Dancing an Embodied Sinthome: Beyond Phallic Jouissance 3031423275, 9783031423277

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THE PALGRAVE LACAN SERIES SERIES EDITORS: CALUM NEILL · DEREK HOOK

Dancing an Embodied Sinthome Beyond the Phallic Jouissance megan Sherritt

The Palgrave Lacan Series

Series Editors Calum Neill Edinburgh Napier University Edinburgh, UK Derek Hook Duquesne University Pittsburgh, USA

Jacques Lacan is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century. The reach of this influence continues to grow as we settle into the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably only beginning now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application to clinical matters and in its application to a range of human activities and interests. The Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new writing in the Lacanian field, giving voice to the leading writers of a new generation of Lacanian thought. The series will comprise original monographs and thematic, multi-authored collections. The books in the series will explore aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with original insights. There will be books focused on particular areas of or issues in clinical work. There will be books focused on applying Lacanian theory to areas and issues beyond the clinic, to matters of society, politics, the arts and culture. Each book, whatever its particular concern, will work to expand our understanding of Lacan’s theory and its value in the 21st century.

Megan Sherritt

Dancing an Embodied Sinthome Beyond Phallic Jouissance

Megan Sherritt London, ON, Canada

ISSN 2946-4196     ISSN 2946-420X (electronic) The Palgrave Lacan Series ISBN 978-3-031-42326-0    ISBN 978-3-031-42327-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: GaryAlvis/Gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

This book draws on research supported by the Southern First Nations Secretariat post-secondary program, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) program, Western University and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

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Contents

1 Unravelling  a Knotty Condansation  1 1.1 Dancing with the Lacanian Body   3 1.2 The Madness and Humanity of Dance   6 1.3 What Is Dance   7 1.3.1 Dance in Theory   7 1.3.2 Dance Studies  11 1.4 Summary and Choreographic Development  14 2 Changement 17 2.1 A Relational Turn Within Saussurian Linguistics  18 2.2 Loewald and Relationality  20 2.3 Psychoanalysis and Language  21 2.4 Poetry  22 2.5 A New Relationship to the Real  23 3 S  etting the Bar(re) 29 3.1 Being in the World  29 3.1.1 The Imaginary  30 3.1.2 The Symbolic  32 3.1.3 The Real  33 3.1.4 Psychic Entanglement  35 vii

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3.2 The Art of Dance Within the Lacanian Psyche  36 3.2.1 Dancing with the Imaginary  36 3.2.2 Dancing in the Symbolic  37 3.2.3 Dancing the Real  38 3.3 Psychosis  39 3.4 Sinthome  46 3.4.1 Corollaries of the Sinthome  49 3.5 Dance, Psychosis, and the Sinthome  59 4 The  Being of a Sinthome 63 4.1 Mirroring  64 4.1.1 Theorizing the Revelatory Mirror  65 4.1.2 Dance Reflections  69 4.2 Containing and (Potential) Space  71 4.2.1 Theoretical Space to Dream and Contain the Real  72 4.2.2 The (Potential) Space of Dance, Bound in Time  78 4.3 Play  79 4.3.1 Play in Theory  80 4.3.2 Dancing Play  84 4.4 Dance, Paradox, and Feminine Jouissance 88 4.5 Joyce and Fosse  94 4.5.1 Writing a Sinthome (Joyce)  95 4.5.2 Choreographing and Dancing a Sinthome (Fosse) 99 4.6 Sergei Polunin 104 5 R  einterpreting Joyce’s Sinthome109 5.1 Rewriting the Standard 110 5.2 An Embodied Sinthome 112 5.3 Driven to Dance 114

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6 I nterlude119 6.1 Joyce Dancing with His Daughter 120 6.2 Parallel Play 122 7 Playing  and Dancing with Différance125 7.1 Dancing an Ethical Act 126 7.1.1 The Swan’s Sinthome 127 7.2 Pas (de) deux133 8 Reverberations  of the Embodied Sinthome139 8.1 Implications for (Lacanian) Psychoanalytic Theory 140 8.1.1 Symptoms and/or Sinthome 140 8.1.2 Lacan’s Place in Contemporary Theory 145 8.1.3 Sinthomic Discourse 150 8.2 Implications for Psychoanalytic Practice 153 8.2.1 The Return of the Real (Dancing) Body 153 8.2.2 Silencing the Voice 159 8.2.3 Mirroring/Divisions 166 8.2.4 Drawing on Tradition 170 8.3 Implications for Dance 172 8.3.1 Dance as an Art 172 8.3.2 Dance and Aesthetics 173 8.3.3 Dancing an Embodied Sinthome 174 8.3.4 Dance’s Humanity 176 8.3.5 Dance Therapy 183 9 P  ossibilities187 9.1 Bearing the Real Real 187 9.2 “Shifting” the Symbolic 193 9.3 Creating Metaphor 195 9.4 Choreographing a Subject 200 9.5 The Next Joyce 201

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10 B  eyond Psychosis205 10.1 Dance and Neurosis 206 11 W  eaving an Impossible209 B  ibliography215 I ndex233

1 Unravelling a Knotty Condansation

In 2017, I was reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar 23, a seminar in which Lacan conceptualizes the sinthome as what can (re)connect the psyche when psychosis threatens, when a line jumped out at me. It wasn’t a line that captures the attention of most people—or at least I assume—and it’s quite possibly just a throwaway line that has no real purpose for Lacan. Nonetheless, the line immediately raised questions for me. Near the end of his seminar, he says: Here I would like to make a remark that might just keep in check a little something that forms a gulf in what the use of this Borromean knot, this pére-version, allows us to clasp. There is something that one may be quite surprised not to see serving the body as such even more, and that is dance. This would allow us to write the term condansation a little differently.1

Now the Borromean knot is how Lacan envisions our psyches: it’s the knot of the symbolic, imaginary, and real—or the three elements that govern how we interact with the world—and he’s been talking about how  Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 23: The Sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 133. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Sherritt, Dancing an Embodied Sinthome, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7_1

