Malaise, Suffering and Symptom

Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker Instituto de Psicologia da USP

Abstract We stress the importance to separate, within the psychopathology of psychoanalisis, a theory of the discontent (Unbehagen) from a conception about the development of suffering. The metapsychology of the symptom formation (Symptombildung) have to subscribe these two exigencies. Our interest is to show the existence ot his kind of self-critics within the diagnostic reason in psychoanalysis. We claim that in psychoanalysis there is a theory of recognition, which initial source lay on the conception of narcissism and after that in the articulation between masoquism, sadism and superego. The

experience of suffering appears here as a demand of recognition, in its impasses and difficulties to be integrated to a sexual grammar (as Van Haute has demonstrate). Besides suffering we have to admit the discontent (malaise, Unbehangen) as an existential disposition,

expressed in concepts as death drive, Hilfolosigkeit and in the

lacanian concept of jouissance (considered as a counter identity experience zone). We conclude that the theory about the genesis of symptoms must be understand as a theory with articulate a social theory about recognition (narcissism) and an negative anthropology (presented in the concept of Unbehagen) Key Words: psychoanalysis, psychopathology, diagnostic

1. The Suffering as Aspiration of Recognition1

Hamlet (1599), Don Quixote (1605), Don Juan (1620), Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Faust (1808) are crucial narrative references

when one thinks about the type of subjectivity that characterized the modernity. Each one of these heroes can be defined as a sort of monomania. They are exclusive and selfishly interested in their personal undertakings, making decisions and defining themselves in a specific grammar of desire recognition, autonomy and alienation. A type of subjective division characterizes them. Faust, the wandering teacher, survives the alienation of being satisfied through a soul that does not belong to him anymore. Don Quixote goes mad because it read books of cavalry in excess and. He is divided by living in a time that is not more contemporary to himself. Robinson Cruzoe suffers
1

Dunker, C.I.L. Constitution of Psychoanalityc Clinic hystoryand structure of its Power. Karnac, London, 2010.

the tragedy of freedom, solitude and helplessness, after visiting his slaves' farm in Brazil. Hamlet hesitates before the act of vengeance demanded by the ghost of his father. He postpone his act in a long dreadful and joyful meditation, as soon as the paternal authority does not guarantee any more the legitimate sense of his action. Don Juan suffers from the particularity of the desire: the infinite and infinitesimal abyss that encloses the loving choice. Like the narrative autonomy construction they demand the specific form of recognition for which it cannot be recognized by a net of determinations. Our heroes, all of them of noble stock, present themselves undefended before the subjective division itself. The deficient cunning or talent, courage or dedication and all the classic virtues are insufficient to represent them. What shows up here is the construction of a morbid paradigm that characterizes the modern subjectivity as a kind of inventory of losses and its melancholic elaboration2. Heroes and men of his destinies, through his self-determination, who bring an operation of mourning into effect, as the antique Greek sense of pathos (passivity, submission and passion). In this sense there is a sort of general diagnosis of the modernity that understands it like a set of losses of the pre-modern value universe, interpreted as a time of security and determination, of organic connections and authentic experiences. As well as in the sadness, this lost universe is also the point of identification of the subject. Our heroes did not manage to

Matos, O. C.F. Os Arcanos do Inteiramente Outro. Brasiliense, So Paulo, 1989.

transform in fact for what they intent3. They survive only in a sort of posthumous existence, without events, as it is the case of our Brs Cubas, or deprived of essence, like the man without qualities described by Mussil. These narratives admit a moral conservative reading which enunciation might be: see what happens with that that they turn the back for the cosmic solidarity of the life, for the community of origin and for the collective sense of the conventionality of meaning. The hallucinatory madness of Dom Quixote, the erotomania of Don Juan, the obsession of Kant, the paranoia of Kafka, the depression of Faust, the narcissism of Baudelaire, the hysteria of Hamlet, Montaigne and Hegel and the megalomania of Crusoe. Here we have a set of symptoms which are in some sense regular forms of transference and different sort of desire contradictions. The easiest way to connect these perspectives is imagining that each symptom position belongs to a specific form of suffering place that could be included in a broad space of pathos. This is the easiest and also the false solution, adopted by so many psychopathology models, as I want to defend in this paper. Therapy of suffering is a matter for a grammar of recognition. Treatment of symptoms depends of new arrangements between subject, desire and jouisance. But against pathos, the malaise, the Unbehagen, there is neither treatment nor therapy, only cure. The ideological tendency of our time, in psychopathology, pushes
3

