LACANIAN APPROACH TO PROBLEMS OF AFFECT

AND ANXIETY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Alan Rowan
The system of language at whichever point you take hold of it
never results in an index finger directly indicating a point of
reality, it's the whole of reality that is covered by the entire
network of language.1
It has become common among psychoanalytic writers both critical
and sympathetic to Lacan who are not themselves Lacanians to criticise
Lacan for ignoring the role and place of affect in his theorising. Thus
Kennedy in a co-authored work on Lacan states that 'unlike many other
post-Freudian analysts, he (Lacan) gave little place to any theory of the
affects, or feelings, and the importance of pre-verbal structures. These
omissions may seem to represent a denial of much analytic experience'2
and he adds 'it is for this reason his work can seem over-intellectual'. 3
Similarly, Green makes the point that 'with the exception of Lacan no
modern psychoanalytic theory underestimates the importance of affects'4
while Smith in his epilogue to Interpreting Lacan writes 'Green's
formulations ... like the Kristeva and Vergote chapters goes toward
correcting the inattention to affect in Lacan'.5 Indeed, it could well be
argued that Lacanians themselves have by and large not taken up Lacan's
1

J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III. The Psychosis, 1955-56. Trans. R. Grigg.
London, Routledge, 1993. p. 32.
2
B. Benvenuto & R. Kennedy. The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. London, Free
Association Books, 1986. p. 117.
3
ibid, p. 168.
4
A. Green. 'BJB/Freud Museum Conference: How do we think about Feelings?' in British
Journal of Psychotherapy, 1995, 12, p. 209
5
J.H. Smith & W. Kerrigan. Interpreting Lacan. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983.
p. 268.

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call to produce an 'intellectual accounting' for the affects and one purpose,
therefore, of this paper is to raise debate in just this area.
Lacan, however, adamantly disputed this representation of his work
which does not mean that he was sympathetic to views of affect that left
out of account the fact that between the real and the subject comes the
signifier. Thus, in Seminar I he writes of:
the ambiguity that always dogs us concerning the notorious
opposition between the intellectual and the affective - as if the
affective were a sort of colouration, a kind of ineffable quality
which must be sought out in itself, independently of the
eviscerated skin which the purely intellectual realisation of a
subject's relationship would consist in. This conception
which urges analysts down strange paths is puerile. The
slightest, even strange feeling, that the subject professes to in
the text of the session is taken to be a spectacular success.6
In Seminar III Lacan, commenting on the inadequacy of any theory
of affects in psychoanalysis up to that point, offers what he terms a
working hypothesis around affects taking anger as a case in point. He
writes:
anger is no doubt a passion which is manifested by means of
an organic or physiological correlative, by a given more or
less hypertonic or even elated feeling, but that it requires
perhaps something like the reaction of a subject to a
disappointment, to the failure of an expected correlation
between a symbolic order and the response of the real. In
other words, anger is essentially linked to something
expressed in a formulation of Charles Peguy's, who was
speaking in a humorous context - it's when the little pegs
refuse to go into the little holes.7
6

J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54.
Trans. J. Forrester. Cambridge, C.U.P., 1988, p. 57.
7
J. Lacan. op.cit., p. 103.

68

On this view, which I will come back to, Lacan has already linked affects to
subjectivity and he goes on to note, for example, the absence of anger as
defined above in most animal species. Indeed, in Seminar X Lacan returns
to this precise example concerning anger while classifying as 'absurd' the
view that he is less interested in affects than anything else. He writes:
I have tried to say what affect is not: it is not being, given in
its immediacy, nor is it the subject in some sort of raw form.
It is not, to say the word, protopathetic in any case. My
occasional remarks on affect mean nothing more than this.
And that is precisely why it has a close structural relationship
with what is, even traditionally a subject ... What on the
contrary I did say about affect is that it is not repressed, and
that is something that Freud says just as I do. It is unmoored,
it goes with the drift. One finds it displaced, mad, inverted,
metabolised, but it is not repressed. What is repressed are the
signifiers which moor it.8
It is in this Seminar devoted to nothing other than an extensive study of a
key affect, namely anxiety, that Lacan is also clear that anxiety must be seen
precisely as an affect, albeit an affect with particular status CI am far from
refusing to insert the central object of anxiety into the catalogue of
affects'9), and he is moreover critical of the impasses reached in the work
of psychoanalysts such as Rappaport10 which arrived, he claims, at a mere
cataloguing of affects or psychoanalytic theories of affect with no real
progress in understanding. A further Lacanian reference point in
approaching the problem of affects in psychoanalysis is found in

J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X. Anxiety, 1962-63. Trans. C. Gallagher
(unpublished).
9
ibid.
10
D. Rappaport. 'On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Affects1 in The Collected Papers of
David Rappaport, 1967. Ed. M. Gill. New York, Basic Books.

69

Television. Lacan here comments again on his 'supposed neglect of

affect'.11 He writes:
I just want an answer on this point: does an affect have to do
with the body? A discharge of adrenaline - is that body or
not? It upsets its functions, true. But what is there in it that
makes it come from the soul? What it discharges is
thought. 12
Citing Freud's 1915 paper on repression, Lacan points out that affect
is displaced but that this displacement must be appreciated as a
displacement of the subject through a representation - what is displaced he
says is the structure (of the affect) insofar as it is linked to the signifier. In
this text Lacan is clear, language and affect cannot be seen as independent
entities, rather, 'affect befalls a body whose essence it is said, is to dwell in
language ... befalls it on account of it not finding dwelling-room, at least
not to its taste. This we call moroseness or equally moodiness'. 13 He adds
'Is this a sin, a grain of madness, or a true touch of the real?'. 14 By so
doing, Lacan hints at the fact that affects in some way also have a
dimension to them beyond the signifying structures of language and in
relation to the real, which for Lacan is that 'which never ceases being not
written" 15 and which represents for the subject the pre-symbolic, or after
the subject's immersion in language the ultimately traumatic impasses
and impossibilities within the symbolic order itself. Two final points
arising from this text deserve highlighting. Firstly, Lacan is insistent that
affects have an object and that anxiety which he claims some psychologists
have seen as objectless (compared to fear which is said to have an object)
does have an object which he calls object a or little a. (This will be
elaborated on later in this paper). Secondly, Lacan offers another specific
11

J. Lacan. Television (1973). Trans. D. Holler, R. Krauss & A. Michelson. New York,
Norton, 1990. p. 20.
12
ibid, p. 20.
13
S.Freud. Repression. S.E., XIV, pp. 23-24.
14
ibid, p. 24.
15
Ornicar 17/18.