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the author James Joyce’s literary works operate as a clasp or buckle to keep the knot of his psyche tied when psychosis threatens (or, in Lacanian terms, when there is no name-of-the-father to structure the psyche). But why the sudden switch to dance? If Lacan says this, he must mean something. But what? That question started me on a journey, one that I began without hypotheses; instead, I had questions: Is the sinthome something that serves the body? If yes, then how does Joyce’s writing, seen as a sinthome, work on the body? If dance doesn’t serve the body, does that mean dance cannot, therefore, work as a sinthome to keep the psyche connected when psychosis threatens, or does it mean that dance doesn’t serve the body because it serves some other aspect of a subject to ensure psychosis cannot threaten? What is the connection between dance and the psyche or between dance and psychoanalysis? Are there connections? What is it about dance that means it doesn’t serve the body in the same way as (Joyce’s) writing? Maybe this line caught my attention because I dance and know (or thought I knew) firsthand that dance serves the body. Regardless, I couldn’t put these questions aside, so I decided I needed to look deeply into them. I hadn’t been searching for a topic to research—I already had many ideas—but I couldn’t let Lacan’s comment go. I didn’t entirely understand it (but it’s Lacan, so who can?), yet I felt he was making a joke or a pun that made no sense to me. He says the line immediately after talking about how our use of language reveals a relationship to our bodies that suggests ownership: I have a body. The Lacanian body, however (as I will explain shortly), is not a Cartesian body. This is no dichotomy between the mind and body, and no primacy of the mind over the body. Thus, I wondered if Lacan meant that dance only encourages one to possess the body. In one way, that made sense: dancers often “punish” their bodies or at least train them into submission. Dance is demanding— sometimes painful—yet it’s often a voluntary pursuit. In another way, however, thinking of dance related to the possession of the body made no sense: it was through dance (at least in part) that I learned to occupy space—and know the space I’m occupying. My body was no longer a possession I carried with me subordinated to my mind, but a part of my being. My questions and ideas took many forms as I progressed in my research; my ideas evolved (and devolved). I may even have rewritten this

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entire book (at least) once. I believed, for a while, that neither Lacan nor Joyce went far enough: that they limited themselves to the sphere of language (and the symbolic) whereas if they had included the affective aspects of our lives, then Joyce’s writing would have been less utilitarian and achieved more while Lacan could have pushed his theory much further rather than what (to me) seemed an attempt to surmount ambiguity by separating himself from the world.2 Ultimately, I realized that it is not that Lacan didn’t go far enough, but that I was relying too much on other theorists to understand Lacan rather than trying to grapple with his teachings myself. When I read (and re-read) and sat with Lacan, I started to understand that Lacan himself was fully aware of the necessity of affect for a connected psyche. That realization helped shape this book, a book in which I ultimately conclude that dance, like Joyce’s writing, can help someone if and when necessary to establish a relationship within the psyche wherein all the different aspects that comprise one’s subjectivity remain connected. Dance can help us accept the (seemingly) opposing forces in our lives, offer us a new understanding of our ontology, and lead us to a new relationship with the unsymbolizable real elements of life.

1.1 Dancing with the Lacanian Body This is a book, then, on dance and psychoanalysis—and psychosis. In psychoanalytic theory, even when paired with the arts, dance rarely appears, and when it does, it is often used only (or mostly) as metaphor for what happens within psychoanalysis. This use of dance, however, doesn’t rely on a cogent dance theory, but merely imagines psychoanalysis as a partner dance comprising a give-and-take.3 To me, however, Lacan’s approach to both psychoanalysis and prose are like dance as I hope to analyze it: both processes are trying to “get at” something that evades capture within language. Lacan is of particular interest to me because of the failure of theory: Lacan notes this failure but also that the failure of  At the time, I was thinking of this in terms of Simone de Beauvoir. See The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1948). 3  See, for example, Danielle Knafo, Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art (New York: Routledge, 2012). 2

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theory doesn’t mean there isn’t something to theorize—if only we could. That is to say, Lacan recognizes that things exist beyond our capacities of understanding and will always exist beyond them—he’s not lamenting our lack of knowledge and urging us to try harder or think more deeply; he’s acknowledging the existence of those things that will always remain a mystery. In doing so, he necessarily speaks (dances) around his subject—and that’s the first reason his approach seems like a dance to me. Lacan uses language differently than in the ordinary, everyday sense. Understanding isn’t immediate; it’s elusive. But if you sit with his words and ideas long enough, often you can develop a felt sense of something clicking into place. You might still be unsure what that is, but you know his words have had an effect. The second reason Lacan’s approach seems like dance is in his use of the body. My focus in this book is on Seminar 23, a seminar in which Lacan explores psychosis and James Joyce, positing that Joyce forestalled the collapse of his psyche into psychosis. In his own attempts to grasp this concept, Lacan doesn’t sit and think abstractly; he plays with string, forming loops and knots to think in new ways, and this process is reliant on the body. No, it is not dance, but it does suggest one can use physicality to uncover new ideas. Given the significance of the body in both Joyce’s writing and in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory regarding the sinthome, it was curious to me that Lacan privileges poetic writing as the means of maintaining a connection with the body (which, to Lacan, is part of the imaginary). It is, he proposes, through writing that Joyce reaches the real and, thus, (re)knots his psyche. In my view, however, other arts—particularly dance—would intuitively act on the body more because they directly employ the body. Furthermore, the effects of the real are played out in the body, and dance, by necessity, incorporates the body. Yet, Lacan specifically dismisses dance. Maybe that dismissal is because of writing’s close connection to the symbolic: Joyce’s writing and the unstructured speech of psychoanalysis both, Lacan contends, work on the body through processes that reside firmly within the symbolic; his suggestion then that dance, perhaps surprisingly, does not work on the body as such is made presumably because he believes the real “is accessed via the symbolic. We