in

kind

of

necessary

inclusion

and

compulsory

Watt, I. Mitos do Individualismo Moderno, Jorge Zahar, Rio de Janeiro, 1997:233236.

disconnection. Each suffering has its symptom and all the symptoms must be excluded from the pathos. This is the new rhetorics of the psychopathology since the critics of Foucault.

2. The Pathos of Determination This short literary allusion introduces the idea that modernity could be characterized by subjectivity itself, in some anthropological way, as itself pathological. This pre-psychiatric field of the

pathological is not reducible to the sphere of moral-juridical practices or administrative-politically discourses. This seems to us to have been the biggest lesson of the dialectics between the man and the slave, present in the Phenomenology of the Spirit and brought by Lacan to the psychoanalysis as the third model of the theory of the recognition, after Freudian theory of narcissism and kleinian theory of object relation. So much in his theory of the clinical structures4, how much in his conception on the constitution of the subject5 and still in his conception of the speeches as the forms of social knot
6

or in the

theories on the sexuation7, Lacan removes the psychiatric bases of the field of the psychopathology. This movement displaced the problem of the diagnosis in terms of the intersubjective relation

Lacan, J. (1955) O Seminrio, Livro III As Psicoses. Jorge Zahar. Rio de Janeiro, 1988. 5 Lacan, J. (1957) O Seminrio, Livro V As Formaes do Inconsciente. Rio de Janeiro, 1999. 6 Lacan, J. (1992) O Seminrio, Livro XVII O Avesso da Psicanlise. Rio de Janeiro, 1992. 7 Lacan, J. (1972) O Seminrio, Livro XX - ... Mais Ainda. Jorge Zahar, Rio de Janeiro, 1982.

(transference), the relation with the language (structure of the speech), the relation with the anthropological structures (paternal function) and the incidence of ontological structures (Real, Imaginary and Symbolic). In this displacement Lacan changes from a search of a theory of recognition to a theory of the collapse and impasses of recognition. Psychoanalysis emerge as a clinical enterprise since two main self-diagnostic of modernity could be connected: (1) loss of

experience and (2) insufficient strategies of reconstruction of productive the experience of determination. Power, knowledge and desire could not be arranged neither as an organic, collective, authentic experience neither as functional, individual, systemic experience. We can read lacanian theory of four discourses as a new version of the dialectic recognition theory. If the master slave model read the narrative of narcissism, the four discourses (master, hysterical, universitary and psychoanalytical) stressed the

determinative impasses of recognition derived from other two central anthropological narratives: Oedipous and Totem and Tabu. There is, in the modernity, excess of unproductive experiences of determination. In other words, there are hypertrophy of the systems and disciplinal dispositifs
8

that fetichized the forms of life

and the grammars of intersubjective recognition. The field of the suffering could not be separated from the experience of alienation, so

Foucault, M. Nascimento da Biopoltica. Martins Fontes, So Paulo, 2008.

much in his scope of externalization (Entusserung) of the subject, how much in his scope of otherness (Entfremdung) of the wish. There is too many rationalization of the life9, of the language and of the work, which results in loss of the organic and authentic character of the experience (Erfahrung)10. There is a colonization of the world of the life (Lebenswelt) for the instrumental reason11 and for the thought of the identity12, which causes reification generalized of the conscience13. To the end, the strategies of determination and discrimination, own to the world of the technique (Gestellt)
14

, finish

producing existences unproductive (Erlebnis) of social symbolic recognition15, which brings more ambivalence16, indiscrimination and growth the perception of risk17. In this paranoid lineage of modernity Don Quixote, Hamlet and Don Juan are versions of Oedipus narrative, and later the characters of Henry James18, Kafka19, Flaubert20 are versions more adapted to Totem and Tabu myth.

