After a close reading of Freud’s trajectory on his theory of anxiety, we will travel into another territory and investigate Lacan’s interventions on this topic. Most noticeably in his Seminar X, which focused on anxiety and departed from Freud’s 1926 piece, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, Lacan’s understanding of this affect mobilises the register of the Real, jouissance and the objet a, central concepts in the delineation of an excessive affective vibration that I elaborate here. Lacan’s anxiety brings to light an ‘excess’, but differently to Freud, since the latter was accounting for an economic dynamic of accumulation of tension under a logic of discharge which he understood as the central mechanism of the psychic apparatus. Lacan’s ‘excess’ is marked in a reminder—or remainder—of singularity evidenced in anxiety, as I will be arguing in the following pages, and this has been eternalised in the often-cited passage from Seminar X that “the true substance of anxiety, is that which deceives not” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 76). This affirmation comes along the intellectual trajectory that marks Lacan’s move beyond what he calls the register of the Imaginary, stressing its limits and bringing anxiety, thus, as a kind of ‘proof’ of the ‘unreliability’ of the Imaginary.Footnote 1 The year in which this seminar was delivered, 1962–1963, is also particular as Lacan’s relation to the IPA was getting heated and the year came to a close with his expulsion from the international organisation in 1963 (Roudinesco, 1997). Footnote 2With this in mind, we could argue that this split allowed Lacan more space—or increased his stubbornness—to move into his own theories, beyond his initial endeavour of a ‘return to Freud’. To put it boldly, this moment of delivering Seminar X represents a turning point in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.Footnote 3 In the seminar on anxiety, Lacan’s innovation is marked by the articulations on the objet a, which continues in Seminar XI. This chapter will contemplate various pillars of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, focusing on his writing up until Seminar X and the emergence of the objet a in relation to a structural lack, or gap, in the Lacanian subject. Mapping the development of the consistency of the subject through the theory of the mirror stage and the discussion of self-consciousness during the 1950s and 1960s, I will construct an argument with an emphasis on anxiety in relation to the Real, the body and possible readings of this ‘lack’ as a positive gap—or, as I am conceptualising in this cartography, a vibration—as developed in Seminar X and later seminars. It is in relation to questions of ontology, the Real and negativity that I will be distancing myself from the theories of Freud and Lacan through an engagement with Deleuze and Guattari (expanding the Real seen in Lacan’s very late writings beyond the Symbolic and beyond the Oedipal metaphor), all the while trying to bring these traditions together in a ‘clinically viable’ concept of anxiety as vibration.

Exceeding Freud

Lacan’s work can be roughly divided in three phases, each lasting more or less a decade and corresponding to one of the registers of psychic life identified by him: First, the Imaginary, then the Symbolic and last, the Real. Over the course of his seminar teachings, conference presentations and writings, from the 1940s to the early 1980s, each of these registers is worked through, never in isolation or with ‘privilege’ over the other registers, rather, simply through a theoretical working emphasis. Why does this matter in understanding the place of ‘anxiety’ in Lacanian psychoanalytic work? For two reasons, both guiding this study. The most noticeable one is the place of the seminar on anxiety in this chronological line, closing the moment of the Imaginary and entering the years Lacan was mostly concerned with the Symbolic. The second reason is the ‘quality of anxiety’ throughout these different moments of his teachings. Early mentions of ‘angoisse’ in his seminars in the 1950s are mostly concerned with Freudian case studies, from the Wolf Man in 1952–1953 or Irma’s dream in 1955, to a considerable amount of attention paid to Little Hans and the writing on phobia and anxiety until the closing of the 1950s. Something will change in the seminar on anxiety and that is the beginning of Lacan’s thinking of anxiety in relation to desire, a theoretical venture that carried on, despite less evident in respect to anxiety, through his very last seminars in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Based on this sort of ‘timeline’, is it possible to divide Lacan’s work on the topic of anxiety in about three different instances. At first, in the work that is the very early Lacan, so prior to the Seminars, there is a mention of anxiety in the 1945 paper ‘Le Temps Logique’. Here anxiety is the ontological form of a ‘motivation to the conclusion’, following the instant of the glance and the time for comprehending as the three evidential moments of the assertion of oneself—here already anxiety appears as a ‘common’ experience, rather than necessarily pathologised, in contrast with the diagnostic trend of the period. The topic is left to the side for many years, until what we could call a ‘second moment’ of Lacan’s work on anxiety, which really focused on Freudian works, at the time of delivering Seminar II, when Lacan addresses Freud’s own anxiety in the face of women when commenting on his analysis of the dream of Irma’s injection. Here there is an early delineation of Lacan’s work on the anxiety of the analyst, a point he will explore further in Seminar X, which is Lacan’s third theory of anxiety, his most comprehensive and focused elaboration on the topic. What is missing, systematically, is a later theory of anxiety in light of his post-1963 thinking.

The Freudian base of Lacan’s anxiety seminar is the 1926 text ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’. Lacan picks up on key Freudian concepts from 1926, signal and castration anxiety, not offering equal attention to Freud’s last texts on the topic, however. What Lacan brings into Seminar X, in particular, is the fundamental tension between the subject and the Other, a relation that will reverberate with his earlier writing on the Mirror Stage and a completion of the Graph of Desire.Footnote 4 This same tension between subject and Other serves as the ground for his subsequent development of the notion of the objet a. It is the objet a that will mark the structural ‘lack’ of the subject and the Other, simultaneously. As we will see in the coming pages, it will be, subsequently, such ‘lack’ that will be reformulated in his later Borromean Clinic, or Clinic of the Real (Voruz & Wolf, 2007).Footnote 5 What is curious is that after Seminar XI, Lacan will not provide any systematic theorising of anxiety in his teachings. He only mentions it en passant once in Seminars XIII and XIV, twice in Seminars XVII and XXII and for the last time in 1977 in his Seminar XXIV, despite the drastic changes to his theories more generally (i.e. the abandonment of the centrality of the Oedipus complex and a detour from a focus on differential diagnosis, both following his move beyond structuralism) (Guéguen, 2013).Footnote 6

Preliminarily, Lacan holds onto the Freudian idea that anxiety is an affect (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], pp. 14, 18) and an ‘exceptional affect’ (Soler, 2014). For Lacan, it is in anxiety that the Real makes an ‘apparition’, since “anxiety highlights how much of the subject is not captured by language, or how much is left over after the most exhaustive attempts to encapsulate or represent the subject in words” (Gallagher, 1996, p. 5). It is owing to its relation to the Real that anxiety points at a failure of fantasy, and this is developed in detail through Seminar X, especially in relation to castration anxiety. Fantasy, that for the neurotic structure functions as a cover up for the fundamental ‘structural fault’, for ‘that bit’ that is not reflected in the mirror, fails to provide this efficient covering up in the moment of anxiety.Footnote 7 This fact alone alludes to something beyond symbolisation, something that fails and in failing is unique to each subject that is evident in anxiety. In addition, we must consider how important it is in the Lacanian orientation, and in psychoanalysis more broadly, to understand anxiety not as an ‘isolated symptom’, as the dominant discourse within the psy field would have it; rather, it is entangled in psychic experience and fundamental to the treatment.

Anxiety, in this tradition, evidences the extimate character of the psychic apparatus. Extimité is the Lacanian play on words to emphasise that “the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite” (Miller, 2008). In this sense, the oft-quoted passage “anxiety is the desire of the Other”, which Lacan elaborates in Seminar X, indicates how it is through anxiety that we can ‘dig’ into the Otherness in oneself and the self-ness in the Other. To extrapolate this further, through anxiety we can navigate from an estrangement to a possible entanglement in the I-Other/others relation—this being a possible interpretation of ‘vibration’. To arrive there, I will carve the nuances of entanglement in the subject formation proposed by Lacan and alive in clinical practice of this orientation. If anxiety points to a stranger of me as experienced by me, what is the source and extent of such stranger? Is it an abyss-within or a horizon-beyond, as the Freudian articulation from libido, through Oedipus to an Id-perception?