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access this real in and through the impossible that is defined only by the symbolic.”4 Yet dance, like all art, can only exist within the symbolic. In the end, I realized that what I needed to do was look more closely at Joyce’s sinthome, to see what elements comprise the sinthome. In other words, what are the processes within his writing that contribute to the sinthome. My conclusion is that Joyce, via his writing, takes the real that insists upon him (threatening psychosis) and reflects it, binds it, and creates a space to play with it. Lacanian theorists, I argue, often misidentify the nature of Joyce’s work as regards the sinthome. Lacan’s study of Joyce is really a study of play, and Joyce plays with what he knows best: writing. Writing, however, does not have to be playful; dance, on the other hand, is deliberately playful and operates more fully within the intertwined relationship between the body and the symbolic, and when we use play to cope with the real, we can (re)tie the three elements of the psyche together. In other words, dance can teach us how to play in order to protect the mind from the effects of the real, while Joyce’s writing is merely a reflection of someone who already knows how to play. Thus, this book brings dance into conversation with Lacan’s mirror stage as the inception of the ego (as object) and offers a rigorous examination of the notions of limits, gaps, and play as what I see as comprising the sinthome; I then apply the resulting, more detailed understanding of the sinthome to show that dance operates on the body in a way that Lacan neglects, both as a sinthome and as something “more than” a sinthome. Dance alone, as an “embodied sinthome,” teaches the play that is necessary (in pre-psychosis) to tighten the psyche’s knot. The ability to establish a sinthome is the “more than” I referred to earlier: Joyce could maintain psychic functioning through the play of his writing, but dance is better situated to teach one how to play. In the end, I see Joyce’s sinthome as a process (not a thing); dance, likewise, is a process. This book interrogates the question: what might we gain if rather than looking at Lacan’s seminars and other works as information, we look that them as processes? By exploring dance alongside Lacan, I hope to offer new ways to think (of ) Lacan psychoanalysis and psychosis.  Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 19: . . . Or Worse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Oxford: Polity, 2018), 122; my italics. 4

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1.2 The Madness and Humanity of Dance Dance may not be the subject most people think about when theorizing processes for dealing with psychosis. There is, in our minds, a connection between mental disorders and dance—not always psychosis, but obsessions and compulsions, eating disorders, narcissism, etc.—just as there is between madness and creativity in general. Sometimes this connection arises because of history. Vaslav Nijinsky is a good example: a famous and accomplished dancer succumbs to madness. In the spring of 1913, Nijinsky performs Rite of Spring for a Paris audience. Riots ensue. Over the next six years, Nijinsky never performs at top level again and is ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia. Subsequent discussion focuses simultaneously on Nijinsky’s prowess as a dancer and his madness. Sometimes this connection is a cultural creation: Kélina Gotman writes how, currently, aesthetic theory maintains a split that overvalues the (predominately white) graceful lines of ballet and devalues the angular, disconnected, and more energetic movements of jazz, for example. That is, aesthetic theory elevates the principles of dancing associated with white bodies over those associated with Black bodies, and the principles associate with Black bodies are then pathologized.5 Yet dance is also connected to beauty, strength, and resilience, elements I see as comprising humanity and providing us a grounding in reality. Crystal Pite, a Canadian choreographer, has created a dance that illustrates for me the inextricability of ourselves from our relationship to others.6 Relying, again and again, on the same small piece of “text,” Pite transforms repetitive motions into a dance that portrays conflict (conflict between each other and conflict among groups), yet those same bodily movements that depict conflict, morph into gestures that suggest human connectedness before becoming otherworldly, suggesting that maybe this connectedness even extends beyond humanity. Pite understands dance as a “a duet between your instinct and imagination,” suggesting that “to be  See Choreomania: Dance and Disorder (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), particularly Chap. 11 “Monstruous Grace: Blackness and the New Dance ‘Crazes.’” 6  Body and Soul, performed by the Paris Opera Ballet, recorded November 2019 at Palais Garnier, Paris, streamed online, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, ON, February 17–23, 2021. 5

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human is to be danced by life.”7 She’s using her choreography to depict the humanity in life, which helps us see dance is much more than an inevitable path to a disordered mind.

1.3 What Is Dance Using dance to explore psychoanalysis (and psychoanalysis to explore dance) has its challenges. There is a multitude of (sometimes incompatible) opinions regarding what dance is and how to understand it, yet shifting our relationship to dance could have important theoretical implications for both psychoanalysis and dance.

1.3.1 Dance in Theory Although psychoanalytic theory occasionally touches on the relationship of art or creativity to the psyche, dance itself is often excluded from the categories of art, and those theorists that do reference dance often only use it as a metaphor; Jon Sletvold, for example, refers to the psychoanalytic process as a “therapeutic dance” and movement as “emotional language.”8 Lacan even falls prey to this use of dance as a metaphor, both for women’s actions in attracting men9 and to describe the contradictions within the psychoanalytic act.10

 Joella Cabalu, dir., Crystal Pite: Wordless Language, National Film Board of Canada in collaboration with The Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards Foundation, 2022, 3:40; 3:48, https:// www.nfb.ca/film/crystal-pite-wordless-language/. 8  The Embodied Analyst: From Freud and Reich to Relationality (London: Routledge, 2014), 166, 103. Likewise, Riccardo Lombardi refers only to the motion of the body that enables language; he suggests for some, the purpose of psychoanalysis is to “compile a dictionary that will enable the anarchic body to express itself symbolically.” Mind-Body Dissociation in Psychoanalysis: Development after Bion (New York: Routledge, 2017), 73. 9  See Seminar 19, 164. 10  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 15: The Psychoanalytic Act, trans. Cormac Gallagher, XV 15. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-15-The-­ Psychoanalytical-Act.pdf. 7

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Other fields offer little help as well. Theorists have described dance as “a confrontation with life as a plane of open and divergent becomings,” 11 “a healing of the self ’s divisions,”12 communication,13 affective movement,14 a non-human art,15 and the “sensations of time and energy.”16 And those definitions come from those who look at dance specifically. Most often, dance is brushed aside or lumped with the “arts” and subsumed under arguments that focus on music or the visual arts. In Leo Tolstoy’s famous treatise on art—What is Art?—dance only makes cameo appearances, often only within a focus on a different art form.17 Francis Sparshott suggests that “one possible reason why theorists have found little to say about dance could be that people resort to dancing and gesturing when the meaning they wish to convey cannot or must not be put into words.”18 He also suggests that philosophy overlooks dance because dance’s principal medium is the body, which is something common to everyone. This assertion thus dismisses the challenges and complexity of dance with the assumption that if everyone has a body, then