70

example of an affect, this time 'sadness - as - depression' which he says is

not a state of the soul but is ultimately 'located only in relation to
thought'. 16 It is, he claims, a moral failing or weakness in the subject by
which he means a failure to act on one's desire which, as he argued in his
seminar on ethics, is the only ethical dimension that psychoanalysis can
lay claim to work in.
At this point in the paper however, I propose to make a detour to
examine more generally the major theories of affect before returning to
psychoanalysis and to Lacan while remaining nonetheless in tune with
Lacan who states 'the affective is not like a special destiny which would
escape an intellectual accounting'.17
What Lyons calls 'the feeling theory'18 of emotions has in Descartes
its most influential exponent. Descartes in his work The Passions of the
Soul sees passions as belonging to the soul and as 'kinds of perception or
forms of knowledge which are found in us'. 19 His account of how they
arise is as follows. Firstly, there is a perception of some object, say, an
animal, which is transmitted to the soul via the pineal gland. Once in the
soul, this perception is compared to previous ones and if it has a close
relationship with formerly frightening or joyful experiences, then this
leads directly to a bodily reaction such as, for example, fear which is the
awareness of a force (or 'animal spirit') in the body disposing us to flight.
To take flight, however, is for Descartes not the actual passion, as this is a
desire of the soul aimed at moving the body in some way - the passion is
purely the commotions going on in the body and as such, a special
perception of the soul. It is for a similar reason that what could be seen as
the subject's evaluation or judgement of the perception is no part of the
passion itself though indeed, as Lyons points out, Descartes did come close
to offering a sequential and causal theory of the emotions. He was,
however, prevented from doing so by his preconceived idea that what was
important to human beings had to belong in man's soul and could not be
16

J. Lacan. op.cit, p. 22.

J. Lacan. op.cit, (Seminar I) p. 57.
18
W. Lyons. Emotion. Cambridge, C.U.P., 1980.
19
R. Descartes. 'Passions of the Soul' in The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Trans. E.S.
Haldene & G.R.T. Ross. Universities Press, 1968.
17

71

part of any complex causal process. This view runs into a considerable
number of difficulties, not least that it makes emotion purely passive and
sensation-like, something that does not give us knowledge of the world as
such but merely of our being physiologically in a certain state. For
example, on this view one can make little sense of any connection between
emotions and behaviour, (that is, emotions as motivations), for to state
that a particular physiological state, say a throbbing of the heart, leads one
to act in a certain way is simply absurd without connecting this act to a
subject's wants and desires. Lyons brings out this problem of reducing
emotions to sensations by an analogy whereby to say that I am hot is ...
... not to say that I want to do anything or am liable to do
anything, much less that I will do anything.
I might like
being hot, I might not, I might be indifferent.20
Similarly, in Descartes' view it is impossible to distinguish
emotions from, say, a drug induced bodily state that mimics the emotional
one - Descartes has simply no criteria available for such a distinction.
Moreover, as Bedford points out, feelings unlike emotions, just are, for
example, 'we may experience a pang or particular pattern of internal
stimulation' 2 1 but one cannot ask whether such a feeling is justified or
appropriate. Therefore, if emotions were simply feelings we could not
make sense of them as they would be beyond reason. Finally, Wittgenstein
in his Philosophical Investigations makes the point that we could not use
emotional words without them being part of language - for a word only
has meaning as part of language - and, as such, Descartes' internal mental
experiences could never be conceived and expressed by Descartes. 22
Nevertheless, despite these difficulties with the Cartesian theory of the
emotions - some of which Descartes himself sensed - many (for example,
Hume) followed Descartes in seeing emotion as a special feeling in the
soul or the soul's perception from within of the body's changes and
20

W. Lyons, op.rit, p. 7
Bedford, (1967) quoted in Lyons, op.cit.
22
L. Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations, 1945. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford,
Basil Blackwell, 1953.
21

72

activities. Indeed, William James, an arch Cartesian, brought to

prominence a modern version of this Cartesian doctrine at the turn of the
century, through the so-called James-Lange theory, which he outlined as
follows:
... bodily changes follow directly the perception of the existing
fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS
the emotion ... Common-sense says we lose our fortune, are
sorry and weep ... The hypothesis here to be defended says ...
that we feel sorry because we cry.23
James hereby took Descartes' feelings out of the soul and put it into the
purely bodily area which did have certain advantages, such as enabling
him to say that if the cortex is electrically stimulated and produces rage
then this is a fully fledged emotional experience for the subject. However,
this theory suffers all the defects of the above Cartesian one. Moreover,
experimental science has consistently failed to distinguish emotions on a
physiological basis, (for example, see the work of Schacter24, Schacter and
Singer 25 or for a view that does see some progress being made in this area,
Ax*>).
A second approach to affects that has had considerable influence
and was an outgrowth of so-called scientific psychology is the
behavioural one which sought to reduce affects to specific behavioural
patterns. Watson 27 championed this approach in the early 1900s by
attempting to delineate - initially in infants - such universal behavioural
patterns which he saw as hereditary in response to particular stimulus
23

W. James. Principles of Psychology, Volume II. New York, Henry Holt and Co., 1870. pp.
449-50.
24
S. Schacter & J.G. Singer. Emotion, Obesity and Crime. New York, Academic Press, 1970.
25
S. Schacter & J.G. Singer. 'Cognitive, social and physiological determinants of emotional
state' in Psychological Review, 1962, 69, pp. 379-399.
26
A.F. Ax. 'The Physiological differentiation between Fear and Anger in humans' in
Psychosomatic Medicine, 1971, 15, pp. 433-442.
27
J. Watson. Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. Philadelphia, Lippincot
Press, 1919.