Lacan’s Mirrors

In ‘On Narcissism’, from 1914, Freud addresses the constitution of the ego, or what allows the self to become an object in the psychoanalytic sense. However, Freud leaves the question of the ‘birth’ of such an ego open, simply hinting at a possible ‘new psychical action’ that must take place in order to allow the ‘birth’ of the ego, without precisely pointing to what this action would exactly be. Lacan offers an answer to this open-ended question left by Freud with his theory of the Mirror Stage. His inventive response points towards the assimilation of the identification with an external image as what allows for this ‘ego’ or in general terms a ‘self’, or an I/Ich, to exist. To Lacan it was partly due to human premature birth—all babies are “trapped in […] motor impotence and nursling dependence” (Lacan, 1949 [2006], p. 76)—that children are drawn to their reflection in the mirror, a striking image of a ‘complete’ body, or coherent body in which all limbs and parts of this early ‘l’hommelette’ form one’s image. This uncanny meeting leads to the identification with a coherent image thereafter; it is, for Lacan, a moment of jubilation. In the first eighteen months of age, for Lacan, the Mirror Stage represents this inaugural encounter with an image of oneself reflected in the mirror, an image which appears, strangely, complete.

As we can trace from his writings of 1949 onwards, the Mirror presents the promise of an image of totality, elaborating psychoanalytic explanations for the dynamics through which the child gravitates towards this image. Since then a certain anticipation for a future mastering of all functions that the child by the time of their encounter with the Mirror does not yet have is present, as is a fictional tone to the identification proposed through the mirror. This ‘fiction’ of the ‘form’ (Lacan, 1949 [2006]), as Lacan calls the image, which is constitutive of the subject, comes from an ‘outside’ space. Or, the m(ego), the subject, reflects back i(a), which is the image from the Other that is constituting this same ‘moi’/’ego’. This relation is discussed throughout Seminar I, delivered in 1954. It is, therefore, via the identification with this ‘fictional’ mirror image that a perception of one’s own body comes through. This relation between the body and what Lacan will call the registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real will reverberate later on in the Lacanian theories of anxiety.

Preoccupied with the grounds for the emergence of the psychoanalytic subject, Lacan theorises the ego in the manner of a ‘return’ to Freud that contrasted with a ‘mastering’ and ‘unity’ character present in other then dominant schools of psychoanalytic thinking. The image in the mirror appears as a crucial mediator between ‘in’ and ‘out’ that troubles a reliance on a ‘reality principle’. In summary: “The function of the mirror stage thus turns out, in my view, to be a particular case of the function of imagos, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (Lacan, 1949 [2006], p. 78). Parting from such images of ‘completeness’ that the infant does not yet have, as a reference point for a foundational identification, there is an implicated understanding of the ego already relying on the ‘outside’ rather than in some ‘internal’ or individualised agency. Identification crosses the image of the body when establishing an ‘I’, in a relation that is never without conflict, a status guaranteed by the constant dissonance between these realities (internal, external; Innenwelt, Umwelt).

The ‘orthopaedic’ mirror image also reveals the strong bond between libido and the visual that is present in Lacan’s text, especially earlier texts and less so in later works, critically observed by feminist scholars such as Jacqueline Rose (1986). ‘Reality’ and the image are linked in the sense that whenever a child experiences their own subjective ‘chaos’, they will return to the ‘image’, or, they will find recourse in the Imaginary. However, this ‘unreliability’ of the Imaginary, or the mere fact that one could never ‘integrate’ or ‘be’ that image in the mirror, makes for its deceptive character. Without stretching our imagination very much, we can see how this proposition challenges the discourses of wellness, for example, since the ‘image’ is but a fictional promise to cover up psycho-soma ‘chaos’.

The Imaginary function of the Mirror is reformulated through the 1950s and 1960s, mostly by offering an emphasis not so much on the power of the image itself but on the presence of an Other, forming a triangle crossing i(a) [the Image in the mirror], m [the moi] and A, the ‘big’ Other/Autre. In the early 1950s, in Seminar I, the Symbolic will already make an appearance when Lacan makes a distinction between the Ideal-Ego and the Ego-Ideal in relation to the Mirror Stage. Other teachings from this period such as Seminar II, Seminar V and the paper ‘Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure’, from 1960, published as part of the Écrits, comment on the fact that in the specular relation there will always be the Other in the equation. Lacan thus swiftly moves beyond the impression of a somewhat ‘pure’ or ‘independent’ relation of the infant with the image in the mirror, as described in the 1949 essay, to stress the turn towards the Other. It is crucial to keep in mind that the Lacanian construct of the subject, as a critique of what was then ‘mainstream’ psychoanalytic theory, marks his efforts to always see any firm reliance on autonomy or an ‘individual’ crumble. This mark of the Symbolic will be evident in the infant’s turn towards the person accompanying them, accessing a confirmatory look from the caring adult that ‘glues’ the experience of the image on the mirror. In other words, the specular image i(a) is constituted via the big Other. The truly “jubilatory” moment in the mirror stage is when the infant turns to the adult: they seem “to be asking the one supporting [them], and here representing the big Other, to ratify the value of this image” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 32).

In sum, from these early 1950s texts, it is clear to us that the Other participates in any specular relation once this experience is not of a ‘pure’ captivation of the young person by their image. The child’s turn towards the Other seeks the recognition that that’s ‘their image’, a Symbolic confirmation (“who is that in the mirror? That is baby”, etc.). Already at this stage, Lacan posits the mirror’s relation not only to the Imaginary but also to the Symbolic. This is the site of entrance into Lacan’s distinctions between the Ego-Ideal and the Ideal-Ego, which are psychic points of reference located in the Symbolic and in the Imaginary registers respectively albeit interconnected. Ideal-Ego is a term that refers to the image in the mirror, the Imaginary point of reference of coherence and completeness that is set into place by the Ego-Ideal, the locus from which the subject feels ‘looked at’, indexing the site in the Symbolic that frames the subject. Lacan summarised this more complicated Mirror-Schema in the lecture of the 31st of March 1954:

In other words, it’s the symbolic relation which defines the position of the subject as seeing. It is speech, the symbolic relation, which determines the greater or lesser degree of perfection, of completeness, of approximation, of the imaginary. This representation allows us to draw the distinction between the Idealich and the Ichideal, between the ideal ego and the ego-ideal. The ego-ideal governs the interplay of relations on which all relations with others depend. And on this relation to others depends the more or less satisfying character of the imaginary structuration. (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 141)

The Symbolic anchoring of the Ego-Ideal is not arbitrary, or without consequence as Lacan continues:

The Ichideal, the ego-ideal, is the other as speaking, the other in so far as [he] has a symbolic relation to me [moi], which, within the terms of our dynamic manipulation, is both similar to and different from the imaginary libido. Symbolic exchange is what links human beings to each other, that is, it is speech, and it makes it possible to identify the subject. (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 142)

The Ego-Ideal is, as it will later be called, the ‘unary trait’, meaning that it is via the Ego-Ideal that one is able to recognise the other with some trait, or being able to concede that ‘this is the Other’ through the identification with this unary trait (clearly carrying the tone of universal referential in subjective formation). Lacan will develop this in more detail in Seminar IX on the theme of Identification, claiming that the stability of the Ideal-Ego is granted via the unary trait. Putting it differently, it is in this crossed temporality of registers in which Symbolic identification precedes the mirror that the subject emerges, or in very simple terms, the ‘world out there’ is already the instance of the Other when we arrive into it. It is only thanks to the Mirror image that the ‘moi’ as such emerges, almost as an ‘ego’ that we dress over our early fragmented body, the corps morcelé. The Symbolic, culture and discourse are, thus, integral to the anchor of the subject, who comes into ‘being’ therein, without many routes into ‘becoming’ outside of such order.