Weber, M. A racionalizao da educao em treinamento (1946), in Ensaios de Sociologia. Zahar, Rio de Janeiro, 1963. 10 Benjamin, W. Walter Benjamin - Obras Escolhidas V. I. Brasiliense, So Paulo, 1994. 11 Habermas, J. Pensamento Ps-Metafsico (1988). Tempo Brasileiro, 1990. 12 Adorno, T.E. & Horkheimer, M. Dialtica do Esclarecimento (1944). Jorge Zahar, Rio de Janeiro, 1985. 13 Lukks, G. Histria a Conscincia de Classe. Tempo Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro, 1988. 14 Heidegger, M. A questo da tcnica (1953), in Ensaios e Conferncias. Vozes, Petrpolis, 2002. 15 Jameson, F. O Inconsciente Poltico a narrativa como ato socialmente simblico (1981). tica, So Paulo, 1992. 16 Bauman, Z. Modernidade e Ambivalncia (1995). Jorge Zahar, Rio de Janeiro, 1999. 17 Beck, U. A reinveno da poltica: rumo a uma teoria da modernizao reflexiva (1997), in Modernizao Reflexiva, Unesp, So Paulo, 1997. 18 Zizek, S. A Viso em Paralaxe. Boitempo, So Paulo, 2008. 19 Santner, E.L. A Alemanha de Schreber a parania a luz de Freud, Kafka, Foucault (1996). Jorge Zahar, Rio de Janeiro, 1997. 20 Kehl, M.R. Deslocamentos do Feminino. Imago, Rio de Janeiro, 2008,

3. The Pathos of Indetermination:

In his book Civilization and its Discontents

(1929), Freud

introduces another figure of the pathological: the ailment, or malaise (Unbehagen). Freud would have imagined firstly to call the text referring it to the idea of Unhappiness (Unglcklich) in the Culture (Kultur), but the difficulties pointed by Joan Riviere to translate the term Unbehagen to English unhappy, would have led him to change of title. Ailment is an expression however happy (Glcklich). It does not indicate anything transitory or chronic and treatable like a symptom, not even a moral deficit of circumstances like the suffering. Unbehagen is a condition, an ontological limit, a way of being in the world. It is connected to the various faces of the Real in lacanian terms: angst, impossibility, death drive, the inexistence of the sexual relation, jouisance, the body. As a matter of fact, this is the initial subject of the work: "the feeling of indissoluble connection, of mutual belonging (zuzamenhang) with the exterior world this world from which we cannot leave21. The difference between the suffering, which treatment teases in the progress of the relations of recognition and the symptom, which solution implicates the subjectivation and symbolization of the repressed wishes, the Unbehagen sends us to what there is incurable in the human experience.
21

Freud, S. Mal Estar na Civilizao (1929), SFOC-VXXI:66.

The Freudian solutions are quite palliative against the pathos of Unbehagen: the mighty entertainment, which make us forget our misery; the substitutive satisfactions, that reduce our misery and the inebriant substances that make us insensible to the misery22. The life as it is imposed brings us pains, disappointments and insoluble tasks. If the pains are typically a metaphor for the symptoms and the disappointments reflect our ideals, which are function of our sufferings measured; the pathos of Unbehagen is well represented by the insoluble tasks. Freud mentions three of them, to govern, to educate and to analyze. You link all they refer to the cure of the Unbehagen, in other words, the attempt of equipping what is impossible for the indeterminate nature itself of that one under which it is detained. If symptoms could be treated, and suffering could be healed, pathos remains us the antique sense of the cure (Sorge, cura sui in the foucaultian sense). Now, if Freud attributes this

indetermination to the drive of death, Lacan has another name for that that does not become complete to within the logic of the identity and, so, resists the social grammar of the recognition; it the question is the pleasure. But if theory of four discourses, and the grammar of recognition of suffering, depends on anthropological structures, malaise or Unbehagen depends on ontological structures. In the beginning of his seminar on the Ethics of the Psychoanalysis Lacan23 enumerates three ideal regarding which the psychoanalyst should be warned in his
22 23