73

conditions. In this task he was building on Darwin's The Expression of

Emotions in Man and Animals28 in which Darwin attempted to define
emotions in terms of adaptive behavioural responses that originally had a
distinct survival value for the species. Thus Darwin saw disgust as
originating from a response to a bad or foul taste and the characteristic
facial expressions associated with disgust, (for example, mouth open,
partial closure of the eyelids, etc.), as movements identical with those
preparatory to the act of vomiting. However, Watson was unable to make
his case even to his own satisfaction for he was obliged to accept that once
one considered an adult example of an emotion, one had also to accept that
the hereditary pattern became diffuse and broken-up which meant that
stereotypical behaviours could not be used to identify particular emotions!
One possible way of resolving this was to look to the stimulus conditions
as being the constant factor that allows us to classify particular affects or
emotions. However, here, once again, Watson faced an impasse which
related to the fact that similar situations clearly caused different
behavioural patterns to arise in different subjects, (for example, one
person's reaction to a parachute jump or dog may be very different to
another's), and by virtue of his own theoretical position he was barred
from appealing to differences in the 'unobservable beliefs' of particular
subjects. B.F. Skinner attempted to find a way out of this impasse by
maintaining that while emotions like anger predispose the subject to
actions of a particular type, the particular behaviour displayed will be what
is operantly reinforced in particular situations.29 The difficulty here is that
while an angry man may pick a fight, raise his voice, pound the table, etc.,
he also may not, and on this view it is simply impossible to find a list of
behavioural items, some or all of which must be present if the behaviour
in question is to be dubbed angry, and thus one is stuck with a circular
definition. The most compelling evidence for this theoretical approach
is that experimental research has demonstrated that most people,
regardless of culture, agree on the meaning of certain characteristic
human expressions such as sorrow, surprise, and rage. The problem
28

C. Darwin. The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. New York, Philosophical
Library, 1872.
29
B.F. Skinner. About Behaviourism. New York, Prentice-Hall, 1974.

74

however is that there are also exceptions to these findings and this,
alongside other problems with this approach, has led some researchers
towards a further theory, namely the so-called Constructionist theory
which offers I believe a far stronger theoretical account of emotion than
the previous two approaches.
The constructionist approach is one that puts the emphasis on the
meaning or cognitive content of an emotion, though in a form that is not
narrowly cognitivist insofar as it also highlights the need to understand
the social context in which a particular emotion can be expressed. It then
says two things about emotions. Firstly, that they have cognitive content,
and are therefore not some form of 'natural stirrings' but constructs
related to beliefs or judgements about the world in such a way that the
removal of the relevant belief will remove not only the reason for the
emotion but the emotion itself. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, was the first
exponent of this view and argued, for example, that the belief that one has
been wronged is in some way essential to the experience of the emotion
anger. This implies that if one discovers that one's belief is false - that the
object of one's anger did not in fact exist - then one will cease to experience
the emotion. It also means that emotions are subject to rational
evaluation for insofar as an emotion is based on a false or irrational belief,
then the ensuing emotion can itself be judged as false or irrational given
the actual circumstances the subject finds him or herself in. The claim that
some emotions do not appear to be related to particular beliefs or
evaluative judgements, for example, in cases of apprehensiveness or
'objectless' fear, is countered by pointing to embedded beliefs the subject
has in the situation, such as a belief concerning one's experience of
helplessness in that particular situation or else a belief concerning what
could happen to one rather than a belief concerning what was in fact
happening. This theory is still, however, open to a number of objections,
not the least of them being that it is unclear how one might
independently identify the reasonableness of particular emotions which,
for example, cannot be done in the form of a mathematical or logical proof.
It is at this point that the second aspect of this theory becomes prominent
and indeed strengthens it. The argument is that emotions gain their
meaning in complex patterns of cultural relationship and indeed are

75

constitutive of particular forms of social life. Thus, emotions are seen as

learned by the child through exposure to his or her familial and social
environment in which, as Nussbaum puts it, 'these beliefs and the related
emotions are housed'. 30 On this view emotions, as embodied expressions
of judgement, which may or may not also be ways of accomplishing certain
social acts, would be expected to vary historically and culturally, which is
indeed the case. Thus, Indo-Europeans have no emotion similar to what
the Japanese call amae which expresses something like a state of sweet
emotional dependency towards another adult while as Averill has
demonstrated, what in the Western World would be termed a display of
hostility is an emotional pattern that is absent in many cultures. 3 1
Similarly, Lutz in her study of the Ifaluk people has shown how it is
impossible to achieve any one-to-one translation of emotional terms
between English and Ifaluk, while other writers have documented radical
changes in the meaning and use of emotional terms over time. 32 For
example, Stearns and Stearns have shown how anger in the beginning of
the eighteenth century referred to a public display of outrage and had no
personal reference to inner feelings as part of its meaning while our
modern and frequent use of words like depression, burnout, and stress
would have puzzled our forefathers of even a hundred years ago.33 Clearly
there are some problem areas faced by such a theory, particularly
concerning the status of the so-called irrational emotions and the related
problems of relativism given the existence of different culturally
influenced emotional 'sets' or capacities which, in turn, gives rise to the
question of whether some sets of emotions have a greater capacity to
contribute to human flourishing than others, (see Nussbaum 34 for a
discussion of these issues). Nevertheless, I believe this theory is
substantially correct and does not have the obvious weaknesses of the two
30

M. Nussbaum. Love's Knowledge. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990. p. 293.

J. Averill. Anger and Agression: An Essay on Emotion. New York, Springer-Verlag, 1982.
32
C. Lutz. Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments of the Micronesian Atoll and their
Challenge to Western Theory. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988.
33
C.Z. Sterns & P.N. Sterns. Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's
History. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986.
34
M. Nussbaum. op.cit.
31

76

approaches I outlined earlier. The interesting questions I would like to

pose now are: in what ways might this theory be compatible with
psychoanalysis, and in particular with Lacan's theorising, and secondly, is
the latter capable of developing or enriching this account in a meaningful
way. At this point let us turn to psycho-analysis with a hopefully
deepened understanding of the various issues and dilemmas one faces in
thinking about and accounting for affects.
Freud's earliest accounts of affects sees them very much as
physiological processes or processes of discharge (and therefore similar to
the James-Lange viewpoint), the final expression of which is perceived as
feeling. Thus, in his first major paper on anxiety, namely On the grounds
for detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under the
description of anxiety neurosis,35 Freud outlines a theory of anxiety as
transformed libido. On this view there is a direct transfer of embodied
sexual energy - a 'quota of affect' - which is denied access to psychic
representation into the somatic symptoms of anxiety which means that
anxiety is fundamentally a biological process, though one which has
psychical consequences. However, Freud was also aware that this account
of anxiety did little to explain the psychoneuroses, (for example, hysteria,
obsessionality, etc.), where symptoms arose on the basis of repression and
contained within them traumatic memories and blocked affects. There is a
tension, therefore, between Freud's view of affect as arising fundamentally
as an excessive and disorganising factor in the psychic apparatus versus his
seeing affects as essentially linked to ideas, beliefs or fantasies that the
subject holds. This latter viewpoint is obvious, for example, in Freud's
descriptions in the Rat Man case; he writes:
... between an affect and its ideational content, (in this
instance between the intensity of his patients' self-reproach
and the occasion for it), a layman will say that the affect is too
great for the occasion - that it is exaggerated - and that
consequently the inference following from the self-reproach,
(the inference that the patient is a criminal), is false. On the
35