In short, the simple formula I/S (in which I stands for Imaginary and S for Symbolic) proposes that the image only comes to occupy the space of ‘an important image’ as such when it relies on the presence of the Symbolic, which situates this image. Registers, throughout Lacanian theory even before the ‘knots’, which mark his later teachings in the 1970s, are not separate or in blocks, rather, they constantly appeal to each other. This support in the Symbolic was Lacan’s first important revision of his theory of the Mirror Stage—a development that is important for his theories on anxiety as we will see in what follows—and allows us to explore the matters of self-consciousness and recognition via the philosophical ‘roots’ of the Lacanian Mirror.

Self-consciousness as a general philosophical debate that crossed the field of psy in its heart was at the centre of Lacanʼs reworking of Freudian texts and his own psychoanalytic contributions. With the writings on the Mirror Stage, and subsequent earlier teachings, the centrality of this theme is clear for they condensed fundamental ideas of his thoughts around the installation, development and maintenance of an ʻIʼ. Without running the risk of delineating a metapsychology that favoured adaptation, ‘normality’ or mastering, Lacan’s subject is since the beginning of his teachings marked by a ‘glitch’ to normality, and concepts such as ‘barred’, ‘alienation’, Real, object a will offer a side of impossibility, antagonism and excess to any experience of the ‘self’, both in fantasies as in symptoms (Chiesa, 2007; Van Haute, 2002).

In this sense, the Lacanian praxis elaborates a subjectivity that goes against the grain of the hegemonic psychiatric nosology. Following Freud, the lines between a ‘normal’ and a ‘pathological’ are blurred and symptoms, as well as anxiety, appear as lively and dynamic arrangements that each subject finds in order to stay alive. In treatment, mapping the function and modus operandi of such symptoms, as entangled to the body, libido and a general position in the world, is the fundamental logic of its direction. Rather than thinking of a symptom in isolation and ‘blocking’ it either by avoidance (a process which is integral to CBT techniques, for example) or chemically (with the use of pharmaceutical drugs), exploring how this symptom was formed in the historical narrative of the patient and re-orienting its dynamic to one of less suffering (without any pre-conceived standard for what that looks like) is what directs the clinic. In Lacan, the barred subject is ‘glitched’ already, for a coherent ‘I’ is but an illusion.

Consciousness and Desire

Already in Lacan’s ideas of the Mirror, there is a furthering of the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave as a somewhat stable cycle into a conflict of recognition internal to subjects (yet not restricted to an individual), divided between the ʻreal meʼ, or my physical perception that is fragmented and incoherent, and ʻthat me in the mirrorʼ, which is really an image of the body of the child, an image of this body in its entirety, with a coherent contour. In simple terms, that reflection on the mirror functions as an ʻideal-Iʼ acting as a point of reference and generates an ongoing impasse between ʻrealityʼ and an anchoring ʻwholeness or ‘coherenceʼ (Lacan, 1949 [2006]). Such coherence will always be deceiving despite being necessary, for what we see in the mirror is an image mediated by the ʻexternal worldʼ, by the Symbolic, conferring an essential alienation to subjective experience and removing any possibility of a ‘pure’ captivation of the subject by the image ‘alone’. Hegelian philosophy, through Kojève, influenced Lacan’s distrust in the ego as theorised by his contemporaries, mostly Anna Freud, whose work on the ego’s defences he is very critical of, since for Lacan the ego should not be seen as “centred on the perception-consciousness system or an organised by the ‘reality principle’” (Lacan, 1949 [2006], p. 80). Rather, he argues, we must “take as our point of departure the function of misrecognition that characterises the ego” (Lacan, 1949 [2006], p. 80). An ‘impossibility’ of sorts in the process of identification will mark the Lacanian subject from then onwards, becoming more evident in his later discussions of the Real. Such ‘impossibility’, as I am carving out in this book, is the very edge of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ in Lacan.

Crossing ‘perception’ and ‘consciousness’, desire is, as various exchanges during his first Seminar show, the fundamental term Lacan takes from philosophy into his psychoanalytic work. In Seminar I, Lacan goes through what he considers to be “the fundamental Hegelian theme—man’s desire is the desire of the other” (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 146), this being “exactly what is made plain in the model by the plane mirror” (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 146). In this Seminar Lacan stresses the relation of ‘desire’ and the ‘other’ in the crucial ‘moment de virage’, or the ‘turning point’ in ‘development’ (and he uses this word here) that is the mirror stage “in which the individual makes a triumphant exercise of his own image in the mirror, of himself” (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 146), in which “what occurs here for the first time, is the anticipated seizure of mastery” (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 146). This moment is also the first time, he explains when debating with an attendee of his seminar, that one’s libido is unstuck, or we could understand that libidinal investments whilst still being narcissistic are detached from the body itself, redirected to the image in the mirror and yet crossing or traversing the ‘other’, or the Symbolic, and thus producing a delay that evidences a ‘gap of desire’. Lacan explicates:

The subject originally locates and recognises desire through the intermediary, not only of his own image, but of the body of his fellow being. It’s exactly at that moment that the human being’s consciousness, in the form of consciousness of self, distinguishes itself. It is in so far as he recognises his desire in the body of the other that the exchange takes place. It is in so far as his desire has gone over to the other side that he assimilates himself to the body of the other and recognises himself as body. (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 147)

This primordially ‘intersubjective’ approach to desire, consciousness, perception, relation to one’s body and one’s image is, as Lacan explains, already present in this version of the Mirror Stage of the 1950s. It is interesting that Lacan spells out the relation between the perception/experience of a fragmented body and a ‘fragmented’ or not yet ‘matured’ desire in this pre-Mirror Stage moment of life, explaining that “The body as fragmented desire seeking itself out, and the body as ideal self, are projected on the side of the subject as fragmented body, while it sees the other as perfect body” (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 148). Quite confusingly, this very early ‘fragmented body’ is not ‘glued’ to the subject, or, it is not ‘from the place of the fragmented body’ or as an ‘I-as-fragmented’ that the subject engages with the other and their image. Rather, “for the subject, a fragmented body is an image essentially dismemberable from its body” (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 148). What I read from these passages is precisely that subject formation, or the establishment of self-consciousness, in Lacan, is bound to a bodily experience. That is because desire (or a ‘singular’ mark of being) is ‘matured’ through the dialectic engagement of the ideal mastery of the body—or of the coherent contour of the body on the mirror—and the body of an other. In this sense, a relation to the world is already ‘alienated’ from this multiple, fragmented body; channelled through an image captured through its place in culture (an important detail to hold on to, as this fragmented body returns as the central theme of Lacan’s later works, after the abandonment of the Oedipal metaphor). Alienation, identification and a certain ‘dividualisation’ are thus structural to the Lacanian subject, yet, this same theory makes evident the very fictional quality of such identifications, alienations and dividualised subjectivities assumed by psychoanalysis.

In the following sessions, when exploring the ‘see-saw’ of desire, Lacan will bring into his focus ‘identification’, making it clear that the establishment of desire is not a simple ‘stage’ that one goes through once, crossing through the other and the mirror, rather, it is through a series of identifications, a series of encounters, a series of moments of being in the world that desire in its singularity will emerge. Identification, however, is not without a ‘problem’, since this fundamentally alienated desire should only be ‘resolved’ with the destruction of the other, as Hegelian dialectics would indicate for Lacan:

Before desire learns to recognise itself—let us now say the word—through the symbol, it is seen solely in the other. At first, before language, desire exists solely in the single plane of the imaginary relation of the specular stage, projected, alienated in the other. The tension it provokes is then deprived of an outcome. That is to say that it has no other outcome—Hegel teaches us this—than the destruction of the other. The subject’s desire can only be confirmed in this relation through a competition, through an absolute rivalry with the other, in view of the object towards which it is directed. And each time we get close, in a given subject, to this primitive alienation, the most radical aggression arises—the desire for the disappearance of the other in so far as he supports the subject’s desire. (Lacan, 1953–1954 [1991], p. 170)

This ‘destruction of the other’ and the question of aggressiveness and this dialectic struggle obviously generate a political matter in Lacan’s description of the subject and the possibilities of socialisation. Lacan spells it out simply as “an impossibility of all human coexistence”, which I take as a poignant political shortcoming in Lacanianism (or, less generously, a blatant sign of his modern patriarchal and colonial epistemological roots). Yet, he also points that it is via the Symbolic order, or of language, that living together is made possible. In this sense, we are all enigmas to each other that get by through speaking—a relation that carries its limits but that has profound political and clinical implications when considering the relation between the analyst and analysand, the limits of speech and the fitness of diagnosis to the masses under the same names. In Lacanian practice, the enigma of the other and the flimsiness of identification are what prevent the analyst from interpretations (of the transference, of the material brought into the sessions, as done in other clinical orientations) that would be akin to a ‘colonisation’ of the unconscious, or an act of clinical violence.