 Claire Colebrook, “How Can We Tell the Dancer from the Dance? The Subject of Dance and the Subject of Philosophy,” Topoi 24, (2005): 5, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-004-4157-7. 12  Steven Bruhm, “Dance Divisions,” (draft of a paper presented at ‘Seeing Things’: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Literature and the Visual, University of Tours, France, 2001), 1–2. 13  Henrietta Bannerman, “Visible Symbols: Dance and Its Modes of Representation,” in Thinking Through Dance: The Philosophy of Dance Performance and Practices, ed. Jenny Bunker, Anna Pakes, and Bonnie Rowell (Hampshire, UK: Dance Books, 2013), 187–89; Francis Sparshott, “The Philosophy of Dance: Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 277; Bruhm, however, adds, “dance is not only founded on textual narrative, it telegraphs to others the degree to which human behaviour itself is a textual narrative.” “Dance Divisions,” 3. 14  Sparshott, “The Philosophy of Dance,” 281. 15  Carrie Rohman, Choreographies of the Living (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3. 16  Paul Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,” Salmagundi 33/34 (Spring–Summer 1976): 72. 17  See Tolstoy, What Is Art?, trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1904). 18  “The Philosophy of Dance,” 277. 11

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everyone can dance.19 Unfortunately, this sentiment of dance informs how dance is presented in popular culture. Not only does it appear in the plethora of popular movies that depict dance,20 but it also shapes dance scholarship.21 If this is true, if everyone can dance or every movement can be dance, then dance has no particular need of a philosophy or aesthetic theory. Dance is not an art, but an amusement or diversion that can be set aside by theorists and philosophers because it lacks complexity, standards, or objectivity. Nevertheless, one excellent start towards bringing dance theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis into interdisciplinary conversation—a start that informs my own work—appears in the work of Fran de Cuyper and Dries Dulsster.22 De Cuyper and Dulsster look at dance in relation to the  “The Philosophy of Dance,” 278. Additionally, there are work on psychology and dance that take this idea and transform it into dance therapies, therapies that focus on the relationship between movement and emotion rather than on how dance relates to overall psychic functioning. Furthermore, these therapies do not focus on dance as an art or a practice (mostly) but as a technique that draws on someone’s intuitive movements. In other words, these therapies are using rhythmic movement as a framework for establishing a connection with a person’s intuitive and unconscious affect spontaneously, rather than drawing on dance as a discipline. The methods of dance therapy different widely and are not codified (and, curiously, do not always involve movement). 20  The list of movies is long and includes films such as such as Dirty Dancing, directed by Emile Ardolino (1987; Montreal, QC: Alliance Films, 1987), DVD; Shall We Dance, directed by Peter Chelsom (2004; Los Angeles: Miramax Films, 2004), DVD; Coyote Ugly, directed by David McNally (2000; Burbank, CA: Touchstone Pictures, 2000), DVD; Take the Lead, directed by Liz Friedlander (2006; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006), DVD; and my personal favourite, Happy Feet, directed by George Miller (2006; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2007), DVD. Why restrict dancing to a human endeavour? Even penguins can dance. 21  See, for example, Kimerer L. LaMothe, Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) who suggests any movement could be dance so long as it leads to “bodily becoming.” 22  “The Dancing Being,” trans. Dries Dulsster, unpublished. Translation in author’s possession. Original published in Dutch as “Le dansêtre: Over psychoanalyse en dans,” Psychoanalytische Perspectieven 36, no. 3 (2018): 249–64, https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8580920/file/8580921. The translated article is unpublished, and thus, I cannot provide accurate page numbers. De Cuyper and Dulsster offer some suggestions for further research, and their work, too, reveals the numerous ways that dance is understood. Although their look at how various dancers understand what they do through dance is interesting, those views (of dancers) don’t help theorize dance or its relationship to the psyche. Writing, too, is understood differently by different writers. This does not make writing more or less prone to becoming a sinthome, it just describes how we search for meanings, potentially where none exist (or at least where no conscious ones exist) and, therefore, belongs more to science and the belief there is a subject supposed to know (an idea I take up later). In relation to James Joyce, Lacan suggests that Joyce did not understand what he was doing psychically, i.e., fashioning a sinthome, while writing. See Seminar 23, 99, 123. 19

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Borromean knot and the sinthome—the same concepts I explore—to identify the function of dance for the professional dancer, positing that Nijinsky—who, as I mentioned earlier, suffered from schizophrenia— found a sinthome through his dancing, at least until such time as something frayed or severed his psyche’s knot. They speak to dancers to learn what function dance has for them, what dance means to individual dancers, and how dancers experience dance. Overall, they posit that three essential elements of dance make it a sinthome. First, dance contains both pleasure and suffering in the dancer’s life; this “intrinsic division” is like a symptom, the necessary symptom that “does not stop being written,”23 in which dancers are trapped. For de Cuyper and Dulsster, this dichotomy is one of the ways that dance contains a paradox,24 but a paradox in which each element connects to the other, something I will later discuss as essential to the sinthome. Second, de Cuyper and Dulsster argue that dance offers a “movement vocabulary,” which they describe as a way of communicating what cannot be said. Third, dance is an art, one which not only allows the dancer to shape what she cannot grasp, but one that also acts as a container for the real within the body. Together, these qualities create levels within dance: on a primary level, dance is purposeless, possessing a beauty that has no meaning but nevertheless affects the dancers; on a secondary level, dance communicates to an audience, and in this way, a dancer puts ineffable experience into a type of language. The authors argue the primary level is what makes dance a sinthome: its effect is non-interpretable because each dancer will respond to different movements in different ways, so each solution is unique. Since dancers have no control over the affects that arise from the movement, they are simultaneously controlled by these affects and able to manage them as each movement is connected to others that may give rise to different affective responses. As a result, dancers can contain the real without ascribing a meaning to their experience; they can exist as what de Cuyper and Dulsster term dansêtres, as dancing beings driven by idiosyncratic encounters with the real within that body, coping with these encounters in a way that makes it possible for them to maintain connected psyches.  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 20: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1999), 97. 24  This paradox is later explained by de Cuyper and Dulsster as discussing how dance is simultaneously reliant on jouissance and a defence against jouissance, which allows one to more fully experience one’s jouissance. 23

