About Myth and Structure in Oedipus

From the image of the Ego to the structural subjectivity in regard to Beyond the Oedipus Complex, ^{Lacan, (1999)} reminds the reader and his listener that "Freud again saves his father", that is, every father, in the role of an agent of castration, transmits castration, but always leaves leftovers of this symbolic operation in the real of the structure. If previously we approached the present study from a Freudian perspective, around the das Ding - the maternal Other -, from now on, we will continue our reflection from the perspective of the structure, considering the real father, which implies consequences in the position of the subject’s enjoyment towards the Other. It is in an originally perverse way that the question of fantasy and, as Lacan would say, it is the "version vers le père" (or, la père version). ^{Lacan (2005)} distinguishes myth, and even myth of parricide and structure, stating that the father does not have to be killed, because he has always been dead – the Other is an empty place. The myth of parricide is necessary, but as a myth with a structural effect. The Other is an emptiness, a place, a function that allows a psychic structure to function. It structures the subject in the field of the Other, it is the thesis of Lacan’s four discourses (the Master/Teacher, the hysteric, the psychoanalyst, and the student) (^{Lacan, 1992}). What is the myth for? It goes from the maternal myth, from this game of intersubjective misunderstanding present in maternal love to the introduction of the father - this time that determines the structure. To this structure, a minimum of functioning is necessary for symbolic reasons. The system of signifier or language (synchrony and diachrony) requires not only three but four elements to achieve the Oedipus complex; the intervention of a fourth term, the father, is necessary. Breaking the harmony of the maternal world, with the Beyond Oedipus (^{Lacan, 1999}), the father is an exception in relation to the phallic function. The ideal father is a fantasy of the neurotic, which takes place by reducing the Name of the Father to a resemblance, whose analysis produces the fall of this myth remains a real whose symbolic operator, the functioning of language will make its counterpoint.

In the Seminar “The Other Side of Psychoanalysis” (^{Lacan, 1992}), Lacan introduces what he refers to as "The beyond Oedipus". This concept explores the consequences of the Oedipal crossing after the repression operation with the transition from the real father to the symbolic father. Parricide leaves the subject with a trace of enjoyment that cannot be treated by the symbolic. It will need a work of symbolic elaboration – Durcharbeitung - from this act of parricide to the symbolic function of the Name. In other words, an elaboration of the father to the Name of the Father, whose version of this dead father is severe in its structure. That is, how the subject will deal with this residue of jouissance in his own symptom. This symptom that fell into the locus of nonexistence and that, with its phantasmatic cover and the incorporation of language, to the well said, makes it impossible to treat the remaining of enjoyment in a different way, turning it as its symptom (the subject to well-say this symptom, to treat this residue of enjoyment differently making it its symptom).

By the question previously addressed, we intended to bring peculiar elements of this praxis that could guide us around this theme, especially in the mother/baby observations and in interventions with high-risk pregnant women that could give birth to a premature baby. In the clinic with babies, as well as in psychoanalysis of young children, we start from the thesis that this small being is still constituting itself as a subject; his unconscious is formed by the treasure trove of signifiers coming from an Other that pre-exists him. The time of original refoulement in babies has not yet occurred in the psychoanalysis of children, and their age situates and guides us, that is, whether the child is in pre-Oedipal time or passing through Oedipus or having already passed through it. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the importance of this passage in the structure of the subject is well known, as well as the repercussions of this experience for its subjectivity. In this crucial passage, we observe the foundation of the original refoulement upon the first mnemonic inscriptions, the first perceptual signs responsible for structuring the psychic apparatus and its unconscious.

On Mnemic Traits and Traumatic

In order to move forward, we wish to take into consideration one of the most important notions in psychoanalysis: the concept of trauma. Based on the first wound, the inaugural split, or the trauma experienced in an originary time of being, a reorganization of the meaning is only built afterward.