The quest for recognition of one’s desire in the other is, therefore, the setting stone of the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach and his clinic of a desire that is by essence intersubjective. That means that the subject’s desire comes into being through this relation with an other. The Lacanian clinic that aims at unveiling one’s desire is fundamentally a clinical approach that situates the subject psychosocially. The Lacanian clinic, it can be argued, is psychosocial par excellence once it engages with the fact of the alienation of the I on the image (misrecognition) and in this negativity of desire as a mode of being (Safatle, 2006), and always puts in check the subject and their symptoms as part of a shared matrix rather than an isolated, individual phenomenon. There is a certain level of entanglement in the Lacanian subject, yet, it leaves something behind.

Recognition—or misrecognition—of oneself in the image or in the other and the appeal to the Symbolic do not come, however, smoothly or totally. There is always something else involved and it is this that is bound up with the concept of the Real. Anchoring the non-adaptive character of the negativity of desire, the Real already appears in the early writings on the Mirror Stage as embodied in the prematurity of the human child and an early lack of coordination. However, at first, we have ‘that’ which is there at the beginning—but only mythically—that can be partially subsumed to an image, but not entirely, or this ‘me’ which does not fit into the image.

Following the logic set out by Lacan with his writings on the Mirror Stage, once identified with the image, the infant starts to gesticulate, to experiment with the space surrounding them, reaffirming that “that is their image” at the same time that “the image is not themselves”, opening up, therefore, this other space, a space outside the mirror. Whilst the specular image establishes an anchoring point of the subject, it also establishes a space for a ‘real’ body, its frontiers with the world, a contour. The body, therefore, is essential to identification, from which emerge a complicated relation to the image and, as Lacan adds in early seminars, the Symbolic barring of the subject. From the outset of Lacan’s teachings, simply by following the logic delineated in the theory of the Mirror Stage, the body functions as a point of departure to identification at the same time that it never ‘fits’ into any ‘frame’ completely. From the body and the experience of being a body or having a body, Lacan will follow Freud in exploring particular bodily parts that in their very ‘not-fitting’ establish the drives, or as Lacan will call it at the time of Seminar X, the different forms of object a. We could say, thus, that this earlier period of Lacan’s teachings, during the 1950s, addresses the bodily presence of the subject as an inside out of the mirror from various perspectives. Towards the end of this decade, and moving into the 1960s, this ‘in-out’ excess, or that of ‘me’ which cannot fit the cut of the frame of the mirror that appears in the image, becomes more clearly articulated as not only a matter of the Imaginary (or the ‘image in the mirror’). Rather, the ‘excess’ and as its counterpart, ‘lack’, both on the side of the subject and on the side of the Other, are unravelled in relation to the Symbolic register.

The effect of the Symbolic or, in Lacanian parlance, the effects of the Symbolic ‘cut’ upon the subject that results precisely in emerging as subject are explored in the 1950s and early 1960s across a variety of teachings, crossing themes that range from identification to transference. In order to offer some clarity on Lacan’s articulations in regard to the Real in relation to the Symbolic at this moment of his work, a delineation of his elaboration on ‘desire’—which is perhaps the most fundamental concept of Lacanian Psychoanalysis—is of particular relevance. It is in the limits of his theory of desire as harnessed to the desire of the Other and what grounds are then left for the Real that our thinking of anxiety as vibration is articulated.

In Seminar VII, delivered between 1959–1960 on the theme of Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the Real appears, with clarity, as a ‘problem of language’. By this is meant that the Real marks what is impossible within language or symbolisation. Lacan delves into the matter of ‘impossibility’ as a legitimate path to engaging with reality and it is in this respect that the Real as an ‘impossibility’ is articulated. This seminar, which deals with the relations between action and desire, offers an elaboration of the concept of ‘la chose’, das Ding or ‘the thing’, an enigmatic ‘excess’ that will later form the base of his concept of object a as the object cause of desire—crucial contributions of his work on Anxiety. Lacan speaks of a ‘field of das Ding’ as the locus of an ungraspable enigma that organises psychic life.

In the following year, when teaching about Transference in his Seminar VIII, Lacan returns to the Mirror Stage and the relation between anxiety and desire. Dissecting his formula of fantasy [$ <> a] in relation to Freud’s ‘Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety’ text, Lacan argues that “anxiety is produced when the cathexis of little a is transferred to $” (Lacan, 1960–1961 [2015], p. 361). By this he means that there is something in fantasy that orients the barred S, or the subject, in relation to their desire and this point of apprehension of oneself as desiring is homologous to i(a), the Ideal-Ego, or the Imaginary ‘image on the mirror’. Lacan explains that:

anxiety as a signal is produced somewhere, in a place that can be occupied by i(a)—the ego insofar as it is the image of the other, the ego insofar as it is, fundamentally, the function of misrecognition. It occupies this place not inasmuch as this image occupies it but qua place—in other words, inasmuch as this image can, on occasion, be dissolved there. (Lacan, 1960–1961 [2015], p. 363)

The possibility of this image in the mirror, or the fantasy, or the Imaginary (which are similar to one another, as he points out) being ‘dissolved’, or ‘to fail’, brings out anxiety. It is not “the absence of the image that provokes anxiety” (Lacan, 1960–1961 [2015], p. 363), rather it is the encounter with this failure of the fantasy that brings out anxiety. In fact, in Seminar X Lacan will posit that “the structure of anxiety is the structure of the fantasy” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 3). This emergence of anxiety, however, is only possible through a relation to desire, so Lacan’s invocation of the order of the fantasy is, in this seminar, simply a way into this relation to one’s desire and the same ‘way into’ can be articulated in regard to the mirror image and the question of the ‘object of desire’.

Anxiety does not emerge as facing the image per se, rather, in facing the image as ‘a’; or, it is this charge of ‘a’ present in the specular image and in the fantasy that allow for their function in relation to the emergence of anxiety. He writes: “Anxiety is the radical mode by which a relationship to desire is maintained” (Lacan, 1960–1961 [2015], p. 365). Already in this seminar (VIII) we can sense an anticipation to what Lacan will develop in detail in Seminar X, which is the relation between anxiety and desire through the various forms of the object a, granting anxiety the status of the affect that does not ‘lie’.

Sustaining one’s relation to desire therefore is the function of anxiety. More is elaborated on desire, its emergence and the emergence of the subject, around the same time Lacan was delivering Seminar VIII, in the influential text ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’, from 1960 and published as part of Écrits. In this work, the subject is situated in relation to the establishment of needs, demands and desire, forming an interesting base to what will ‘happen’ to desire at the moment of Seminar X, a few years later. A concise summary of this article could be as follows: In our attempts to ‘satisfy our desire’, this desire is transposed by demands, important terms in this analysis of subjectivity. A physical need such as hunger or thirst can be satisfied. However, our ʻsubjective needsʼ when transferred to the Other, in the belief this Other could satisfy our desire, take the shape of what Lacan calls a ʻdemandʼ. Demands are, in simple terms, a manifestation of desire limited by language, the in-between point, or a gap, in the relation of need and desire (Lacan, 1960 [2006]). The interlinking of desire and the Other demonstrates how the split of the subject also leaves the subject deprived of autonomy, being impossible to gain any sense of selfhood outside of the relationship with culture—‘culture’, or the Symbolic, is understood by Lacan in a particular and not unproblematic way that is limited to a dialectical relation, where a ‘rest’ (the Real) can only be accounted as an impossible that is the kernel of symptoms.