S. Freud. On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under
the Description of Anxiety Neurosis. S.E., I.

77

contrary, the (analytic) physician says: No. The affect is

justified. The sense of guilt is not in itself open to further
criticism. But it belongs to some other content which is
unknown (unconscious) and which requires to be looked
for.3*
Here unconscious ideas are clearly held to explain the emotion and in
so doing, to establish its appropriateness or rationability for that particular
subject. Nevertheless as Cavell notes, 37 Freud continued in his belief that:
the release of emotion and the ideational link do not
constitute the indissoluble organic unity ... but that these two
separate entities may be merely soldered together and can
thus be detached from each other by analysis.38
This position, which implies that the respective destinies of
representations and affects are different, is evident in Freud's paper on
Repression where he writes:
If a repression does not succeed in preventing feelings of
unpleasure or anxiety from arising, we may say that it has
failed even though it may have achieved its purpose as far as
the ideational portion is concerned.39
In the same year, Freud wrote his paper The Unconscious and in
this he defines affects in the following way: 'affects and emotions
correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestation of which are
perceived as feelings' 40 and thereby assigns affects a secondary or
derivative role arising as a consequence of a blocked action. He also insists
36

S. Freud. Notes upon a case of Obsessional Neurosis. S.E., X, pp. 175-176.

M. Cavell. The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. Harvard, Harvard
University Press, 1993.
38
S. Freud. The Unconscious. S.E., XIV.
39
S. Freud. Repression. S.E., XIV, p. 153.
40
S. Freud. The Unconscious. S.E., XIV, p. 178.
37

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at this point, contrary to his earlier formulations concerning, for example,

the possibility of unconscious guilt, that there could be no such thing as
unconscious affects, as affects, by their very nature, had to be conscious and
experienced by the person having the emotion. What exists in the
unconscious is, therefore, something like dispositions or prowesses to
have certain feelings which only come into being at the point at which
such dispositions are linked up to a conscious representation. However, in
The Ego and Id,*1 Freud suggests that this link does not involve the
preconscious system but is more like an internal perception linking
conscious and unconscious directly which emphasises, according to
Green, 42 that there exists an essential difference between affect and verbal
representation with the former being an elementary form of sensation and
one which has moreover a different mode of existence in the unconscious
which, of course, also thus re-introduces the idea of an unconscious
modality for affect. In 1926, Freud suggests a further modification to his
theory which, as Green notes, both reduces the gulf between thought and
anxiety while simultaneously holding on to the idea that anxiety can cause
a traumatic flooding of the ego (now seen as the seat of anxiety) and
thus act as a disrupter of all thought processes. Freud describes the
former process as follows:
The ego notices that the satisfaction of an emerging
instinctual demand would conjure up one of the well
remembered situations of danger. This instinctual cathexis
must, therefore, be somehow suppressed, stopped, made
powerless. We know that the ego succeeds in this task if it is
strong and has drawn the instinctual impulse concerned into
its organisation. But what happens in the case of repression is
that the instinctual impulse still belongs to the id and the ego
feels weak. The ego therefore helps itself by a technique
which is at bottom, identical with normal thinking.
Thinking is an experimental action carried out with small
41

S. Freud. The Ego and Id. S.E., XIX, p. 186.

A. Green. (1977), On Private Madness. London, Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis, 1986.
42

79

amounts of energy in the same way as a General shifts small

figures about on a map before setting his large bodies of troops
in motion. Thus, the ego anticipates the satisfaction of a
questionable instinctual impulse and permits it to bring
about the reproduction of the unpleasurable feelings at the
beginning of the feared situation of danger. With this, the
automatism of the pleasure-unpleasure principle is brought
into operation and now carries out the repression of the
dangerous instinctual impulse. 43
At this point, and accepting that this review of Freud's thinking on
affects and anxiety provides more of a sketch than a comprehensive
review of his work, I think it is evident that Freud did not so much
present a coherent theory of affects but rather held a number of, at times,
incompatible hypotheses which he went about changing throughout his
work as his theory developed and as he attempted to clear up various
contradictions and problems within it. What I now wish to suggest is that
a coherent theory of affects is available to psychoanalysis, though only on
the basis of a thorough going privileging of the signifier combined with an
understanding of the essentially linguistic nature of subjectivity. By
implication, I will be arguing against writers such as Green. Green, for
example, argues that affects are colourings within psychic life or pure
transformational forces over which we have little control. He states they
operate in distinction from, and prior to, representation and can invade or
diffuse over any or all parts of an individual psyche and insofar as they
accompany, define, qualify, and connote mental states, can only be
inhibited or mastered but do not change in their structure44 - an approach
which ultimately I would suggest lends emotion a mystical aura and
moreover is subject to most of the flaws earlier associated with a Cartesian
reading of emotion.
To illustrate the profound impact of thought on the human being,
something that indeed fundamentally creates a subject, I will shortly take a
detailed quote from Helen Keller's autobiographical study entitled The
43
44

S. Freud. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. S.E., XXII, pp. 121-122

A. Green, op.cit, p. 211

80

Story of my Life. Firstly, however, it is worth noting how Lacan's

references to the subject are dominated by this very emphasis on speaking.
The subject is for Lacan essentially a speaking being (parletre), 'what in the
development of objectivation, is outside of the object',45 which he later
defines as that which is represented by a signifier for another signifier - in
other words, the subject is for Lacan an Effect of language. Now for
Keller's description of her experience:
One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan
put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled 'D-OL-L' and
tried to make me understand that 'D-O-L-L' applied to both.
Earlier in the day we had a tussle over the words 'M-U-G' and
'W-A-T-E-R'. Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me
that 'M-U-G' is mug and that 'W-A-T-E-R' is water, but I
persisted in compounding the two. In despair she had
dropped the subject for the time being, only to renew it at the
first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts
and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was
keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll
at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate
outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in
which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness.
She brought me my hat and I knew I was going out
into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless
sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip
with pleasure. We walked down the path to the well-house,
attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it
was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher
placed my hand under the spout.
As the cool stream gushed over my hand, she spelled
into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I
stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her
fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness, as of
something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought; and
45

