On Supplementary Jouissance

By Shaftain Naseer

"Psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is — that would be a task it could scarcely perform — but sets about inquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition" -Freud, 1933.

Psychoanalysis has always tried to explain the position of woman either from the point of sexual development or, as Laurent puts it in his essay “Womanly Positions of Being" (1992), existing beyond the pleasure principle. While Freud focused on the development of a girl experiencing the lack of a phallus, Lacan considers phallus a symbolic trait. For Lacan, feminine jouissance is beyond having or not having it. Jouissance oscillates between having it all and being left with nothing.

Jouissance is supplementary because it exceeds the limit of any phallic measure. A woman invests all of her energy in the man she loves or a cause she’s fighting for, only to find herself empty in the end. This act of privation is the hallmark of feminine masochism. In cases of love, it can be her way of ensuring that she is the fantasy of the man. But that is not a solution: “it is to be Other for a man.”

Lacan finds commonality in feminine masochism and psychosis, especially in Schreber’s case. He states that both share this becoming all for the Other; “Other of the Other.” In the psychotic’s case, he wants to conquer the big Other by becoming The Woman or all for men. In another sense, he wants to become Other of the Other, but as Lacan suggests, there is no Other of the Other. Similarly, in the case of feminine masochism, she gives everything to make sure she becomes all for him similar to the way Schreber wanted to become “the woman that men are missing.” The “logic of all” resonates with what is commonly believed in our culture: “I can change him; I waited for him to change; let’s get him married, and his wife will bring out the best in him.”

Eric Laurent explains that it is only through man as a mediator, not an absolute opposite or One, that she can become Other for him and for herself. This duplicity is explained by the work of desire in both men and women. Desire works differently in both men and women. A man would think he is autonomous when he says, “You are my woman.” However, in the case of a woman, since she holds no fear of castration, the father becomes an ideal which cannot be realized, and the man with whom she is in love, she keeps for herself. This unreachable figure structures the course of her desire, the desire which hides behind the mask of the imaginary semblant. For this desire to be sustained, the subject alternates between the two poles of dead/ideal father and jouissance -- between pure absence and pure sensibility.

A patient was an orphan who desired a father’s love and got married to a man who lived in a joint family system. She suffered from domestic violence for 7 years and finally entered analysis. She couldn’t leave him due to financial constraints, but also because she wanted her children to have a father, an ideal/dead father she thought she could have had as a child. She and her two other sisters suffered in a similar environment. These impressions manifested themselves in the dream: “I was naked with my sisters, and we had male body parts [penises]. We were sexually pleasing each other with our hands.”

The patient explained that “since our husbands do not support us financially and emotionally, we wished that we were men who could support themselves ... I wanted to help my sisters.” It can be said that to stay in this marriage subsisted her desire for nothingness or pure absence. She kept the organ [the man] for her jouissance, but also held onto the dead father.