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The term dansêtre, the authors suggest, is comparable to Lacan’s concept of the parlêtre, the speaking being controlled by the unconscious as revealed through the lalangue of language. De Cuyper and Dulsster then suggest dance also ties to Lacan’s concept of escabeau because the dance itself creates a social bond as the singular dance is disseminated to others. De Cuyper and Dulsster’s article is pivotal for starting a conversation, and I think de Cuyper and Dulsster offer some crucial insights into dance—ones I will return to later—yet I also believe I can push their argument farther. Their article is the start of a conversation, so they do not fully develop their ideas despite the suggestion there are important implications that derive from their thesis. Thus, they leave the reader with both the idea that the creation of sinthome can be taught, but without explaining how, and the (I suggest, misguided) idea that the ineffable can then be spoken. Although I agree important implications derive from their thesis, the experience of the real will always remain ineffable, which is partly why their implications are important. Nonetheless, this is one essential contribution to the interdisciplinary conversations that need to happen.

1.3.2 Dance Studies Turning to dance studies offers some helpful ideas as well, and my work shares some affinities with those involved in dance studies, including Anna Pakes, Susan Leigh Foster, and Felicia McCarren who all look to aspects of dance more intentionally or at how dance operates dialectically with other disciplines and what we can learn about dance through its relationships to those other disciplines. Pakes looks at the philosophy of dance, especially aesthetics as well as methods and methodological issues in and for dance studies. In her latest book, Choreography Invisible, she examines the ontology and problem of lost dance works (and dance does have an ontology): what dance works are, what can happen to them, and how artists and audiences interact with them.25 The latter is not just how people interact with dance works philosophically, but also how they have interacted with them historically. She is trying to understand dance works metaphysically: is a dance work  Choreography Invisible: The Disappearing Work of Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 6, 7. 25

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singular or plural and what is its relationship to reality, or how does a dance work continue to exist when not being performed? She also looks at the historical shifts in our conceptualizations of dance and argues that rather than existing purely in its ephemerality, dance straddles the divide of the ephemeral and the concrete: dance is “inherently ephemeral” and “lost when forgotten”; although dependent on the body, dance nonetheless exists beyond the body.26 Pakes explains the common view of the binary where things are either ephemeral or concrete physical objects—a view which eliminates dance because it does not fit neatly into either category—and she wants to disrupt this conception by exploring dance as “structures of action.”27 In exploring the ontology and definition of “dance works,” her book necessarily contains ambiguity between product and process and between the concrete and the abstract. Foster looks at historical shifts in dance as models of representation (historical divisions of choreographic methods). Foster, in one work, offers a table outlining four dance projects and what each project entails. In this table, she shows how different choreographies have different tropes and modes of representation, and she provides an historical example for each.28 What strikes me is how her table shows that each project she describes is very different: each project reveals different underlying assumptions regarding the nature of the body, the self/subject, and the dancer. What her table also suggests is that for dance to be seen as communication, for example, it must be a communication from the choreographer, not from the dancer nor from the dance itself. This confusion, therefore, lays bare that, to an extent, what is inherent in dance and what (I will shortly argue) is essential for its role as a sinthome, is the ability to hold this dialectic, these opposing interpretations, knowing that all are true, yet none are true.

 Choreography Invisible, 1, 242. This reliance on the body, however, often results in the lower valuation of dance in the art world because it contributes to the problem of identity over time. 27  Choreography Invisible, 6, 7. 28  Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 236n1. 26

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Foster, in the past, has looked at dance as choreographies of gender and of protest,29 and her more recent research looks at the interaction of the discourses of dance and labour, more specifically at theories of dance as economic transaction or domestic language and the language or tropes that characterize dance as labour (or that transcend labour) and how politics intervenes in each discourse to change the value of the corporeal.30 In other words, she’s looking at the interactions between dance and culture, and each shapes the other. McCarren also looks historically at dance, but in a different realm. She explores dance’s historical relationship to pathology and race, for example, and is, again, interested in the interaction between society and art and how changes in society change the reception of dance in society.31 She is also interested in technology and dance,32 that is, the relationships between machines and dance, and she is particularly interested in hip hop culture in France.33 Her work often looks at a particular performance and makes use of archival research. The ideas of these researchers have all be invaluable in my own research, but despite moments of congruence, particularly in bringing dance into conversation with other disciplines and looking at dance’s societal or cultural connections, what I am doing is very different from what they do. They seem to fit more easily into the two categories that appear to dominate dance studies: dance ethnography/cultural research that explores the influences of society and cultural constructions on dance and dance history/heritage research that explores the changing practices, theories, and methods of documentation to assess dance and its functions in society.  “Choreographies of Gender,” Signs 24, no. 1 (1998): 1–33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175670; “Choreographies of Protest,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (2003): 395–412, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/25069277. 30  Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 31  Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); “Minority Visibility and Hip-Hop Choreography,” Ch. 23 in Contemporary Choreography, ed. Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut (London: Routledge, 2017); “Somebody or Anybody? Hip Hop Choreography and the Cultural Economy,” in Post-Migration and Postcoloniality in Contemporary French Culture,” ed. Kathryn Kleppinger and Laura Reeck, 185–201 (Liverpool, UK: University of Liverpool Press, 2018). 32  Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 33  French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip-hop. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 29

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What I’m doing is using psychoanalytic concepts to look at what dance is and the possible implications of that for the dancer, specifically on how we might understand the relationships among dance, psychoanalysis, and psychosis and what those relationships might offer us in terms of understanding each concept individually as well. I use examples of choreographies or of specific dances, but my focus in really on the dancer and the concept of dance, not on any specific dance or dancer or, even, style of dance. Although there are researchers studying the possibilities of dance specifically in terms of psychological treatments (for schizophrenia or other mental illnesses), I’m not doing that either. I’m trying to understand what dance is, not merely what it does culturally, metaphysically, or practically. To this end, although I’m informed by history and criticism of dance, I’m thinking more the phenomenology of dance that Lacanian theory offers, yet I’m not thinking phenomenologically. I want to explore dance in a way that provides a (corporeal) sense of the real impossibility of expressing the inexpressible. I am writing of what Lacan’s sinthome is, yet what that amounts to is something that is entirely inexpressible. Dance helps achieve my impossible goal because to look at dance theoretically means one is constantly confronting the question of how to represent that which requires the body and the embodied nature of representation.