Referring to the newborn, it is known that, with the loss of the natural and the entry into culture, humans are henceforth submitted to the order of ethics. In the article “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (^{Freud, 1950[1895]/1996b}), Freud explains the movement of erasure and, thus, of distancing the subject with the Thing, das Ding (the primordial Other). In this movement of distancing with the primordial Thing, the ethical dimension with the impossible of full enjoyment is evident. The failure that occurs in the hallucinatory movement when in the absence of the object opens the functioning as such of the psychic apparatus and there begins the formation of the first mnemic inscriptions in the psychic apparatus. It is the notion brought up by Freud in Niederschrift's Letter 52 (^{Freud, 1896/1996a}): "The line begins to become written" and these first inscriptions will, afterward, be retranscribed.

This is a painful experience, but necessary for the subject to enter the language: the cry presentifies, gives voice, to the object’s absence. In other words, the pain, or the displeasure comes from the pure pleasure principle. In this context, the issue of ethics in psychoanalysis will be addressed in relation to Aristotelian ethics. Based on the ideal in search of an Aristotelian Supreme Good, Lacan makes this ideal unreal by introducing his record of the real there. The term of the real comes in a movement to revolutionize the debate around morals, the good (moral), and ethics. Real and truth; these last two terms are dear to Lacan, as he states that on the side of the real there is a fiction in opposition to reality. The fictional is not a lie, but the symbolic fiction that the infant will do in this condition of being missing (missed) and, therefore, in the condition of speaking. This indicates how the real will be articulated to the word, to the symbolic through fiction. Language is the condition of the unconscious in this discursive structure that links the subject in the field of the Other.

By observing the infant, then, we can refer to the first experience of satisfaction described by Freud: after birth, the fragile human being can only live if cared for by another; if the Other takes care of him. That Other who Freud calls as Nebenmensch: the next, the one that is next to. The Freudian thought presented in “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (^{Freud, 1950[1895]/1996b}), places at the center of the experience of satisfaction – Befriedigungserlebnis - an extremely important character for the baby, responsible for organizing the desire: the Nebenmensch. Its translation from German would precisely be Nebem: next to and Mensch: man or human being, that is, the human being who is beside This word can be translated from German as “next to” (Neben) and “human being” (Mensch), meaning the human being who is beside them. Freud calls it auxiliary force - Helende Macht - its translation would indicate a first power or force, the one that brought the baby the first satisfaction (as well as displeasure); the awakening of knowledge is given due to the perception of the other, of the alien from which the child can recognize visual traits, gestures, and movements.

This perception can be associated with the image and the shape of the object who made the first experience possible. Nebenmensch, being that human who is next to, has a fundamental role in the perceptive awakening of the baby. With the experience of a specific action, the organism is called up to enroll in the universe of language; this experience allows the baby to move from the record of pure needs to the record of demand. The baby receives the food, but also receives the word, an experience that begins with the cry, an action responsible for the releasing of tension from the initial despair. The evolution of Freudian thought at that time teaches us that in the field of the Other, anything that is expelled outward is guided by the subjective path of the subject.

“The traumatic, explains Freud, an experience that cannot yet be represented, even though it leaves indelible mnemic traces” (^{Freud, 1896/1996a, p. 230}) carries, in itself, a violence that is experienced without the possibility of elaboration: this happens because the subject doesn’t have, yet, the necessary internal resources to live that as an experience. This event can be considered as both real and fictional: the experience of discontinuity in the subject’s life, in which we find its abysses and holes in the search of itself. This happens because the trauma is considered trauma for representing the self-organizational core, with its unconscious fantasies and symbolic processes, even though it can represent the cause of a terror that the mind keeps in a place of rest, of no-reaction and no-elaboration. The unsettling stresses the violence of the trauma, the mark of the most radical singularity, but not without the action of transformation: reconstruction for creation, and the new, which is possible throughout the contingencies that are offered to the subject in the afterward of its existence.

And what about when there are no words?