J. Lacan. op.cit, p. 194. (Seminar I).

81

somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I

knew that 'W-A-T-E-R' meant the wonderful cool something
that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened
my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were
barriers still, it is true, but barriers that would in time be
swept away. I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything
had a name and each new name gave birth to a new thought.
As we returned to the house, every object which I touched
seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw
everything with the strange new sight that had come to me.
On entering the door, I remembered the doll I had broken. I
felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried
vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears,
for I realised what I had done, and for the first time I felt
repentance and sorrow.46
This is a rare and rich description and I will unpack it in a number of
points. Firstly, as Hobson notes, Helen's reaction to her teacher bringing
her hat - she hops and skips - is a pleasurable reaction to a sign or signal
that is clearly non-linguistic in form and is rather like a dog frisking its tail
when the owner produces the dog's lead.47 Secondly, we see the power of
naming. As Helen puts it, 'everything had a name and each name gave
birth to a new thought'. Helen, with words, could now draw lines through
what was previously a flux of experience. The word 'water' offers Helen
not a simple one-to-one correspondence with a cool something but is a
construction of her experience, a conception of an object is formed which
points beyond it, the importance of which she illustrates by the powerful
metaphor of sight. For Helen, language brings power and meanings
making every object 'quiver with life'. Thirdly, and perhaps most
importantly in the present context, we see Helen assuming a subjective
identity through language. Emotions or 'strong sentiments' emerge now loss and sorrow - and Helen becomes a subject that experiences
retroactively, apprehends herself as experiencing sadness or remorse.
46
47

H.Keller. The Story of My Life. New Jersey, Doubleday, 1954. pp. 35-37.
R. Hobson. Forms of Feeling. London, Tavistock Publications, 1985.

82

This naming is what allows the human being to move from the concrete,
the realm of perception, sensations, objects and images, to the world of
concepts, which can then be manipulated through thinking. Interestingly,
we can see here, at least in outline, a further proof of Lacan's thesis that the
punctuation that allows the signifier to take on a meaning occurs both
through the intervention of another and from the locus of the Other
(language) within a retroactive effect of temporality. It is perhaps
important to note here that the capacity for language is independent of the
process of interpretation (the deaf can and do 'speak' a language) which is
again consonant with Lacan's view that the symptom or, for example, the
so-called 'Freudian slip' is, in fact, 'a successful, not to say well tuned
discourse'. 48 One can ask more here about the elements of language and
how they are acquired. Lacan argues that language comes to the speaking
being more or less as a whole which means that...
... the particular effects of this or that element of language (la
langue) are bound up with the existence of this total
ensemble, anterior to any possible link with any particular
experience of the subject. Thus to consider this latter
particular link independently of any reference to the first is
simply to deny in this element the function proper to
language (la langue)49
We can see this concretely in how children develop language, for words
are already generalisations for the child (for example, names only slowly
acquire specificity), and reflect reality in quite another way than perception
and sensation, the latter being presymbolic until the point that they too
are, in a sense, taken up in language. Lacan is explicit on this point and
like Freud gives us reason to recognise the special importance to language
development of the ability to code the real according to the categories of
yes/no, affirmation/negation. He asks what makes the symbol into
language and states:
48
49

J. Lacan. Ecrits: a selection (1966). Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Tavistock, 1977. p. 58.
ibid, pp. 63-64.

83

In order for the symbolic object freed from its usage to become
the word freed from the Hie et nunc, the difference resides
not in its material quality as sound but in its evanescent being
in which the symbol finds the permanence of the concept.
Through the word - already a presence made of absence absence itself gives itself a name in that moment of origin,
whose perceptual recreation Freud's genius detected in the
play of the child, and from this pair of sounds modulated on
presence and absence ... there is born the world of meaning of
a particular language in which the world of things will come
to be arranged.50
This explains Lacan's emphasis on Freud's 'FORT! DA!' game where
Freud describes the child's 'great cultural achievement - the instinctual
renunciation', - that allows the child to substitute in place of his mother's
disappearance a rudimentary form of language that frees the child from
the immediacy of the situation. For Lacan, language is a radical otherness
at the core of the subject. 'Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol
has made him man'. 51 Returning to affects, we can see how the child's
ability to use signifiers introduces the child to an emotional world. Thus,
where previously the (M)other's absence was just that, and leads, to what
some observers have described as a wilting or 'low-keyedness' in the
infant, 52 there is now the emergence of sadness which is related to the
ability of the infant to grasp the notion of loss in relation to this object. It is
important, however, to highlight two points here. Firstly, we must
recognise that emotions are necessarily grounded in pleasure and pain and
as Cavell - shadowing Lacan - insists, in some form of wanting or demand
prior to desire. For as she states:
... only a creature who can experience pleasure to begin with
can be pleased to have won the lottery, proud of having
50

ibid, p. 65.
ibid, p. 65.
52
E.R. Zetzel. 'Depression and the Incapacity to Bear it' in Drives, Affects and Behaviour.
Vol 2. Ed. M. Schur. New York, International Universities Press, 1965.
51

84

learned to tie her shoelace, grateful for the favour done. Only
a creature who can experience pain can feel ashamed of his
rude remark, or sad because he's going away ... it is pleasure,
pain and volition that become articulated in an endless
number of ways by cognitions and beliefs.53
Secondly, if we are not to descend into confusion at this point, we must
define what the word 'object' implies. In doing this, we need to first make
a distinction between the different uses of the word 'representation'. In
English this usually refers to an image or likeness and is linked to
perception, whereas in the Freud Cartesian tradition the expression Videe
representative is linked with symbolic capacity. In other words, it is the
ability to hold on to an enduring representation as against an image or
working map of one's environment which, for example, almost all
animals develop to some degree. Thus, at approximately eight months of
age, the infant can keep the mother in mind, even though she is out of the
room, and also clearly recognise her. The infant thus has a working and
largely perceptually or sensed-based map of important objects in the worldout-there. However, at approximately eighteen months the infant acquires
language and can think (and have fantasies) about the (M)other in contradistinction to any experience he has had with her. Some psychoanalytic
writers here refer to 'internal objects' but the question is: What can these
be if not symbolic constructs or pieces of language? As Jones (1993) puts it,
'Simply stated, internal objects must refer to our first concepts, the infant's
first attempts to categorise and conceptualise what is important in his
world', which are ...
... certainly not the infant's first experience with relationships
... Unfortunately, the term object relations is routinely used
to describe both the relationship between the subject and
another person and the symbolic encoding of this
relationship, thus blurring the distinction between the two. 54
53