At the same time, the body is still present in these elucubrations, being then at the heart of the psychoanalytic project. As Lacan puts it, “psychoanalysis concerns the reality [réel] of the body and of its imaginary mental schema” (Lacan, 1960 [2006], p. 680). To illustrate the complex dynamic of subjectivation through desire and the Other, Lacan formulated the Graph of Desire, an evolution of mathemes worked across a series of different seminars, noticeably Seminar V and given emphasis in this text and in Seminar X. The basic element of the graph is the ʻpoint de capitonʼ, a subjective ʻpoint of anchoringʼ representing the autonomy of the signified and signifier, furthering Saussureʼs linguistic model of there not being a universal grounding referent for meaning, rather just a structure of signs in relation to one another.Footnote 8

The complete Graph of Desire explores the duality of attempting to gain recognition from the Other in the enterprise of becoming the object of desire of the Other, giving evidence to the objet a, the ʻpetit autreʼ in the Imaginary realm. In trying to identify the desire of the Other, the subject identifies with this “what the Other wants from me”, a fantasy, attaching the desire of the Other to its own subjective experience (Lacan, 1960 [2006]). From the Graph of Desire, another interesting element of Lacanian thought arises: anxiety. The subjective opacity granted by the prominence of the Other over oneʼs desire leaves a gap, once there is “no universal satisfaction” (Lacan, 1960 [2006], p. 689). This uncertainty, this impossibility, is anxiety. In desire, which opens space for a fantasy of omnipotence of the Other (Lacan, 1960 [2006]), we become subjected to the rules of the Other. Here again, the subject could only gain access to something that could be perhaps called ‘oneself’ or even ‘singularity’ not within language, so not within this rule of the Other, but through the repetition of the drive, the force that makes it repeat, or desire, as caused by object a and opened in something of the order of the rims of the body. These ‘rims’ have a significant importance when thinking of anxiety beyond the limits of the Oedipus complex. Accordingly, these ‘openings’ of the body, where in and out get mixed-up or confused, are the loci of the drive; and it is from the logic of the drive, rather than of desire, that Lacan’s later teachings get closer to an ‘anti-oedipal’ model of the unconscious (Schuster, 2016).

Phallic Troubles

To get to this point, or in order to lay out the ground for a non-Oedipal critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is important that some basic elements of his ideas of the ‘phallus’, ‘lack’ and ‘sexual difference’ are clarified. Once these problematic and widely criticised elements of Lacan’s theory appear with evidence in his work on anxiety as well. We can start from the premise, as seen above, that negotiating oneʼs ʻreality’ with the idealised version of oneself through discourse leaves behind an excess, an ʻun-symbolisableʼ fragment, the Real (as described in his early teachings and in relation to the Imaginary). Subjects will be left in a constant “discordance with [their] own reality” (Lacan, 1949, p. 2) in the same manner that the positioning of oneself in language will leave out a frustrating lack (again, the Real comes in his mid-life teachings as a ‘gap’ in the Symbolic system). Desire will carry in its core an absence, a lack. The unconscious, therefore for Lacan, is marked by lack, one we will try to fulfil throughout life with no necessary guarantee of success. The understanding that desire will never be satiated, that oneʼs wish for wholeness will always be frustrated, is the meaning Lacan attached to the phallus (Lacan, 1958). As a ʻveiled signifierʼ, the phallus marks the divide inherent to subjectivity. It is that which guarantees the Imaginary with Symbolic ʻsupportʼ, with a promise in language. Symbolising, thus, brings reassurance. This use of the word ʻphallusʼ and further developments of theories of femininity leave space for pertinent feminist critiques (Braidotti, 1994).

The Mirror Stage can be utilised as a fruitful background for thinking of the split subject, one of Lacanʼs greatest contributions to the thinking of subjectivity. Whilst the divide of the subject already refutes any notion of unity, Lacan proposes femininity and masculinity ʻlack differentlyʼ. The ʻLaw of the Fatherʼ, which guarantees prominence to the phallus in culture, can be understood as Lacanʼs denunciation of patriarchy (Mitchell, 1982; Rose, 1986). When theorising on sexual difference—in Encore Lacan, curiously, does not cite any women analyst—and positing that ʻWoman does not existʼ, Lacan denounces biological roles as determinant, yet, he backs this idea by stipulating different ʻkindsʼ of jouissance experienced by ‘men’ and ‘women’ (in Seminar XX—Lacan, 1972–1973). Phallic jouissance is the frustrating enjoyment in believing we have satiated our desire, a promise held in the Other; whilst the ʻOther jouissanceʼ involves carrying this ʻpromiseʼ of satisfaction in oneself. The Lacanian views of sexual difference and the phallus will then move from a strict guarantor of lack, which flirts with biologism in the 1958 text ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, which was published in Écrits, to his first views of ‘different’ kinds of jouissance in Seminar X on Anxiety (when he still speaks of the breast, breastfeeding and the detumescence of the phallus/penis) until the clear formulation of sexual difference in Seminar XX, where a ‘masculine’ and a ‘feminine’ position are the (only, for him) two options of a relation to the phallic Law that mark two different subject positions. This Law comes in as a mediator of the ‘excessive’ jouissance, in which ‘everyone lacks’, but just ‘enjoy’ differently. ‘Lack’ is throughout Lacan’s teachings an anchor of subject formation, one that presents in ‘negativity’ its antidote beyond total domination. The deep interconnection of these themes in Lacanian teachings makes it very difficult for some theorists and psychoanalysts to try and conceive of a subjectivity that is not dependent upon Oedipal sexual difference (and its binary arrangement) or on ‘lack’. Addressing the political and onto-epistemic problems of this far from neutral arrangement that relies on the binary of sexual difference seems to cause a crisis of imagination among orthodox followers of Lacanian texts. Owing to this, tensions between feminist theory and psychoanalysis seem to be as alive as ever, with a current of Lacanian analysts equating, for example, transgender living to psychosis precisely on the grounds of such ‘lack’ being foreclosed.

Contemporary elaborations around queerness and trans-identities in psychoanalytic settings have argued that transgender subjectivity sits on the side of psychosis (Millot, 1990; Morel, 2000). That would be because it is a case of foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and a push-to-the-woman (inspired by the reading of Schreber’s case) characteristic of the inability to live with the inconsistency of sexuality, transitioning thus as a way to name oneself and suture this gap.Footnote 9 Argentinean analyst Patricia Gherovici (2017), however, has led the way in stating what, to me at least, is the obvious reality of the Lacanian psychoanalytic encounter: trans people, like all people, can have any unconscious structure and can be hysterics just as well. Whilst Gherovici’s (2017) remarks are well grounded in case-studies and theory and her contributions are generous and therapeutically sound, there is still some insistence on the equation of sexual difference (and differential diagnoses) as fundamental to the clinical encounter and to subjective formation. What Gherovici does is very important: as a clinician and keen theorist of Lacan’s teachings, she finds a ground within Lacanian theory to demonstrate how queerness can be a creative solution of a capacity to live without the hold of the phallus. In other words, rather than a symptomatic escape, it is a sinthôme, like James Joyce’s sinthôme—described in Lacan’s seminar XXIII, from 1975–1976.Footnote 10 By acknowledging a possibility that is not ‘just’ psychosis to whatever mode of existing that does not correspond to the phallic Law, Gherovici paves the way for a feminist conceptualisation of all forms of rupture with ‘the phallus’ as creative transformation within the sinthôme.Footnote 11 Accordingly, and informing my theory of anxiety as vibration, excess, chaos or too-muchness (such as anxiety) do not necessarily need to be ‘castrated’ in order to be soothed—as Gherovici (2018) herself proposed elsewhere—nor ‘sublimated’, rather, excess can be mobilised into a sinthôme, bypassing the Law-of-the-Father into a ‘becoming’. This possibility, or, what is done to ‘excess’ is central to Lacan’s seminar on anxiety.