In the Metapsychology of the drive, ^{Freud (1915/1996d)} affirms that the instinct/drive source study does not concern, does not belong, nor it is necessary to psychoanalysis. It belongs, according to the author, to the field of Biology. Hence, since Freud, the concept of instinct/drive is conceived with a certain ambivalence and even confusion between the body and organism. We can approach this aspect from the symptom’s or anxiety’s perspective, from the signifier or the object, the sexual or the speech, the meaning or the jouissance. The psychoanalytical clinic is fundamentally a clinic of the body, a clinic that comes from the body and then returns to it. If we were previously talking about the entangling of language and body or yet the determination of the body as a form of language, this leads us, in a way, to the exercise of distinguishing body and organism, and, on the other, to the statute of the body as a locus, structure or, as Lacan says, the body as the “other’s bed”. But this relation also refers to the jouissance, and more specifically to the drive as an echo in the body because there is a saying, meaning a symptom as a corporal event. It also refers to the promotion of the body as an imaginary consistency.

The unrepresentable dimension of the body leads us to the anxiety as an implication of this subjective dimension. This aspect of unrepresentability is imposed as a hole in the center of the representational net which structures the psyche. It is a kind of emptiness that opens itself in the field of representation. In the human being, there is an original lack that can be observed throughout the non-equivalence between flesh, language, and image. Something escapes the representation of the flesh throughout the word that gives the body the finishing in the form of an image. That which escape configures itself as a residue never assimilated by the subject, something that does not receive a symbolic inscription and that insists on appearing in the form of an absence.

For psychoanalysis, this lack is the subject's center is present in the form of a puncture, similar to a torus or a tire tube float we used as children at the beach. ^{Lacan (1985)} states in counterpoint with the image of a filled bubble. In this hole, Freud located the lost object, which ^{Lacan (2005)} later named object a. It is something that is constituted from an extraction, something that stands out from the subject right there at its origin, giving it a loss of enjoyment. In the human being, the records are precisely articulated by the insufficiency of a single field when it comes to the human body and psyche. The symbolic is always divided, not reaching the full representation of the body by the word - the symptoms, in the analytical sense, represents this disjunction.

Time and cut

At this point, we would like to bring to this debate an extract from Marguerite Duras’ romance “Le Ravissement” de Lol V Stein” (^{Duras, 1986}). We will start with a passage in which Lol is confronted for the first time with the person who steals her object of love: Anne-Marie Stretter. In this passage of the romance, we face the time cut, in its whole, that can be symbolized by the topological figure of the Möbius strip. This is a topological figure that puts in evidence the structure of the space. We will revisit this figure later.

In the romance, “Lol, suddenly immobile, had looked forward, like him (Michael Richardson), to that abandoned grace (referring to Anne-Marie Stretter), curved, of a dead bird. She had worn that thinness, Tatiana clearly remembered, in a black double-lined tulle dress, also very low-cut. She wanted to have that body, to be dressed like that, and that was what she wanted, irrevocably. The bone of the body and face was guessed. As it appeared, from now on, she would die, with her desired body” (^{Duras, 1986, pp. 49-50}).

Shortly afterward, a question arises: Did Anne-Marie Stretter look at Michael Richardson as she passed by? Did she dismiss him with a nonchalant gaze at the ball? It was impossible to know, and thus the story of Lol V. Stein begins. After the ball, when Lol V. Stein was the center of attention, something shattered, plunging her into a transient and painful wandering, in the order of almost despersonalization. Upon awakening, ten years will have elapsed from that moment, from that fainting to the beginning of the remembrance; and that is what the romance consists of: “Once the ball is over, the night is over, once the others are reassured about their condition, this story fades, falls asleep, it would seem, for ten years” (^{Duras, 1986}). The ravishment then refers to the lover – the object -, to the nakedness of Anne-Marie Stretter, wich will have an impact on Lol V. Stein body’s, ultimately leading to her fainting. In the meantime, Lol V. Stein manages to get out of that non-sense and that emptiness where she fell through the phallic support: she gets married, has three children, and seems to live well during these ten years. It is from this phallic support that she undertakes this remembrance work, the symbolic installation of this reality that brutally invaded her, leaving her defenseless and unloved, expelling her from the center of her eyes, and turning her to a position of the gaze and even to be looked at. In this second part of the romance, the knot of three represented by Lol, Jacques Hold, and Tatiana will be installed.

