal is a demand for a solution, a demand for a concluding and lasting answer. The primary loss represented by Objet Petit a is expressed by a demand to the Other – the hystericised analysand/Agent as Divided Subject demands that the analyst/Other take up the role of Master (Signifier) and provide the answer. Tell me who I am and what my desire is! In terms of the Four Discourses, The Discourse of the Hysteric refers to a particular social bond and structure of discourse. It is not limited to the discourse of individuals with a hysterical structure. An obsessional or phobic might be the Agent in the Discourse of the Hysteric, and a hysteric is capable of being an Agent or Other in any of the Four Discourses.
Of course, due to the Disjunction of Impossibility, this expression is lacking. Subjected to the demand of the Agent, the analyst/Other is supposed to know and produce Knowledge. Knowledge is placed in the position of jouissance – thus the hysteric gets off on Knowledge. But the answer is always beside the point – it never corresponds to the Objet Petit a due to the Disjunction of Inability. Further, despite the insistence of the Divided Subject’s demand, they will always be seeking a limit to that Knowledge – searching for the lack. For an analyst situated as Other within this Discourse, these respective positions reflect the fact that both abstinence and neutrality have yet to be installed in the analytic relationship. The analyst is producing Knowledge for the analysand, and that Knowledge represents a fruitless attempt to reach the analysand’s Objet Petit a, which the analysand has positioned as their unconscious Truth. In this Discourse, the analyst will continue to strive and fail to satisfy these demands of the analysand. As Lacan comments, ‘in other words, she wants a master she can reign over. She reigns, and he does not govern’ (Seminar XVII, 129).
The Discourse of the Analyst
If the analyst’s position is not founded on their position as a Producer of Knowledge, or the foundational values that underpin that Knowledge, then what is the role of Knowledge in the establishment of the analytic relationship, or more particularly, the Discourse of the Analyst? The analyst does have knowledge – the analyst’s already acquired theoretical knowledge which forms the basis of the analyst’s savoir-faire, as well as the analyst’s knowledge of the analysand – their psychic structure and life, and the nature of their jouissance. The nature of this knowledge is mythic – knowledge which emphasises relationships rather than static whole discrete identities. In contrast to Greenberg’s dismissal of that which is mythic, Bracher (1994) underlines the value of such a term:
It is only the mythic form of knowledge that can avoid excluding the a, because it offers not absolute, clearly established, self-referential identities, but rather a system of oppositions embodied in images and fantasies that offer no unequivocal identities, meanings, or values (125).
It seems odd that Greenberg should equate ‘mythic’ with ‘empty’ when some of the foundational concepts of psychoanalysis are based on myths – Oedipus, Narcissus and the Freud-penned myth of the primal horde.
With the analyst’s Knowledge in the position of Truth, it cannot be brought directly to the analysis and the position of Agent is free to be taken up by the Objet Petit a. Thus desire can become the driving force of the analytic treatment for the analyst – the object of desire is Desire itself – the desire of the analysand. As Bracher describes,
the analyst’s activity of interpretation – that is, of representing the ‘a’, cause of the patient’s desire – is sustained by the analyst’s implicit knowledge, S2, in place of truth (125).
Also, with S2 in this position, below the line, it does not locate the listening position of the analyst as an Agent of Knowledge, which would create a situation of suggestion, as will be discussed below.