Seminar X: L’Angoisse

When Lacan started his Seminar on Anxiety (Seminar X, in 1962–1963) the first lectures brought up again the Mirror Stage and the Graph of Desire, demonstrating how the Other is inscribed in the specular relation. To Lacan, anxiety was an affect separating desire and jouissance (Harari, 2001) in which the fear of fragmentation is paramount. Reworking Freudʼs earlier ideas of an anxiety which anticipates a threat to the ego, Lacan points anxiety towards the Imaginary. The virtual specular image and its prestigious state attract the subject. The subject invests more and more in their own body—believed to be the originator of the specular image—with the aid of objects assuming the role of the object of desire; being, consequently, fooled (Lacan, 1962–1963). This dynamic precisely was named ‘anxiety’ at the lecture of November 28, 1962. The ‘strange’ object that Lacan discovers, object a, is the focus of several of the lessons of the seminar on anxiety, once “anxiety is not incited by the lack of the object but rather by the lack of the lack, i.e. the emergence of an object in the place of lack” (Salecl, 2004, p. 32), standing right in between desire and jouissance. Once desire is linked to frustration and the lack of the object of satisfaction, jouissance is the somewhat ‘painful’—or ‘charged’—approach to this satisfaction; enjoyment, or the Lacanian version of Freud’s libido. The ʻlack of lackʼ, the knowledge something is there which could satisfy our desire and yet, it does not, appearing in the place where lack should be, is in this complicated logic, the backbone of anxiety. The new argument brought forward by Lacan in this seminar is the fact that there will always be a portion of the libido that does not go through the Mirror image (elaborated in terms of the minus phi, castration and object a). The image in this seminar is defined by the exclusion of minus phi and object a, leaving something aside. If the ‘lack lacks’, it then produces the affect of anxiety. An auto-erotic jouissance, something that is profoundly invested in the body makes its way in anxiety; in other words, in anxiety, the Symbolic is invaded by the Real and desire appears as extracted, indexed to the experience that we are only just bodies (hence the bodily harnessing and mobilisation of anxiety, both in a chronic form and in attacks).

Anxiety is an “intermediary term between jouissance and desire in so far as desire is constituted and founded upon the anxiety phase, once anxiety has been got through” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 175), writes Lacan in an often-quoted passage from Seminar X. What is very important in this seminar is the idea of ‘going through’ anxiety. In French, the original term used is ‘franchir’, thus ‘franchir l’angoisse’ connotes a stepping through it as if stepping over a threshold, crossing it. Lacan is referring to castration anxiety, saying that only when one crosses through one’s castration anxiety can desire be encountered. This idea presents an interesting paradox, bringing up a cyclical impossibility of our relation both to anxiety and desire. We could parallel here an idea from Lacan’s Seminar VII, of ‘ceder’, or giving up of one’s desire; he states that “from an analytical point of view, the only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one’s desire” (Lacan, 1959–1960 [1997], p. 319). In this sense, whenever one goes in the direction of one’s desire one feels anxious—as anxiety is a way into desire, as per Seminar VIII—conversely, when one ‘gives up’ on desire there comes guilt. This is an interesting nuance that is added to the ‘truth’ found in anxiety in Seminar X. In this sense, there is no ‘cure’ for anxiety other than desire. The paradox is that in order to access desire you face anxiety, and as a ‘cure’ to anxiety, there is only desire. There is a cycle here and perhaps the whole notion of ‘franchir l’angoisse’ or crossing through one’s anxiety that is so central to Lacan’s presentation in this seminar implicates a learning to balance oneself within this cycle, or to dance in this rhythm established by anxiety and desire that, as we cannot lose sight of, emerges in the encounter with the Real via the sight of the object a.

There is something about anxiety, which is an affect, that is revealing of the structure of the subject, in Lacan’s words: “What is anxiety? We’ve ruled out the idea that it might be an emotion. To introduce it, I will say that it’s an affect” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 14). He continues: “And this is even the reason why it has a close structural relationship to what a subject is. On the other hand, what I said about affect is that it isn’t repressed. Freud says it just as I do. It’s unfastened, it drifts about. It can be found displaced, maddened, inverted, or metabolised. But it isn’t repressed. What are repressed are the signifiers that moor it” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 14). Anxiety is, therefore, “a question of desire” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 15). It is owing to such a privileged presence in psychic life that Lacan dedicates a whole year of his teachings to anxiety. A guiding thread into reading this Seminar will be formulated in what follows. It is by carefully looking into Lacan’s only major work on the topic of anxiety in detail that an important impasse (or even contradiction in his work) can be fleshed out, namely, how the object of anxiety—object a—is not bound to the field of the Other and to the Symbolic, potentially escaping an Oedipal binary of sexual difference frame for the subject.

The Seminar begins with Lacan recuperating Freud’s account of anxiety, which is mainly castration anxiety according to his reading of ‘Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety’, by means of a theoretical reconstruction. Lacan approached castration anxiety from the point of the dominance of the Symbolic order over the Imaginary, when the latter is then bound to the Symbolic rule. He comments in the first chapters that his contribution in this seminar will be to formulate an anxiety that is ‘beyond’ castration anxiety. By that he means that everything of the order of the signifier (with a chapter title announcing this precisely: Anxiety in the Net of Signifiers) is a castration anxiety. A critical idea that marks Lacan’s development of anxiety at the moment of Seminars X and XI is that anxiety is tied with the desire of the Other. Therefore, to address this point, Lacan makes use of the Graph of desire, proposing “a formula indicating the essential relationship between anxiety and the desire of the Other” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 5), stressing that what he added in the then recent work was precisely the matter of the ‘desire of the Other’. It is through the elaboration of the desire of the Other that Lacan is able to advance on Freud’s theories of castration anxiety. The question ‘Che vuoi?’ at the top of the Graph is, thus, an anguishing question. Lacan says “‘Che vuoi?’ is not just ‘what does the Other want with me?’, it’s ‘what does [He] want concerning the place of the ego?’” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 6). In other words, this question is linked to the specular image and to narcissistic capture. In the Graph of Desire, “the distance between [the two levels] renders the relationship to desire at once homologous with and distinct from narcissistic identification” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 6). Anxiety, as he points out, plays a role in “the dialectic that knots these two levels [of the Graph] so tightly together” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 6).

Lacan also recuperates ideas from Seminars VIII and IX in relation to the object and the desire of the Other, elucidating an anxiety that is beyond castration anxiety, which is the anxiety facing the desire of the Other, when one is the object for the Other. An anxiety, thus, knitted within the Symbolic realm. Lacan’s dissection of the Symbolic, Desire of the Other and Anxiety is rather extensive as he addresses philosophical texts (Hegel and Kierkegaard, especially) and composes multiple formulas to trace what this relation is in the moment of anxiety. This is Lacan’s ‘structural’ approach, where he is looking for the function of the signifier in anxiety in order to trace a map towards the point of anxiety that is beyond the signifier, or how do we cope with the ‘rest’ in the process of subjectivation.