^{Lacan (2003)} approaches this reading through the bias of a subject who is dazzled and represents the object’s own beauty, the bright, and beautiful face of the object, until the moment when the object is undressed, its nakedness revealing the subject’s bones. For love, Lol was dressed in all virtues. That night, all eyes were on him. Now, Anne-Marie Stretter looked away from Michael Richardson, who was wearing Lol until then, “that image of himself with which the Other invests us” (^{Lacan, 2003, p. 201}), the narcissistic image I (a), and the loss of his identity and his reason.

Lol dazzled the reader in the sense of beauty. Lola Valérie Stein emerging from the plume of Marguerite Duras, which describes the landscape of T. Beach, in her hometown of S. Tahala, a landscape that evokes marine immensities, where land and sea come together originally, and shows the beauty slipping from her writer’s feather and bringing, according to Lacan, “the practice of the letter with the use of the unconscious” (^{Lacan, 2003, p. 200}).

Thus, there is first the image that comes from the other, that covers the subject. It is the image of the self, Freudian narcissism, that is, the image that, from the other, alienates the subject in the “mirroring of love” that the other refers to the subject. The image coming from the other dresses the subject and sustains his fantasy, hence the shock of the fantasy that Lol wore when the look of his love object deviates. Whereas emptiness is what is not presumptive in the image, and is the cause of the desire behind the image. The subject is then confronted with a stopping point, with an object of anguish, and no longer with objects that fulfill his desire and appear in the form of phenomena or affection.

The second part of this romance is constituted around the triad Lol, Jacques Hold, and Tatiana: “Every look will be yours, Lol, as Jacques Hold fascinated, as for him, he will declare himself ready to love ‘whole lol’” (^{Lacan, 2003, p. 201}). Lol is then back in his hometown with her husband Jean Bedford and their three children, with no memory of the ball scene, what transpired, or that night that marked a scansion in the intermission of her existence. There was, hence, a temporal sweeping in her personal history.

“What would have happened? Lol goes no further into the unknown to which this moment opens. She has no memory, not even an imaginary one, she has no idea of this stranger. But what he believes is that he should penetrate there, that was what he had to do, that would have been there forever, for his head and body, their greatest pain and joy, confused even in its definition made unique but unnameable in the lack of a word. I like to think, as I love her, that if Lol is silent in life, she believed, in the time of lightning, that this word could exist. In the absence of its existence, it is silent, it would have been a word-absence, a word-hole, with a dug hole in the center, of that hole where all the other words would have been buried” (^{Lacan, 2003, p. 201}). Lol returns to her hometown and brings with him the amnesia of that moment that was his life, an instant of the subject’s fading, having not had the passage in him to be when he was saying, although there were existence and an ex-existence of the subject.

For some people, as it happens in the case of hysteria, from the trauma it is possible to build symptoms, as Freud stresses in a late text of his works (^{Freud, 1939/1996g}). The symptoms lead us to the unconscious meanings that can be built in a work of deciphering. According to the author, the original repression is related to a hole in the symbolic realm, that results in a personal loss. The original repression would be a trauma related to the entrance of two contradictory messages related to the significant, the operation of the paternal metaphor, which allows the mechanism of the “yes” as Behajung – primordial affirmation – and of the “no”, as Ausstossung – expelling.

According to Freud, the unconscious is the psyche itself and its essential reality (^{Freud, 1900/1996c}). This unconscious is made of thoughts (Gedanken) – and that is one of the reasons why ^{Lacan (2008)} will refer to Descartes’s “I think” - and, consequently, it will only know the representations of the instincts; or, more exactly, the representations of the representation (Vortellungsrepräsentanzen). But all the advances made by Lacan in terms of language and its effects can only be conceived with the notion of body, without the support of the body as the place of the voice, of the memory, the significant effects and the jouissance’s effects: pleasure, displeasure, satisfaction, suffering, pain.