M. Cavell. op.cit, p. 149.

J.M. Jones. Affects as Process: An Inquiry into the Centrality of Affect in Psychological
Life. New Jersey, The Analytical Press, 1993. p. 190.
54

85

On this view, as the baby grows and acquires greater degrees of competence
or immersion in language, its initial emotional states are increasingly
refined by cognitions, or mental contents constructed on the basis of this
encounter with language which, of course, has to some degree an
accidental character. Indeed, it is this very accidental character in the
subject's symbolic structure that can lead to the formation of symptoms as
Leader and Groves somewhat amusingly illustrate in their description of a
subject who banged her head each morning on waking on the basis of an
identification with her father, described frequently in the mother's speech
in terms of 'he woke up on the wrong side of the bed' - a symptom which
disappeared when linked to the mother's oft repeated phrase. 55 The
approach I am outlining also emphasises the way incongruent affects
should be, and sometimes are, understood within psychoanalysis. The
point here is not cathartic release nor is the task of the analyst affective
elaboration, which is strictly a non-analytic approach, rather the analyst
faced with, say, a phobia, should in some way ask what the subject is really
afraid of, thus making a link to unconscious objects, constructs, and
ultimately language. In a similar way the analyst, when faced with the
affective control of the obsessional, may speculate on the terror of evertempting transgressions, or when faced with delusions of being watched
and observed, consider the workings of a vigilant and self-punishing super
ego. In each case, the apparent incongruity is something that in the
progress of an analysis loses its character. As I noted earlier in this paper,
Freud, and later Lacan, insisted that affects are not repressed but are rather
displaced, inverted, metabolised, etc., and so one can pose the question of
how to account for this. Freud, in his paper The Neuro-Psychoses of
Defense, notes how the ego cannot eradicate the affect but nevertheless
can, in its defensive attitude, reach an approximate fulfilment of this task
if it succeeds in turning a ...
... powerful idea into a weak one (therefore) robbing it of the
affect - the sum of excitation - with which it is loaded. The
weak idea will then have virtually no demands to make on
55

D. Leader & J. Groves. Lacan for Beginners. Cambridge, Icon Books, 1995. p. 52.

86

the work of association. But the sum of excitation which has

been detached from it must be put to another use ... In
hysteria, the incompatible idea is rendered innocuous by its
sum of excitation being transformed into something
somatic.56
Affects function, therefore, by being disassociated from their original
ideational content under certain conditions and re-associated with another
set of ideas that are in some way suitable for this operation, as can be seen
in Little Han's 'creation' of a fear of horses in place of an original fear of
the 'castrating father'. My point here is that displaceable affects, far from
being a random occurrence, depend on emotions having, in the first place,
an ideational content which both fits with the present theoretical
elaboration and explains why animals and the pre-symbolic infant can
only respond to concrete signals of danger which convey specific
information, a point I will shortly come back to when considering what
can be said about affects prior to language acquisition. Firstly, though, I
would like to highlight a point made by Cavell, who argues that we must
not restrict our understanding of a subject's emotions solely to his or her
use of emotional terms. Rather, beliefs and desires which always function
in a context of related beliefs and desires - eventually, in the adult, forming
a vast signifying network or complex text - have to be seen as 'shot
through' with emotion. She cites Freud's account of the beginning of his
treatment of the Rat Man as an example. Freud writes:
He had a friend, he told me, of whom he had an
extraordinarily high opinion. He used always to go to him
when he was tormented by some criminal impulse, and ask
him whether he despised him as a criminal. His friend used
then to give him moral support by assuring him that he was a
man of irreproachable conduct, and had probably been in the
habit, from his earliest youth onwards, of taking a dark view
of his own life.57
56
57

S. Freud. The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense. S.E., III, pp. 48-49.

S. Freud, S.E., X, p. 159.

87

Now not all language use is like this but as Cavell points out, it is virtually
impossible to deny that within this language, there is present a sort of
'thick description' of a scene where the emotions are, if not present, then
imminent and only awaiting a more fine-grained description for their
arrival.
At this point, it is time to pose the question concerning what is
sometimes referred to as the emotional life of the infant (or, indeed, other
sentient creatures) prior to language and following on from there, to
finally address the question of anxiety - namely, is anxiety an emotion?
The argument so far has been that emotions are subjective
phenomena, they belong to a subject and the subject is, and comes into
being, as a subject of language. To speak of a subject (or self) prior to
language simply makes no sense from this view point, though this has not
prevented many writers from doing just this. Thus, for example, Stern in
The Interpersonal World of the Infant writes:
It is a basic assumption of the work that some senses of the
self do exist long prior to self-awareness and language. These
include the senses of agency, of physical cohesion, of
continuity in time, of having intentions in the mind, and
other such experiences we will soon discuss. Self-reflection
and language come to work upon these pre-verbal existential
senses of the self, and in so doing transform them into new
experiences. If we assume that some pre-verbal senses of the
self start to form at birth (if not before) while others require
the motivation of later-appearing capacities before they can
emerge, then we are freed from the partially semantic task of
choosing criteria to decide a priori when a sense of self really
begins. 58
However, as Jones points out, Stern simply assumes here that a
sense of self begins at birth and thus confuses biological capacity with the
58