The ‘rest’ is very important to the argument that will follow in regard to anxiety and the Real, an articulation that will carry on in the later 1970s with Lacan’s last teachings. The rest raises a question of what is left from our jouissance when we enter the Other and the field of the signifier. At this point, in Seminar X, he brings us the concept of the ‘unary trait’—which stands in very simple words for the fact that there’s no subject without a signifier preceding it. In Lacan’s words: “There’s no conceivable advent of a subject as such except on the basis of the prior introduction of a signifier, and the most straightforward of signifiers, known as the unary trait” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 21). This ‘dominance’ of the Symbolic is very clear at this point. “The unary trait precedes the subject” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 21) and brings with it a singularity, which he proposes as the “singularity of the trait, this is what we cause to enter the real, whether the real likes or not” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 21). This unary trait marks the subject in the sense that it mediates the speaking subject’s access to the Real whilst it is, itself, extracted from the field of the Other, which, in its turn, precedes the subject. This articulation reads slightly confusingly, but one simple manner to connect it with anxiety is the following: once the subject is marked with the unary trait, drawn from the field of the Other, a relation to the Other is instigated that moves the subject towards an encounter with the Other’s desire. Clearly, Lacan leaves very little space for real social emancipation, change or rupture, once the subject seems to be caught by a dominant Symbolic. In other words, there is ‘being’, but virtually no ‘becoming’.

By means of the unary trait, the subject is “inscribed as a quotient” of (i.e. the result of mathematical operation of division by) the Other. In Lacan’s words, “first off, you find A, the originative Other as locus of the signifier, and S, the subject as yet inexistent, who has to situate himself as determined by the signifier” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 26). What follows is a move into the Imaginary in relation to anxiety, which is explored by Lacan via Freud’s work on narcissism and the Mirror Stage, and it is in this relation that Lacan points to the ‘object of anxiety’. Here the concept of the phallus is utilised in order to approach this ‘special’ object—‘special’ because Freud had postulated that anxiety had no object and Lacan will ‘discover’ or reveal the object of anxiety. The phallus, according to his logic, not having an image in the mirror, which is akin to the Imaginary definition of castration, leaves a gap, a void, and it in the space of this lack that something else can appear, in Lacan’s words: “the disruption wherein anxiety is evinced arises when this void is totally filled in” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 65). The phallus is auto-erotically invested, giving rise to a fracture in the specular image, this fracture in the specular image is the ‘support’ of symbolic castration. This ‘something else’ that can appear in this space is precisely the object of anxiety. The limits to the specular investment are articulated not only through what is left or what remains—Lacan is clear that “not all of the libidinal investment passes by way of the specular image. There’s a remainder” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 38)—but also through what is just ‘not there’. The remainder is the place of the phallus, which is “an operative reserve” but is “not represented at the level of the imaginary” and is “cut out of the specular image” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 38). This cut can establish two different pieces, first a piece which can have a specular image, which is the minus phi and, second, a piece that doesn’t have a specular image which is the object a.

Lacan underlines the difficulty of defining object a, so perhaps the easier manner to grasp it, at least within this seminar is by considering that “whenever Freud speaks of the object of anxiety, think of him as speaking of the object a” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 40). To map the relation between the phallus, minus phi and the object a, Lacan brings back the mirror stage, positing, in this way that castration anxiety is Imaginary in the sense that “in everything that concerns taking one’s bearings in the imaginary, the phallus will henceforth step in, in the form of a lack” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], pp. 39–40). Pointing at the Imaginary, or the image of the body in the mirror, Lacan describes the phallus as essentially ‘cut out’ of the image, which is why in this seminar the phallus is still considered one of the forms of the object a.

Minus-phi, in its turn, denotes the place of such a missing or lacking imaginary phallus. The phallus “can’t be grasped in the imaginary”, rather it is an absence that brings with it the possibility of presence (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 45). Lacan links it strongly to the penis in this seminar with all the references to the body, detumescence and copulation, opening, of course, space for a feminist critique of his view of the phallic function and the predominance of the visual in the Imaginary (and proof that the use of the word phallus is not at all arbitrary but intentional in his work). The phallus as this ungraspable part of the body schema in the Imaginary means, for Lacan, the portion of auto-erotic enjoyment that the subject has not parted with under the castration threat. If minus-phi holds out the possibility of the missing something becoming present in the specular image, the object a is a remainder that cannot be brought into the specular field. A relationship is established between this place of lack and the ‘libidinal reserve’, which could not be incorporated into the specular image and remains profoundly invested at the level of one’s body. Lacan calls it primary narcissism, autoeroticism and “an autistic jouissance”.

A proximity of the object is the core of Lacan’s view on anxiety at this stage of his work. Anxiety, as he stresses time and time again in this seminar, is not without object, neither a signal of lack, but rather it is when the support that this very lack or gap provides to the subject fails that anxiety emerges. Lacan speaks of the baby’s relation to the breast, this early encounter with the field of the Other and with the object of anxiety, stressing that is not an anticipation for the breast that produces anxiety, but the anticipation of its going away. He says: “Don’t you know that it’s not longing for the maternal breast that provokes anxiety, but its imminence? What provokes anxiety is everything that announces to us, that lets us glimpse, that we’re going to be taken back onto the lap” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 53). This early encounter is anxiety-provoking once it disrupts the delineation of desire that is then orienting the subject:

The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship upon which he’s established himself, of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while, and especially when she’s wiping his backside. (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014, pp. 52–3)

The mother being there which is bound to her not being there is what opens space for this anxiety, as he points out. In general terms, anxiety is then not linked to a ‘loss’ but with a ‘presence’. In Lacan’s words, “anxiety isn’t about the loss of the object, but its presence” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 53). In this sense, and referring back to his work on the seminars on Transference and Fantasy, it is the meeting of a fantasy over the mirror that allows for an object to appear in this space of a void, and when this happens, anxiety emerges. This is what is meant by the often-quoted definition of anxiety being ‘the lack of the lack’, or, instead of this void, the object pops up. Lacan claims to have discovered such an object, which was only possible after he revised Freud’s work in light of his own return to Freud and theoretical advances.

When approaching this object in order to delineate anxiety, Lacan goes through the question of the drive. At the point of Seminar X, the relation between drive and body is on the basis of the action of the signifier over the body. Lacan is also critical of the psychological and psychoanalytic methods to research and theorise anxiety that take as a given that the body is a unity—and here we sense again a strong presence of his earlier critique of phenomenology too. His body is one of excesses. The place of the void and a ‘residue’ will bring us back to his earlier texts on the Mirror Stage when asking how does the drive is established, or how does the drive ‘come about’. Here it is clear that the drive derives from the relation to the mirror image that ‘cuts into’ the body. The initial corps morcele, the fragmented body is cut through when reflected in the mirror and as a result various ‘parts’ of the body are cut off, or become objects. This cut, therefore, creates lost objects and ‘voids’ in the body as a graphic ground in which to explore this question of ‘these voids’ that are established through the cut:

It is with the real image, constituted, when it emerges, as i(a) that one clasps or not the multiplicity of objects a, here represented by the real flowers, in the neck of the vase, and this is thanks to the concave mirror at the far end, a symbol of something that must stand to be found in the structure of the cortex, the foundation of a certain relationship that man has with the image of his body, and with the different objects that can be constituted from this body, with the fragments of the original body grasped or not at the moment when i(a) has the opportunity of being constituted. (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 118)

These peculiar, special objects marked on the body are not external, but neither are they completely internal. Such ‘inside-out’ zigzagging is of the order of the ex-timate, of that which is internal but always crossed by the field of the Other. With the object a marking such excess of the body that is not captured by the division and establishment of the body and the drives, Lacan comes close to the polymorphous perversion of early Freud and of the Body-Without-Organs of Deleuze and Guattari. For Lacan, however, and crucially, without the cut, there is no subject. Or, in Lacan’s view, there is simply no subject before the mirror stage and whatever there is there, involved in the autoerotic jouissance is not the subject. In his words:

Prior to the mirror stage, that which will be i(a) lies in the disorder of the objects a in the plural and it is not yet a question of having them or not. This is the true meaning, the deepest meaning, to be given to the term autoeroticism—one lacks any self, as it were, completely and utterly. It is not the outside world that one lacks, as it is quite wrongly expressed, it is oneself. (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], pp. 118–119)

The voids of the body, or the ‘rims’, as in these physical spaces where in-out get blurred (openings such as the mouth, the anus, the eye, etc.) are loci of the drive only in so far as they bear a relation to the field of the Other, producing an excess that is cast off from this Other. As Lacan puts it: “Freud tells us that anxiety is a rim phenomenon, a signal that is produced at the ego’s limit when it is threatened by something that must not appear. This is the a, the remainder, which is abhorred by the Other” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 119). The object a, therefore, escapes the Symbolic and in this way, causes anxiety, as “if what is seen in the mirror is anguishing, it is in so far as it cannot be proposed to the Other’s acknowledgement” (Lacan, 1962–1963 [2014], p. 120). In this sense, anxiety, as an encounter with the Real, is excessive of the field of the Other. By being so, it is excessive to the Oedipal logic and bears a special place within a Lacanian differential diagnosis.

