Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Lacan Today Conference, Ghent, Belçika, 20 - 21 Eylül 2024, (Yayınlanmadı)
The paper aims to examine the relationality among the distance, anguish, and phallus in terms of how they are used by Lacan regarding the case of Young Homosexual Girl discussed in Seminar IV.
About distance, it is important to realize Lacan’s opposition to attempts for idealization of the subject’s relation with the object. Rooted in the inevitably conflictual character of the relationship with an object, the distance mainly refers to how the child is positioned concerning the mother and phallus, which is based on the subject’s relation with the lack of the object, presenting itself in the dialectic of frustration, privation, and castration. Lacan puts forward the role of the object in terms of being “placed against the background of anguish”. Lacan argues that the function of the object of phobia or fetish is to maintain the operation of paternal metaphor when it is unable to enable distance between mother, child, and phallus; whose insufficiency leads to anguish related to identification with the imaginary phallus.
Lacan suggests that the perverse path of the young homosexual girl relies on how the Other is articulated on the imaginary plane. Taking care of a child belonging to her parents’ friends, the girl was in the position of imaginary mother with penis, during which she was frustrated by the emergence of real child given to her mother by the symbolic father. Disappointed by her object of attachment, permutation of positions takes place and the subject develops narcissistic identification with imaginary father. Then, the girl experiences a passionate love towards a lady who appears to be a phallic substitute of the child that is not given to her. So, the love towards the lady is a love for what she lacks, which is the symbolic penis associated with father.
Based on these, the acting out of the subject in the sense of niederkommen (falling down) could be interpreted as a reaction towards the inability to realize the symbolic lack in Other, which becomes visible in her claims concerning the phallus. As girl’s search for compensating the lack through real substitutes indicates, there is an insufficiency in the function of the Name of the Father. The lack of distance from the desire of the mother results in anguish which the girl tries to deal with on the real plane by some acting outs that include metonymic messages to Other. As the case of Young Homosexual Woman presents, insufficiency of phallic function results in subject’s finding herself in the position to be the imaginary phallus and identification with object a. In the case history, after the imaginary relation with the lady was shaken by the intervention of father’s gaze, the girl cannot bear the loss, and attempts a suicide by niederkommen, falling down the bridge. This attempt metonymically implies fall of the phallus/baby refused to her, which could be interpreted as acting out connected to anguish and lack of distance experienced by imaginary identification with phallus.