D. Stern. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York, Basic Books, 1985. p. 6.

88

nature of a subject.59 All sentient species who can pay attention to their
environment, which includes all mammals as well as fish, birds and
reptiles, have the capacities Stern outlines. For example, they can control
their bodies in a display of agency, make perceptual discriminations
concerning their body and their environment, demonstrating selfcoherence, and they have the ability to record their experiences in
memory and learn from them in a way that demonstrates continuity of
form. But this hardly implies that one's dog or cat is a subject, or possesses
subjectivity and can think 'thoughts', though it does confirm the point
that living organisms are complexly organised and necessarily have the
capacity for some form of biological self-regulation. What then are we to
make of the obvious capacities of the human infant prior to the acquisition
of language? Clearly, infants as well as animals are from birth capable of
paying attention and noticing various aspects of their environment
through information gained from the senses. They also begin to construct
a working map of their environment that with time includes, in our case,
the infant itself as well as significant others and important aspects of the
inanimate environment. To understand these capacities we do not,
however, have to postulate the workings of a mind or subject capable of
representation existing in a sense behind the infant's behaviour. On
seeing that a baby is attending to something or signalling that it is hungry
it is easy to place a subject at the centre of that experience, yet what we need
to recognise is that it is not the baby's ego or self that is somehow
orchestrating this behaviour, rather there is just the-baby-acting-in-thisway on the basis of particular internal or external influences or stimuli. In
other words, the baby (or an animal) functions presymbolically on the
model of an analogic machine rather than a symbolic subject. A mercury
thermometer is a good example of an analogic machine, the height of the
mercury column measures the temperature though clearly it does not
symbolise it. Thus, it can be seen how the baby, for example, can have
available a continuous reading of its bodily states (for example, level of
hunger) which moves it to alter or not that state which, however, does not
require inner symbolic representations but merely sensing capacities.
Similarly, if an animal is confronted with two competing motivational
59

J.M. Jones, op.cit.

89

systems, (say, on the one hand, hunger which however, involves

approaching the carcass a dangerous animal is feeding on) what happens
depends purely on the strength of the competing motivational systems,
and the animal does not have the capacity to override these systems as a
language-using subject would. To be motivated to act does not require
thought but merely a need and the know-how or behaviour required to
meet that need. Freud named these mechanisms devoted to bodily needs
the 'instincts of self-preservation' which are what regulate our
physiological and bodily requirements. With regard to movement, recent
neuro-physiological research (see Pilbram60) confirms that motor activity
does not occur on the basis of a prior internal representation particular to
the piece of motor behaviour, but that the motor cortex is itself a 'sensory
cortex for action' which once motivated by a want or interest, makes
continuous and ongoing alterations of movement based on sensory
feedback in eventually achieving the 'know-how' necessary, say, for the
infant to pick up or touch a particular item. The infant on this view thus
comes into the world with a certain amount of pre-programming (for
example, the ability to signal distress and discriminate pain from pleasure),
and is capable of being in a number of different states, for example, sleep
versus wakefulness. These states should be seen as fundamentally
motivational ones for the infant insofar as the infant will be motivated to
continue, say, sucking if this is pleasurable, and to cry if it is hungry. In
addition to these two states, Jones argues that two other states are present
from birth, namely, interest, which will motivate the infant to explore his
world, 61 and is similar to Freud's notion of mastery, and surprise, which
he sees as having its prototype in the startle response and represents a
moment when the infant's attention is abruptly refocused. These states
which are 'in the body' are not to be confused with affects and though they
may seem in some way similar to moods, if not to affects proper, there is
literally no way we can, for example, describe such prior-to-language
experiences; they remain always unspeakable. They are, nevertheless,
what drives the infant to act and are states of being which require or
demand a response of the body. They are real in the Lacanian sense of the
60
61

K. Pilbram. Languages of the Brain. New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1971.

J.M. Jones, op.cit.

90

word (that is, outside symbolisation) and, therefore, for Lacan, linked to
one sense of what he means by jouissance (and to Freud's libido) - the
purpose for the human subject being to limit the effects of such jouissance
in the name of subjectivity, the total failure of which leads to psychosis
and the failure to inhabit language, (rather than inhabiting language the
psychotic is possessed by language). The infant, of course, also quickly
develops and becomes more proficient within its environment, which
includes the development of new biobehavioural capacities, (for example,
social smiling at approximately eight weeks) though such developments
prior to the acquisition of language need to be seen as examples of
increasing effectiveness in how the infant processes various signals either
in terms of its interior states or from the environment; it does not alter
the fact that what is being processed remains data linked to perception
(or images) and not symbolic representations. The acquisition by the baby
at about six months of what Piaget and Inhelder termed 'object
permanence', 62 which means that the infant relates to objects existing
independently of the infant's perception of the object, allows the infant to
develop a basic map of its environment (similar to an animal's
appreciation of its environment - which can, of course, equate with a vast
amount of know-how). Though again it is important to keep in mind that
a capacity to revive stored perceptions, form schemas of the environment,
and even discriminate between them is not the same thing as having
beliefs about the environment, the latter being possible only on the basis of
language. In finishing this section, I think we can now make a number of
points, powerfully supportive of Lacan's theorising on psychoanalysis.
Firstly, we can see how language gives birth not just to the subject but, as
Lacan argues, to the unconscious itself insofar as prior to language, no
symbolic representation is at all possible - the unconscious is thus not
some primary and natural given. This, however, does not mean that
prereflective experience is not significant for the human but rather that the
infant's experience, motivational states, and stable behavioural patterns
are retroactively encoded into fantasies when the ability to symbolise
emerges. Lichtenberg - though I would dispute particularly his use of the
word 'affects' - puts it neatly when he writes:
62

J. Piaget & B. Inhelder. The Psychology of the Child. New York, Basic Books, 1969.

91

The toddler of about eighteen to twenty-four months is in a

position similar to Pirandillo's six characters in search of an
author : the infant has memories, affects, organised states,
(with transitions between them), preferences and complex
interactional patterns all in search of a form of symbolic
representation. 63
The basic mechanism for this is, of course, Freud's notion of 'deferred
action' much emphasised by Lacan, which means, for example, that one
does not need to hypothesise an innate ability for symbolic functioning to
explain 'oral phantasies'. On this view, we must also recognise with Lacan
that the ego is not something that one can think of as present from birth
(as Klein does) but rather represents a developmental task dependent on
the capacity for recognition.64 Similarly, one cannot but agree with Lacan's
way of defining the difference between animal psychology, which he sees
as entirely dominated by the imaginary, and the human order which is
completely taken up in the symbolic, which, in the human, structures
retroactively the imaginary or as Lacan states it: 'in man the imaginary
has deviated (from the realm of nature)'. 65 Our attributing thought to
babies is, therefore, purely metaphorical though one can understand it, as
projecting our mental lives onto infants is what allows us to treat them as
potential members of the human community and also is, in a sense, a way
of inviting them into this community of subjects. There are also moral
reasons for treating human infants at this stage as subjects for while they
are, in fact, more similar to charming domestic pets, 66 they will rapidly
63

J. Lichtenberg. Psychoanalysis and Infant Research. New Jersey, The Analytic Press,
1983. pp. 168-169.
64
J. Lacan. The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the T in Ecrits: a selection
(1966). Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Tavistock, 1977.
65
J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and the
Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaseli. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1988. p. 210.
66
And let's face it, not just charming but gorgeous, beautiful, delightful creatures who
moreover always pose to us that intriguing question of our origins, etc.