By conducting this very close reading of this seminar, we are able to identify a subtle and yet powerful change to his structural clinic: If psychosis, neurosis and perversion relate to a foreclosure or internalisation of the Name-of-the-Father (Oedipal order), anxiety is an affect that brings the subject to the world beyond such subjective formation: it is a new horizon of being. This is precisely what ‘becoming’ entails. If anxiety, thus, is an affect that characterises the emergence of experience beyond ‘the subject’, it moves away from ‘being’ into a ‘becoming’—anxiety vibrates in its emergence. Here is the impasse of Lacan’s seminar on anxiety that such close reading allows us to observe.

Anxiety in Late Lacan

The ethics of Lacanian Psychoanalysis through the relation to Desire and the Real changes in his later teachings. In ‘early’ Lacan, and in particular in Seminar VII, the seminar dedicated to the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan proposes a version of ‘ethics’ that can be roughly summarised as an unconditional fidelity to one’s singular desire. A simple critique of this notion is that in social life (i.e. collective, political and even democratic life) this arrangement would be ‘impossible’, for how could we ‘fit’ in so many singularities, making concessions and negotiations of desire the crux of sociality and subjectivity? In Lacan’s later teachings, he offers a second proposition of an ethics of psychoanalysis; without annihilating this principle of fidelity to one’s desire, he proposes another ethics that has to do with the Real. He proposed that we must make ourselves ‘dupes’ of the Real, demarcating thus the later Lacanian characteristic of an ‘Ethics of the Real’. Dupe derives from Lacan’s poetic linguistic games that take the ‘Nom-du-Pere’ and ‘Pere-version’ to the fore, arriving at a ‘dupe’ of ‘du-Pere’. If anxiety is so closely linked to the Real, how does this later ethical proposition relate to anxiety?

The theoretical and clinical potency of anxiety we find in Seminar X was last evoked by Lacan in Seminar XI, when he defends that the clinician must ‘canalise’ it in ‘small doses’ in the treatment. Any later mentions of anxiety (the French angoisse) will not cover any further theoretical grounds. His very last definition of anxiety comes in 1977, in Seminar XXIV, L’Insu que Sait de L’Une-Bévue S’Aile à Mourre (1976–1977), where he characterises anxiety as ‘symboliquement réel’ and the opposite of a ‘lie’. Until Seminar XI, Lacan delineates an anxiety in relation to the Other and introduces this affect to this peculiar excessive blind-spot he calls object a. Towards his later works, we find a change from the structuralist Lacan of desire into a post-structuralist Lacan of the Drive, or of the body, of jouissance not harnessed to the Other and beyond the logic of the signifier.

In the 1974 Rome congress of the EFP, Lacan, in what is known as La Troisième, says that anxiety is “precisely something that is situated in our body but in another part, it is the feeling that emerges of this suspicion which fools us that we are reduced to our bodies” (Lacan, 1974, p. 102).Footnote 12 Around this period, Lacan was reworking fundamental pillars of his teachings such as castration and sexual difference, leaving behind the ‘feminine’ and ‘phallic’ jouissance he still hung on to in the 1960s. By the time Lacan delivers Seminar XX, in 1972–1973, instead of a phallic jouissance (limited by castration) versus the ‘other’ jouissance (beyond castration and object loss), Lacan proposes that it is the signifier that is the main source of jouissance. The signifier here appears with a very different face; rather than attached to the possibilities of meaning which dressed his structuralist tone until the 1960s, now the signifier is quite material, it is not bound to meaning but rather to sounds that mark the body in lalangue (the lallation of a baby’s play with sounds, repetitions and the body, our first encounter with words that will only later be restricted to meaning). Whilst the later Lacan focuses on the parlêtre—or the speaking-being—rather than the subject of Oedipal sexual difference, offering a queer possibility for a psychoanalytic subject not determined by the phallic signifier, it is the Real that marks his clinical and theoretical shift.

Voruz and Wolf, two contemporary Lacanian analysts, stress the insistence of the Real as a motor to psychoanalytic theory observable in the transformations of both Freudian and Lacanian texts and seminars through their lifetime (Voruz & Wolf, 2007). Whilst Freud leaves us with the somewhat generalised idea of ‘negative therapeutic reactions’, Lacan, “eventually had to acknowledge the impossibility of fully ‘draining’ the unconscious with the signifier” (Voruz & Wolf, 2007, p. viii) and the end of analysis and of his theoretical endeavour. This ‘push-to-the-Real’, or this unconscious beyond what can be grasped or reduced is, for the psychoanalysts, the characteristic of Lacan’s later teachings. Anxiety, and the seminar on anxiety, roughly situated in the middle of Lacan’s career and right before his excommunication from the IPA, is, as we know, an encounter with the Real.

Both in Seminar XXII and in La Troisième, Lacan puts anxiety in the centre of his Borromean Knot (a diagram of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real and its intersections). In this movement, as Colette Soler (2014) also concludes, we are then able to find an anxiety that lies outside meaning, but not outside of the body. This later Lacanian understanding of the Real, which is not an impossibility of the Symbolic but existing outside of it, will not manifest itself as enjoyed meaning (sens-joui), rather, it will manifest in the affect of anxiety. Thus, anxiety is an encounter with a materiality of the body that does not cross meaning or the Symbolic (and its discontents). Anxiety can, in this manner, point towards the constitution of a new Imaginary—rather than an abyss within, a whole new horizon. This new horizon takes anxiety as being a ‘compass’ (Miller, 2007) to the clinic not only of ‘being’ but also of ‘becomings’. In this sense, anxiety is an affect that vibrates possibilities within and beyond the frame of the subject.

A lot has been written in recent years about later Lacanian teachings, a large part of which remains untranslated into English. Lacan, who died in 1981, had a chance to circulate around very radical and political thinkers of his time, from Guattari and Deleuze to the strong feminist movement in France, choosing, however, not to engage so actively with more radical ideas (Dosse, 2010). Aside from a clue to his own political conservativeness, open dialogues between Lacanian works and both feminist and Deleuze and Guattari-influenced thinking have been articulated in academia ever since. However, the lack of a substantial later formulation of anxiety by Lacan could be the reason why anxiety rarely, if ever, features as part of such novel dialogues.

This chapter has mapped Lacan’s theory of anxiety whilst articulating it with the potential openings from ‘being’ into ‘becoming’ found in his Seminar X. By situating his only systematic theory of anxiety contextually and in detail within Lacan’s praxis, it is possible to grasp precisely how the moment of anxiety—in theory, in the clinic and in the experience of this affect—is witness to the emergence of the Real. The Real in question, following this detailed account of his seminars, appears in Seminar X, as still laced by the limits of the Other. The fragmented, or multiple body that Lacan addresses very early on (in Seminars I and II), returns in his later teachings as giving rise to the speaking-body; or the affective body which is not reliant on the Symbolic (and its Oedipal myth). Lacan, however, does not spell out a new theory of anxiety in the 1970s and it is here, recuperating the two vibrational moments in Freud’s work on anxiety (namely, the pre-psychoanalytic libidinal excess and the very late Id-excess), that I situate my psychosocial theory of anxiety.