Freud, S. Mal Estar na Civilizao (1929), SFOC-VXXI:75. Lacan, J. SVII.

practice: the ideal of the human ended love, the ideal of the authenticity and the ideal of not dependence. In other words, treacherous formations, since far from they represent the horizon of the psychoanalytic cure it composes the pathological substance of the modernity. The corruption of the identity in massive identification. The degradation of the autonomy in alienated heteronomy. The dislocation of the authenticity to the impersonality of fetishism. But this space is not secured simply as a kind of negative anthropology, like prescriptive diversion or like deflation of ideals. The criticism of the concluded love sends us to the ideological character of the identity, including the maniac melancholy loss of personality. The criticism of the authenticity sends us to the suffering of

determination, but also to his paranoids symptoms of possessing a personality. Finally the criticism of the ideals of not dependence sends us to the suffering of indetermination, and to the attempts of invention of counter-determinative experiences of squizoid type. These ideals are not symptoms, but a determinative function of symptoms. These ideals appear in a narrative of suffering, but to turn this indeterminate suffering into a proper symptom they have to be connected with some kind of discourse. Here comes the trick. The indetermination of the suffering do not match with determinative function of the symptoms. There are no sexual relation between suffering and symptom, and this no rapport defines the field of pathos. Briefly: lacanian theory can be read as a pervasive tension between anthropological structures (paternal metaphor, master-slave

dialectic of desire, theory of discourses) and ontological structures (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, non existence, semblant, sexuation theory). Should they be properly unified in a kind of

psychopathological synthesis? Could this synthesis be extracted from the borromean knots model? Is it the last theory of the symptome a symptom of the tantalization of psychopathology in the lacanian theory itself?

4. Form of Life and Symptom Determination It is true that the analysis must favor in the analisant the possibility to love and to work, of building his autonomy in the limits of his economy of jouisance and appropriating authentically his or her practice of life. Nevertheless the psychoanalytic treatment of the neuroses is only one between others so many techniques of the art of living or methods for which the men do utmost in obtaining happiness and maintaining somebody else's suffering24. These techniques are enumerated by Freud,: (1) avoiding of the situations of displeasure through the construction of a life calm and protected, (2) the conquest of the nature in whose aim knots of community are reinforced, (3) anesthetic or excited intoxication in order to create a "physical" barrier against the displeasure and to make the satisfaction easy, through a refuge in an own world, (4) substitution of the marks drives for socially recognized tasks, also called
24

sublimation, (5)

Op. cit 81.

consolation provided by the illusions, in which there stands out the paper of the religions and of the speeches and practical what lower the value of the life
25

(6) the withdrawal or introversion of the the principal

libido back to the ego, as in delirious or ascesis. But

competing method of the psychoanalytic treatment is the case number (7): the experience of love understood as circulation of its own grammar of recognition: to love to be loved; to love indifference and to love to hate. We have the finally the eight and last life technique: the esthetization of existence, in other words, that what finds pleasure in the pleasure of the perfection, inhibiting the sexual mark of the drive, favoring, but not necessarily inducing sublimation. Like last technique of life, which promises at least satisfactions substitutive, the refuge presents itself in the neurosis, refuge has already been accomplished in

that in most of the cases the youth. 26

It is seen for the Freudian enumeration that the symptom properly stated is the most specific case of the mentioned case number nine. The cases (5) console by illusions, (6) withdrawal of the libido and (7) loving experience; are equal solutions for the recognition of the ego and its narcissist transformations. We can define them as a therapy against suffering (soufrance). The cases (1) construction of a alternative reality (not equitable), (2) conquers of the nature for the work and reinforcement of knots of community and
25 26

Op. cit:84. Op. cit:84.