1.4 Summary and Choreographic Development To summarize: in this book, I look to psychoanalytic theory and dance studies to identify the relationship between dance and psychoanalysis, specifically the relationship of dance to the Lacanian real, a relationship that, as I further posit, suggests that contrary to a statement Lacan makes, dance does work on the body and can act as a sinthome. Furthermore, dance works on the body more effectively than writing because dance is not primarily utilitarian but is instead both affective and playful. I explore the implications of this argument in a way that reconceptualizes and furthers Lacanian scholarship, structuring my argument in the following way:

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Chapter 2 offers a more in-depth justification for why I don’t employ the conventional understanding of the sinthome as linguistic to explore Lacan’s arguments and of why I write specifically of dance. Chapter 3 explains the Lacanian concepts that are essential grounding for my arguments regarding the sinthome. In this chapter, I overview Lacan’s understanding of the psyche and its functioning in neurosis, relate the core Lacanian concepts of the psyche to dance, then look more specifically at psychosis and the sinthome and the possibilities for a relationship to dance. In Chap. 4, I introduce the psychoanalytic processes that I believe exist within Lacan’s concept of the sinthome. I explain how these processes fit within Lacanian theory, and I illustrate their importance for advancing Lacanian thought. The chapter ends by offering illustrations of how these processes manifest in reality, first within Joyce’s works as compared to Bob Fosse’s dancing and choreography, then within dance proper (rather than within choreography). Chapter 5 offers a reinterpretation of Joyce’s sinthome as beyond linguistic and proposes that the sinthome relies on (imagining) the creation of a new relationship to the elements of the real as they are experienced in the body. In Chap. 6, I offer a turning point or pivot. Focusing on Joyce more deliberately, I offer a sketch of the role dancing plays in his life and how relationship to dance influences his writing. Chapter 7 links dance to the new understanding of the sinthome presented in Chap. 5. In this chapter, I detail the possibilities of dance for a sinthome and of seeing a connection between psychoanalysis and dance as processes that offer support for the development of a sinthome, or the support for helping one to accept (and embrace) as her own the feelings of intrusion and merger that presage psychosis. Having established a relationship between the sinthome and dance (and, thereby, between psychoanalysis and dance), Chap. 8 looks at what my arguments might mean both for psychoanalysis and for dance. In terms of psychoanalysis, this section takes my theoretical argument regarding dance’s role as a sinthome and offers a new understanding of Lacanian theory and practical insights into how one prevents (or treats) pre-psychosis in general. That is, this chapter will explore what dance’s

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relationship to the sinthome suggests about the use of play, affect, and the body within a traditional psychoanalytic setting and the influence this has on understanding Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as contemporary psychoanalytic theory. I then look to what seeing dance as a sinthome means for dance as an art. I will confirm dance as an art, an art that is unlike the other arts in that it not only offers an expression and experience of creativity, but it also has processes embedded in it that can support the development of the ability to play, the play that is necessary for creativity. I maintain that if dance can create a sinthome, then the concept of dance and its place within the arts can be radically redefined and dance’s aesthetics more fully understood. In Chap. 9 I examine more rigorously dance’s ability to create the possibility of impossibility (and maintain a connection to the Lacanian real), tying my argument back to the line from Lacan that started this project to show what this looks like and what it might mean for the subject (of psychosis) and our world more generally. Having focused mostly on (pre-)psychosis, I use Chap. 10 to extend my argument beyond dance and psychosis to encompass the benefits of dance (or the processes inherent within it) for everyone, before consolidating my ideas in Chap. 11, the conclusion.

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If I’m going to argue that dance can be a sinthome, then I need to justify my turn from language and the (written) word. After all, Lacan himself insists that writing supports the real,1 and psychoanalysis as the “talking cure” depends on what the analysand says during each session. Furthermore, new words (of the analyst) often challenge and contribute to change in an analysand’s repetitive ways of being.2 Yet, when Lacan offers his seminars, there’s a quality to his language that, for me, suggests Lacan relationship with language isn’t straightforward and, obviously, neither is Joyce’s. Lacan’s improvises with words or uses them in ways that combine different elements to frustrate meaning and sense. He spins and twirls letters or sounds so that the language he uses barely resembles the language we use for everyday communication, and any understanding relies on the continuous movement of sounds that accompany the mutation of words, rather than on the (expected) meanings of words. The same goes for Joyce’s writing. Lacan says language is imposed upon Joyce, yet Joyce’s 1  See Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 21: Les Non dupes errent, trans. Cormac Gallagher. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/translations/seminars/. 2  Stephen A. Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 223.

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response to this imposition is to take the material elements of language and recombine them in new ways, new choreographies, if you will. He disconnects words and meanings, reducing words to letters and sounds until what’s left is not language that is readily understandable. It’s not the language we associate with the symbolic. The fragmented language of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the writing of the letter, which exists “outside the signifying chain and thus outside meaning.”3 That is, Joyce is using the structures of language that more readily reveal the existence of the real. In this chapter, I offer a look at Lacan and language, one that challenges the necessity of writing for and the primacy of language in the sinthome.

