The following lecture has been given as an introduction to my recent publication of the book The Image of a Voice, to the gathering of The English Social Club (Cyprus) that has taken place on 12th February 2022 in Nicosia.
I will start with the word ‘patient’. It is a word that I usually avoid using in psychoanalysis, because the suffering of the person that is called as such (as patient) implies a defined normality, a set of specifications of ‘what should be’, from which that person is diverted. We may agree that this is true in the medical discourse, where there are documented precise parameters of how the body should function. Yet, if it is that we speak of the psychical world of the individual, how are we to define normality? Considering that there exists some truth in the proverb saying that each individual lives in his own world, then there is no such a thing as normality, and everyone is mad! Think of our everyday experience of misunderstandings between people, the need to explain ourselves so often, in such a way that along with the spoken word it becomes necessary to transmit our intentionality. There is always some part that remains untold: the desire with which something is expressed, whether it is expressed by being spoken or by being acted (the explanation of our word and of our actions; their context). Do we hence eliminate the notion of common sense? No and yes: No, because there needs to be a convention, a mutual agreement so that we can coexist, but since there needs to be such a convention then, by default, there is acceptance that each individual has their unique subjective world and therefore we have to set and agree on a common one. Thus, there is no definite normality in the strict sense of the word: Even the most formal expressions of our consensus which are the written laws of the city, the laws of the state, have their interpreters which we call lawyers or the court.
So, if we are to restore a ‘patient’ to a normality, which world does this normality refer to other than his own that has somehow failed and became cause if his distress!
However, what I like of the word ‘patient’ is the homonymity with another word: the Greek ‘pathos’. It is a word that is used intact in English vocabulary and speaks of the same failure or illness as expressed in the complaint of our fellow ‘patient’, although, I must admit that I had to look this up, it seems that there exists no etymological connection between them. Yet, the English translation of the Greek word provides us with another word that gives a different nuance to the word patient: We get the word ‘passion’, which is used to signify two distinct situations:
We speak of the passion of Christ, the extreme suffering, but we also use this word to express our liking about things that we pursue because they bring us extreme pleasure. What is common, though, between these two uses of the word is (a) the element of ‘the extreme’, and even further (b) that pathos, this extremity, is something so intimate to us yet it does not belong to ourselves: The pain or suffering is something located in our body, yet it is something we should abolish because it is not part of our body, we do not own it. The same goes for the passion for the things we like, because they are not things that we own but, contrariwise, it is these very things that own us (the passion owns us)! We all know very well of people who are driven into destruction because of their passions, the things they enjoy so much! We easily understand how passion, or things that own us, may easily become causes of suffering.
The first common thing the individual does when they address their suffering to a supposed specialist [I say supposed because there is no one that can guarantee a cure; there is no cure because there is nobody ill, as explained in the beginning] is that they provide a description of their distress, how they experience this suffering, which takes the value of a self-diagnosis e.g. they say they have anger, frustration, depression, panic attacks etc.: they know exactly what’s going wrong, i.e. what used to be normal for them and that it is not any more.
The second thing the ‘patient’ does [I use the word ‘patient’ because I have already explained my own intentionality of using it, beyond its common sense, by relating it to ‘pathos’] is to seek the cause of their distress in the surrounding world, because, as analysed before, pathos, although being so intimate to us, is not something that one can locate as part of themselves, i.e. within them. It is thus sought in what is considered as outside; a quest to find that element which escapes. It is sought into their relationships with others: their partners, their employers, their parents, their friends. They speak of the failure they experience in these relationships. A failure of what? Of an assumed identity via which they relate with the others. Even if the cause of suffering is described in the traumatic event of losing a beloved one, it is about what I was for this person, how I could see myself through them! It is about how my identity was lost with the beloved one. The investigation of one’s identity that relates them with the outer world forms questions, which are not stated so clearly or directly in the beginning, but they are refined in the process of the analysis, such as ‘what is it to be a child of my parents’, ‘a friend of my friends’, ‘a man for a woman’, ‘a woman for a man’. They are questions where the identity of the speaking subject is at stake in relation to someone else.