(4) sublimation; evolve the power of the impossibility: to govern and to educate. Here we have the discourse connection needed to transform suffering into symptom or symptom into suffering. The cases (3) intoxication and (8) esthetization can be grouped in a zone of transition, between the transformations of the narcissism and the discursive transformations of the drives. Much has been spoken on the impasses of the concept of death drive in Freud. There are in fact countless methapsychological, epistemological and ethics consequences of this concept, but the clinical crucial novelty brought by this idea is that it defines the field of the Unbehagen as dependant of the experience of indetermination. The best figure for the death drive - and let's remember that Lacan was insisting that there is only one drive: the death drive is the main figure of indetermination. Unbehagen understands the notion of

mortality as finitude indeterminate, and includes the notion of imprevisibility as a metaphor for the destiny and human condition. But on the other hand it serves as a support for the introduction of the notion of freedom in psychoanalysis. Besides the new drawing etiology introduced by the second topical, based on fusion and diffusion of drives, or sadism of the superego and masoquism of the ego, it is the key point for the introduction of a certain experiences of indetermination, as a cure experience that are productive. In other words, they are not only failures in the constitution of the experience, as a traumatic deviant experience, but true necessary experiences of indetermination. The loving experience, as well as the experience of

the sublimation, and certain cases of intoxication or aesthetization, they are still interesting because they introduce productive

experiences of indetermination. There is a psychoanalytic promise of presenting itself as a possible treatment for the loss of the experience of the subject (identity loss, melancholy, fault and resentment) from witch emerges the idea of the treatment as a kind of deconstruction and reconstruction. But there is also space in psychoanalysis to be

considered as a cure experience based on the project of creating productive experiences of indetermination. So we have to complete our diagnosis. In the modernity we do not have only excess of unproductive experiences of determination, we have also a deficit of productive experiences of indetermination. In other words, the experiences of indetermination, necessary to produce a concept of freedom, is expressed in lacanian ideas as the act. The act are not captured in the interior of systems or metaphysical what blockade his potential transformer. The decline of the authority appears insufficient to create new forms of exercise of freedom. But this is an example of a partial diagnosis of modernity in psychoanalysis (and after all not a very original diagnostic). There is also a pathos caused by the perception of the insufficiency of the experiences of indetermination 27 in producing effects of freedom (which cannot be treated with more
27

Honneth, A. Sofrimento de Indeterminao. Esfera Pblica, So Paulo, 2007.

determinative experiences). To this perception we can associated the moral of resentment28. With the institutionalization of the experience the dependence felt regarding the persistence of representation29 (including representation of oneself), in order to blockade

indetermination. The colonization of the public sphere for the private grammar of the intersubjective recognition30, the shortening of the loving narrative31, beside the ascent of the moral of the security, could be considered symptoms of a desire to produce productive experiences of indetermination - the love, the wish and the pleasure are here three bigger paradigms find more and more space of symbolic and discursive inscription. Perhaps we can use the Freudian concept of Erniedrigung originally proposed in order to describe de regular degradation of the love experience, to exemplifies the idea of a unproductive experience of determination (ordinary marriage) in comparison, but not in truly opposition, to the productive experience of indetermination (dreamed in the process of Erniedrigung).

5. Honneth and the Suffering of Indetermination For Axel Honneth, this reader of Hegel and Freud, the suffering of indetermination results from dismantle between three spheres:
28 29

Nietzsche, F.W. A Genealogia da Moral. Moraes, So Paulo, 1997, Taylor, C. As Fontes do Self (1994). Loyola, So Paulo, 1997. 30 Senett, R. O Declnio do Homem Pblico (1973). Companhia das Letras, Rio de Janeiro, 1993. 31 Giddens, A. Transformaes da Intimidade (1992). Unesp, So Paulo, 1993.

self-real-ization,

recognition

and

formation.