2.1 A Relational Turn Within Saussurian Linguistics One of the reasons to question the primacy of (the written in) language is the way Lacan employs Saussurian linguistics alongside the Freudian unconscious. Lacan argues the unconscious is fundamentally structured like a language. When understood to mean the unconscious is governed by rules of syntax and semantics just as language is, then Lacan’s focus on Joyce’s use of language in—and theorists’ arguments regarding the necessity of writing for—the creation of a sinthome makes sense. Yet we assume we understand the structure of language (e.g., as signs, codes), and therefore, we don’t always explore Lacan’s thought in depth. Of course, Lacan uses linguistics to illustrate the structural component of the unconscious, but then he changes Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model to emphasize that meaning in language relies on the slippage of the signifier. Rather than offering a structure of stable elements that links one signifier with  Graciela Prieto, “Writing the Subject’s Knot,” Recherches en psychanalyse 12, no. 2 (2011): 173, https://doi.org/10.3917/rep.012.0170. This connection between the letter and non-meaning is important when it comes to Lacan’s explanation of psychosis. The letter, as outside meaning, doesn’t exist outside of the symbolic entirely; Lacan is very clear that we can’t step outside the symbolic because its rules and laws govern our existence. Yet, the use of the letter, rather than language as communication, for example, permits Joyce to come nearer to portraying the inexpressible real than would be possible otherwise. 3

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one signified in the creation of a sign, Lacan identifies how the relationship between the signified and signifier in language is always unstable. Let me explain further. For Saussure,4 the sign is the totality of the signified over the signifier (separated by a horizontal bar and enclosed in a circle with arrows on each side—up on left; down on right), or a single element consisting of two associated terms. The signified is a concept, and the signifier is a sound-image (a psychological impression, not found physically in speech). The bar separating the signified and the signifier joins the two, and although the joint is arbitrary, it is also strong. Saussure looks at the sign only as a totality; for him, linguistic signs always contain both the signified and signifier. But Lacan places the signifier (S) over the signified (s), and the bar he places between the two represents not unification but resistance. Furthermore, for Lacan, the signified is the meaning (that always refers to another meaning), but the signifier is primary because only through its production is any signified possible. The relationship between the signifier and signified is, therefore, unstable. In other words, language is not composed of signs, but signifiers. Signifiers that constantly slip along in a chain of signifiers and have no stable meaning attached to them. If one were to efface a signifier (or “cancel” a signifier—think of Joyce cancelling his subscription to the unconscious) in the chain of signifiers, its absence would remain. This absence is indicative of the real. Lacan also adapts Saussure’s element of signs having a temporal linearity by adding a temporal circularity. That is, signifiers (not signs) only make sense retroactively, or—in other words—meaning is only ever established in retrospect, when punctuation intervenes to indicate the end of the chain of signifiers. In brief, Lacan takes Saussure’s ideas but reformulates them to show that language is not a naming process but an arbitrary linking of elements in which the arbitrary linkage then undermines the idea of the strength of the bond between the elements. When Lacan states the real is opened up by writing it, he suggests that the real is made possible through writing, but he also notes the letter is  Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bailey and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin, 3rd ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).

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the passage to the real. The letter not the word (nor the sign). Indeed, this conception of the letter plays a central role throughout Lacan’s own work. For example, in Seminar 15 on the psychoanalytic act, he delves into the worlds of letters and logic to explain how the psyche works, and he chooses those elements precisely because they reside outside meaning. They transcend the limits of the signifier5 and show logic “as having carried to its most advanced point the very task that [is] crucial for psychoanalysts: the exclusion from its premises of the subject supposed to know.”6

2.2 Loewald and Relationality A short digression into Hans W.  Loewald’s theory might help explain. Loewald developed the ideas of primary and secondary processes of language as co-existent forms of sensory experience: they are different ways to relate to language. (Secondary process is merely the meaning attributed to the sounds; Loewald makes this “secondary” because he argues it develops later in time for each individual.)7 For Loewald language encompasses both verbal and pre-verbal experiences; these experiences differ merely in how we relate to language, either semantically or phonetically. When I think of Joyce, I don’t see him evoking and using the semantic language, the one that gives meaning to the embodied sensory experience; rather, he uses the sensory experience itself, the sound and rhythm, etc., of language, without relying on any stable meanings. (Loewald identifies these aspects of language as how we first encounter language in the womb, which Lacan would likely see as insignificant or potentially erroneous, but the imaginary distinction, I think, is important in Lacan’s theory nonetheless as the non-existent and, therefore, impossible relation.) Joyce uses the signifier of language divorced from any signified.  See Seminar 19, 128. Lacan argues, “there are two horizons of the signifier.” Beyond these horizons lie the “maternal,” “material,” and “mathematical.” Ibid. 6  Cormac Gallagher, “A Reading of The Psychoanalytic Act (1967–1968),” The Letter: Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis 18 (Spring 2000): 11, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-­content/ u p l o a d s / 2 0 1 0 / 0 6 / Sp r i n g _ 2 0 0 0 - A - R E A D I N G - O F - T H E - P S YC H OA N A LY T I C ACT-1967-1968-Cormac-Gallagher.pdf. 7  “Primary Process, Secondary Process, and Language,” in The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monograph, 178–206 (Hagerstown, MD: University Publishing Group, 2000). 5

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2.3 Psychoanalysis and Language I’d like to return to my understanding of Lacan’s relationship with language, which you could characterize as him dancing with language. By “dancing with language,” I mean that he relies on the movement inherent within language: the slippage of signifiers and the instability of shifting meaning. Psychoanalysis—and Lacan’s seminars—use this relationship to uncover the unconscious. Often analysts will use the same words that the analysand uses in order to discover the meaning of that word or an associated event for the analysand, or to help the analysand see the meaning she’s been ascribing to that word isn’t universal. It’s this ambiguity and non-meaning inherent within language itself that Lacan plays on in his seminars. What we initially understand isn’t always what he means. And what we initially understand may differ from what someone else understands. He doesn’t give us bare facts, and (almost) everything he says contains an inherent ambiguity. Take, for example, the same seminar in which he draws out the relationship between writing and the real: Seminar 21. The title of the seminar in Les non-dupes errant. But what does that mean? Lacan himself draws out the phonetic similarity to les noms du père, but then leaves the ambiguity for his audience to ponder. My own thoughts are that he wants to underscore this relationship because those who are not duped (i.e., those not subject to the phallic function or those who have foreclosed on the name-of-the-father, e.g., Joyce) are in error: the symbolic is how we understand ourselves and is necessary, even if inconvenient on occasion. We are immersed in language, so the best we can do is try to understand that which structures us as subjects by playing with it and, little by little (or in bits and pieces), move it forward. Additionally, the name-of-the-­ father is a necessary limit on the real. Thus, I think there is also a suggestion that those who want to be non-duped—those who desire to step outside of the phallic function—are in error, because ultimately what wanting to step outside the phallic function amounts to is desiring the pain and confusion inherent in psychosis. In analytic practice, an analyst must attune to language, not just because analysis relies on free association but also because the meaning of

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words is often idiosyncratic. The meaning of words often depends on the relational context in which they were learned. If an analyst were to assume a meaning, then he would close off the possibilities for understanding the analysand and her experience. (This is why analysis is helpful—the analyst knows he doesn’t understand and thus listens rather than directing the analysand on how to be or act.) Often, when analysts repeat the words analysand’s use, they do so because they know those words have specific meanings that may only arise if and when the analysand sees that not everyone uses those words in the same way at all times.