Every distress sums up as a crisis of identity, which arises not because of the individual all alone, but because of encountering conflicts with others; it is these conflicts that bring them to analysis. It is thus the environment that gives rise to this crisis, and the only reason is that the environment, the other person, is itself included in one’s identity. One’s own identity unavoidably passes through another – I will give further explanation of this in a moment.
We can even more say that the self-diagnosis that the subject undergoes in the beginning of their sessions is a temporary identity given to themselves because their own identity failed. [e.g. to get the identity of the 'depressed'; how to sustain themselves i.e. relate to the world otherwise? – without relating to the world, the world as well as themselves ceases to exist (every counterpart can only exist in relation to the other one).. Psychoanalytic experience proves that the identity of the depressed is the last resort of identity left before suicide.]
The above lead us to another question: What is identity? Identity, or our sense of self, is nothing but the qualities that one assumes for himself, his properties, which is a nice word that signifies not only one’s attributes, but also one’s belongings: the word property is about belonging. And what is the most fundamental paradigm for a property of the individual other than his/her own body! We say that we have a body!.. we have a body. We do not say that we are one, which itself poses a problem of identity: I cannot identify with the body, be that body, I can only have it. This is a completely different kind of body than the one that the medical discourse tries to treat; the medical discourse considers the individual to be the body. The subjective experience speaks otherwise: what characterises the body of the speaking being, that is to say what allows him/her to have it, is the description it receives for its qualities that unavoidably implement another, i.e. the qualities have reference to another person: how to be a man for a woman, or a woman for a man, how to be a child to my parents or a parent to my children etc. It is a certain identity that one assumes depending on who they address themselves to.
One question that is posed very often, is why we change the way we behave in different situations. An analysand for example spoke of the distress she has lived through during a time where various situations caused her to experience disorientation. She was feeling powerless back then, yet once her husband got ill she was transformed into a very powerful and agile person. She was surprised by this transformation! However, her previous distress was merely replaced by another one: the task to take care of her powerless husband. She became the powerful one when the description 'powerless' has shifted onto the person she relates to. So, what was truly described there, is her relationship where if one person is to be powerful, the other one must be powerless… in relation to whom the powerful is defined. Her suffering was not caused by the identity of the powerless one, but due to the fact that her identity was given by this relationship, i.e. the powerful with the powerless. Her identity did not change at all, because this identity unavoidably includes both counterparts. The other person is the mirror where the subject verifies their own image (their identity).
Crisis strikes in the form of non-recognition. Common complaints are “they don’t really know me” “they cannot accept me / love me for who I am” that very often lead to actions from the part of the subject that they declare as “they have seen myself in a way they didn’t know me” or even “I cannot recognise myself, it is not I who acted like this”. All these signify that the other person is inseparable part of oneself, because I cannot recognize myself unless the other verifies my assumed identity: I need him or her to verify my image. The sense of self, one’s image in the mirror, comes from another. This is equivalent to telling a joke, where it is not the comedian that makes it a joke but the one who listens and reacts to it with laughter, who verifies it as a joke (and the one who tells it a comedian).
Defining oneself as something that they are not, is the most common initial response that the subject gives to the question ‘who am I’ or ‘what do I want’. The individual says they are not understood and that nobody knows them, yet they are unable to state who they are unless they say ‘I am not this and that’, declaring within this negation (I am not) the identity that escapes. Here’s where pathos has its place: it comes to the place of that which escapes oneself, i.e. it is not part of one’s identity. Isn’t this the way that ‘pathos’ was defined in the beginning? i.e. an intimate part that escapes oneself. When identity escapes, pathos marks the place of the lost identity. Pathos is a signal: it is the body itself that speaks for the subject’s account! The word that remains unstated, the intentionality of the subject, what we call desire, is spoken through the body. This is why one’s identity as given by another becomes cause of suffering.
Here, we are brought to another question: How does the subject obtain that identity which seems to be so fragile? The mirror stage is the process via which our self-perception (both our self-identity and the perception of the body) is constituted, as an image in the mirror whose description is received from anOther place. The Image of a Voice addresses both the experienced psychoanalyst, but also the reader who has no psychoanalytical knowledge but they are interested in investigating the illusions of self-perception, false choices, forced modes of enjoyment and the desire which is at stake. This illustrated edition grounds itself on the experience of life and constitutes a step-by-step journey through Lacanian psychoanalysis.