Going back to the beauty of the romance under the feathers of Margerite Duras, we can formulate a hypothesis with the support of our reading of Freudian text, “Inhibition, Symptom, and Anguish” (Freud, 1926/1996f), from this perspective, the symptom is viewed as the manifestation of primal repression, which is tied to knowledge and the conscious choice of “not wanting to know about this”. The anguish as an anxious wait, of a happening, introduces that, who speaks, in the time dimension, its non-temporality, to its effects, and sometimes, to the vanishing of the subject – which brings us closer to this romance.

Non-temporality that stresses the hole in time, a cut, but a Möbian cut, not from a before and an after, but in its accuracy in the transmission of what is at stake in each clinical case. Lacan made use of the topology, branch of mathematics that appeared at the end of the 19th century, to elaborate the real which affects the psychoanalytic experience. The psychoanalysis took over the topology in a particular way, different from the literacy obtained throughout the formulas, prioritizing the revealing of the relation between the elements implicated in a structure. In it, what is engendered and shown is the space of continuity through a twist that makes the right and the reverse appear, in a “dynamic of coming and going, making – undoing, building – destroying, of constant exchange, of the unexpected, from the void, from the lack, from the ineffability, from the inside to the outside and vice versa” (^{Monteiro, 2014, p. 133}). Monteiro narrates the making of the Möbius band from a “strip of paper that is placed over itself with a twisting movement. It is a representative of the unrepresentable, it has neither the opposition nor the right, it is time that makes the difference between the two faces” (^{Monteiro, 2014, p. 134}).

Conclusion

With Lacan, the Real, the Symbolic and Imaginary are registers that correspond, respectively, to life, death, and the body (^{Lacan, 2023}). Life, we do not know how to define it, except for the real of jouissance which it involves. The symbolic is related to death once the symbol kills the thing, and the imaginary is determined by the body dimension.

The relationship between the body and language has been present since the beginning of psychoanalysis when Freud made his first elaborations on the symptom in hysteria. In the text “The Unconscious” (^{Freud, 1915/1996e}), when addressing psychosis, the body-language relationship is quite evident, since the author points out that the disruption of language is always accompanied by a disruption of the representation of the body, that is, in the image. The inscription of language on the body is an original event that allows access to a subjective space that is supported by new displaceable elements in the symbolic chain.

By body, we understand not only what pertains to the organism and its biochemical functioning, the organic and biological level, but also what refers to the idea of the body affected by the incorporeal of language, a notion that Lacan presents since “Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis” (^{Lacan, 1998b}). It is, therefore, the topographical aspect, which is situated between the somatic and the psychic, implies the object of the drive a, but also the body as a body image, constituted in the Mirror Stage, which is the matrix of the imaginary record and function of moi. As an organism, the body is initially experienced as shattered, but with the crossing of the Mirror, under the action of identification, it begins to be experienced as a form composed of an inside and an outside, becoming, hence, the home of the self, or even starting to represent the self. Therefore, we can say, that the body of interest to psychoanalysis is an erogenized organism, marked by drive and language, both inseparable, as in a Möebius strip. In its accuracy in the transmission of what is at stake in the case of the clinical work.

That which deals with the pulsional body, or in other word, the body of jouissance, goes in the direction of the limits of the language as the unrevealing of sense, production, and meaning. It operates through the act – the saying as an act, the cut of the saying or the creative act – acts that resonate in the body, that enter throughout the orifices. As it is not that sense which is interpreted, but the rest, voilà what is the base of Lacan’s 10th Seminar: the anguish (^{Lacan, 2005}). The analytical interpretation tries to produce a reduction of the sense, aiming, throughout the nonsense, to touch the real. The misconception and the playing with words, as well as the cut, are forms of intervention that try to touch them out of sense and, consequently, track the hole, the structural hole of the language. The inscription of trauma through language leaves its marks, as a subsequently present element in the subjective narrative writing.