The

self-real-ization

depends on the experience of which other is an irreplaceable someone. The model is taken from winiccottian relationship between mother and child. But we can imagine the lacanian object a as another possible version of this non exchangeable object. This experience is generally associated to the family and to the knots of intrinsic and primary love. Experience generally presented as a kind of negative model to aspirations of freedom. Here we can grasp an important clinical difference between autonomy and independence. The aspiration of self-real-ization is equal to the negation of the primary dependence and helplessness, of which we move away to the measure in which the knots of primary socialization expand. The recognition, for this moment, is intimately connected with the contradiction between family and civil society and depends on the collectivization of the desire in the expansive realization of the "personality". We find here the ancient hegelian idea that reappears in Lacan: the real-ization of personality implicates separation of the family. Latter: the subject implicates separation from meaning. Honneth describes three internal dialectics to the space of the recognition: (1) love-friendship; (2) legal right - moral justice and (3) social solidarity social respect. The formation (Bildung) is, for this moment, the experience of the culture. It could be contrast to the existence of emptiness (resulting from the hypertrophy of the aspirations of recognition) with

the feeling of solitude (resulting from the hypertrophy of the self-realization). Honneth wants to maintain here the idea of culture as contradiction and the importance of valuing social movements in a kind of diagnose what he calls pathologies of the social one (done by Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas in the field of determination and done by Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Badiou and Zizek in the field of the indetermination). The culture should be the space of the contradiction, posit and recognized, but also the space to the form of life we could not recognize unless naming it as indetermination. Here we can locate the central contradiction in the core of

psychopathology of modernity between the aspirations of universality legally integration (hobbesian Totem and Tabu philosophy of history) against aspirations of particularly ethics of the act (rousseanian oedipal negative anthropology). Each of them correspond to the

poles of suffering and symptom mediated by the discourse. (...) pathology of a fixation in the juridical freedom; knowing, that what articulates all his lacks and intentions in the categories of not in the Sittlichkeit] will not be able to

the formal right [and

participate in the social life. 32 In fact, the best expression of the suffering of indetermination is the called culture of the insecurity or culture of the administration of risks. We can compare this way of suffering33 to the logic of a
32 33

Honneth, A. Sofrimento de Indeterminao. Esfera Pblica, So Paulo, 2007. Dunker, C.I.L. A Lgica do Condomnio ou o Sndico e seus Descontentes. In Revista Leitura Flutuante Vol. I Centro de Estudos em Semitica Psicanaltica PUC-SP. http://www.pucsp.br/cespuc/revistas/volume1/textoLeituraFlutuante_15.pdf

condominium. In other words, the strategy based on privatization of the space, resulted from the normalization of its functioning and from the growth of politics of identity based on the resignation of pleasure and runaway from unpleasure. As the culture becomes anodyne to what concerns ethics, and that ethics becomes an expression of a politics of identity. Here the suffering of indetermination appears as a symptomatic effect of what Lacan called segregation (one possible name to malaise).

6. Conclusion This sort of double diagnostic of the modernity, which we summarize here, is at the same time, condition for the appearance of the psychoanalysis and sign of its confidence in the melancholic reason. The pathological Ding, like field formed by this double and contradictory demand, shows so the necessary correlate of the narratives that present the trajectory of the subjective division that characterizes our modern heroes. Hence, the decline of the paternal authority34, the lacanian early version to diagnose modernity, could be read in two different ways: as a conservative claim, figured by neurosis, to reestablished determination of authority but also as a progressive claim, figured by neurosis as a suffering of a lack of indetermination. It is precisely at those places and with these opposite functions that appear the
34

Lacan, J. Complexos familiares na formao do indivduo (1938), in Outros Escritos, Jorge Zahar, Rio de Janeiro, 2003.

symptoms of the great clinical cases of Freud: the paralysis of Elisabeth Von R. or of Ana O. appeared when they see each other free of the cares dispensed to a father. Dora's voice loss witnesses that the father to join of impotent one still have something with the Sra K. The Rat Man can only decide to get married and to end his studies after paying off the debt bequeathed by his father. The Wolf Man had his fantasy of the paternal Wolf in intercourse with his mother. Schreber copulating to God father give rise to a new race. In other words, the symptom is ever a paternal determination, but it can demand different recognitions from the Other (since it articulate different discourses) and puts pathos of Unbegahen in different (non) relations between the truth (structured in a anthropological fiction narrative or in the impossibilities of the discourses) and the Real (structured in an ontological impossibility of The women or the sexual relation).