92

achieve self-consciousness, becoming a subject and acquiring a sense of

'self. We must not confuse this, however, with the idea of arriving at a
unifying unity or synthesised self for the human condition, an idea which
Lacan writes: 'has always had an effect of a scandalous lie'.67
Earlier in this paper, I posed the question of whether anxiety was an
affect which is clearly enigmatic, given the fact that anxiety is in many
ways the pre-eminent affect within psychoanalysis and moreover, one
which Lacan situates at the centre of any theory of affects which is attested
to by his devoting a whole Seminar to this topic.68 Nevertheless, there is a
sense in which anxiety is not like other affects and it is this sense of anxiety
that I wish to briefly highlight in concluding. 69 Lacan maintains that
anxiety emerges as a traumatic element linked to the real and as
something that does not deceive which, therefore, puts it in contrast to
other affects which can never be taken as a sign or locus of truth. What he
means by this is that anxiety is always linked to desire and is, in fact, the
most radical mode of sustaining desire, for, as he says of phobia: 'It is
constructed to sustain the relationship of the subject to desire under the
form of anxiety'.70 Contrary to Freud, Lacan does not see anxiety as
arising on the basis of a fear of loss of the object (for example, the breast,
penis, love of the superego, etc.), but as an encounter with the
overwhelming presence of the desire of the Other (entailing therefore a
lack of separation) which threatens to eliminate subjective desire. He
likens this moment to the occasion when the praying mantis settles her
eye on a potential mate who is, however, unaware of his identity, what he
is for the Other - which is far from reassuring and brings with it the image
of being engulfed and devoured. The nature of the danger is not, as it is
for Freud, bound up with the helplessness of the ego in the face of
excessive quantities of excitation, but is linked to the Other insofar as the
Other addresses the subject as its cause, thereby placing this little other (the
infant) radically into question. In Seminar X, Lacan writes:
67

J. Lacan. ' 0 / Structure as an inmixing of an Otherness pre-requisite to any subject

whatever' in Ecrits: a selection (1966). Trans. A. Sheridan. London, Tavistock, 1977.
68
J. Lacan. op.cit. (Seminar X).
69
To cover the subject matter of the Seminar in detail would require a separate paper.
70
ibid.

93

The desire of the Other does not recognise me as Hegel

believed ... it challenges me, questioning me at the very root
of my own desire as object a, as cause of this desire, and not as
object. And it is because this entails a relation of intecedence,
a temporal relation, that I can do nothing to break this hold
other than to enter it.71
The anxiety-producing aspect of desire rests on the fact that the infant does
not know what object a it is for the desire of the Other. As Lacan
illustrates, this desire, which is a demand that does not concern any need
which 'does not concern anything other than my very being' and which is
'addressed to me if you wish as expected, which is addressed to me much
more again as lost, and which in order that the Other should be able to
locate himself requests my loss' 72 is a question concerning the birth of the
subject. The subject comes into being by virtue of being able, at this
moment, to place between itself and the desire of the Other at the
beginning of symbolisation the phantasy. The barred subject divided by
the signifier produces object a ($ 0 a) which, however, is based on
something that has already fallen away, the non-symbolised element of the
real, for which object a is the remainder or remnant and as I stated earlier,
the ultimate cause of desire. If this fails, one has psychosis and the
psychotic is someone who becomes object a in the real without the
medium of such a phantasy structure. In this Seminar Lacan thus outlines
two reference points for thinking about anxiety which he describes in
Session 10, one reference is:
to the real insofar as anxiety is the response to the most
original danger to the unsurmountable Hilflosigkeit, to the
absolute distress of entering into the world ... on the other
hand, it is going to be able to be subsequently taken up by the
71

ibid.

72

J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII. The Transference and its Subjective

Reality, 1960-61. Trans. C. Gallagher (unpublished).

94

ego as a signal of infinitely slighter dangers, of dangers, we are

told somewhere by Jones ... (which are) ... 'buried desires'. 73
In other words anxiety, in the latter sense, is linked to affects and can be
assimilated to how these have been presented in this paper so far.
However in Lacan's first sense, it is anxiety that introduces us 'with
maximal communicability to the function of lack',74 which, as there is no
lack in the real, is only graspable through the mediation of the symbolic.
In finishing, I would like to allude briefly to the work of Keirkegaard as,
indeed, does Lacan himself in noting Keirkegaard's 'audacity' in speaking
of the concept of anxiety, he writes:
What can this possibly mean if not the affirmation that either
the concept functions in the Hegelian manner, entailing
symbolically a veritable grasp of the real; or the sole grasp that
we can have - and it is here we must choose - is that afforded
us by anxiety, the sole and thus ultimate apprehension of all
reality.75
For Keirkegaard anxiety was not a consequence of circumstances, but part
of the human condition itself and man in unity or harmony with his
natural condition is only potentially human. To attain humanness, a
prohibition must be introduced which he alludes to in the myth of the
Garden of Eden, putting it as follows:
The prohibition alarms Adam (induces in him a state of
dread) because the prohibition awakens in him the possibility
of freedom. That which passed innocence by as the nothing
of dread has now entered him and here again it is a nothing,

73
74
75

ibid, pp. 6-7.

ibid, p. 10.
ibid.

95

the alarming possibility of being able. What he is able to do,

of that he has no conception.76
So for Kierkegaard anxiety was central and constitutive of the subject and
so it is for Lacan, though Lacan offers us a way of understanding that is
purely psychoanalytic. For the subject there is no escape from anxiety.
Indeed, what we must avoid at all costs, it seems, is appalling certainty and
as Lacan says we do not want the world ordered so that everything is only
'a little wave on a vast order', rather 'Man finds his home in a point
situated beyond the image ... and this place represents the absence where
we are'. 77 As subjects we must become and this necessarily entails our
moving from the spot where we are!

Address for correspondence:

16 Claigmar Gardens
Finchley
London N32HR
England

76

S. Kierkegaard. The Concept of Dread. Trans. W. Lowrie. New York, Princeton

University Press, 1944. p. 40.
77
J. Lacan. op.cit. (Seminar X).

96