2.4 Poetry This is the relationship to language that exists in poetry as well. The division within language that Loewald sees can be mapped onto what Julia Kristeva, for example, sees as the division between the semiotic and the symbolic in Revolution in Poetic Language.8 The semiotic is not semiotics or any aspect of language related to meaning; it comprises the aspects of language associated with the drives, the language that resonates physically. This, too, is related to the letter, not the word. Loewald, too, understands poetry as the border between the meaning of words and their sounds; poetry generates more than just cognitive understanding; it also generates sensory understanding. Poetry, for him, is an embodied language. Language doesn’t merely structure our existence because of how we are spoken of before we are born (or even conceived); language structures our existence because the language of the (m)other is felt within the organism that is the body. The primacy of the felt sense of language is what characterizes poetry differently from any other use of language. Therefore, if Joyce’s writing is effective, it’s because Joyce’s writing isn’t the writing of the word, but the writing of the letter. It’s the poetic writing that plays with non-sense and instability of meaning that helps Joyce

 Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 8

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contain the intrusions of the real that exist beyond language. Joyce uses the non-semantic elements of language to “write” a sinthome.

2.5 A New Relationship to the Real Even before I read Lacan’s statement regarding dance, I had misgivings about the sinthome being a process belonging to writing. Lacan’s seminar is on knots and the name-of-the-father, and he never fully explains how Joyce develops a sinthome, only that he does. While others focus on the idiosyncratic nature of Joyce’s writing (as writing), I wondered about Joyce’s relationship to language and what it offered him. Lacan is often placed in a class by himself in psychoanalytic history: Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacanian psychoanalysis, object relations, ego psychology, interpersonal or relational psychoanalysis, etc. But Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret Black refer to Lacan as an early relational psychoanalyst.9 I think they have a point, one that becomes more evident if you look at Lacan’s understanding of language. Common interpretations of Lacan’s twenty-third seminar suggest Joyce writes a name for himself10 (outside of the phallic function) or uses writing to break down language, establishing the sinthome as the end product of a process that detaches language from its conventional uses but requires language nonetheless. I disagree and suggest that because the non-semantic elements within Joyce’s writing are more important than the use of language, Joyce shows that it’s a relationship to language that is important and the idea that language is relational that matters. Whereas others focus on how Joyce writes himself a sinthome, I see the importance of Joyce’s writing in its creative aspect: he creates a new relationship, through language, to the real, a relationship that didn’t exist for him before except as intrusions into his body. This idea isn’t outlandish: a return to the body (that is, the real as experienced via the body) wouldn’t be anathema for Lacan, nor would the importance of play be. He did, after all, ask 9  See Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1995), chap. 7. 10  This is important to remember because Lacan argues that psychosis is related to the missing primordial signifier, that of the name-of-the-father.

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people to play with knots during his seminars as a way to connect ideas and language to the body. In other words, thinking in language requires physical manipulation in play. Furthermore, for Lacan body language is language (in the way I’ve defined Lacan’s understanding of language). Additionally, I think we can tie Saussurian linguistics to the sinthome. Lacan shows how we operate in language (under the name-of-the-father) in a Saussurian way, believing that x maps to y and together make a sign. His discourse on Saussure, however, and his re-making of Saussure’s theory show us the limits of thinking of language as only signs and how our possibilities increase when “the” relationship isn’t the only one. In the larger scheme of Lacan’s work, Saussurian linguistics would be the endless repetition of our habitual ways of being with others, whereas Lacan’s reconceptualization would be us seeing that our recurrent ways of being in relationship with others are not the only possibilities. When Lacan uses math and mathemes, he takes us away from the metaphors of language, but these elements are not independent realities or instances of the real; they are only what reveals a real, one we can’t cover over with metaphor. Both language and math are slippery and require agreement, but math doesn’t add meaning to its agreement. In language we think we understand whereas in math it’s obvious how meaning is tenuous: f(x) = 4 in a particular relationship, but changing the x (or the function), changes the meaning. Thus, f(x) = 4 if x = 1 in f(x) = 2x + 2, but change the x to 7, and f(x) now equals 16. When Lacan uses math, he’s trying to explain both the relationality of (all) language and the problems he sees in ordinary discourse. He’s trying to get “beyond” language. He’s dancing, as I see it. Yet, he can’t get beyond language because math is still “structured like a language.” But dance is too. Both, however, reveal a real more than our everyday discourse (its existence, not its contents; they reveal what language bends around); they still operate in relationships, but they give us the space to (maybe) see things differently. People don’t end up in psychoanalysis because they are hungry and have no food or because they have  experienced a natural disaster, for example. They end up in psychoanalysis because when they were hungry, no one cared. Or because when they were scared and feeling helpless, they were told others had it worse or that they were expecting too much. Or because when they went to someone for help or comfort, that person,

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in trying to remedy his own past, failed to recognize what was truly needed and instead offered he would have wanted in the past. In other words, people end up in psychoanalysis due to failed, broken, or inadequate relationships, because someone only saw them as the other (who could fulfill, possibly, one’s own desire). Lacan sees this, even in Joyce. Joyce isn’t writing because the symptoms of psychosis are overwhelming him (Lacan only sees Joyce as having averted psychosis after all), but because of the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father. As Lacan explicitly states, Joyce’s father wasn’t a father.11 In other words, Joyce is writing because of a failed relationship (albeit one that underpins the entire structure of psychic life), and Joyce found a way to create his own conditions of analysis. What is important in Joyce is how he uses language in its rhythm, metre, and cadence, for example—those elements that reside outside words and meaning and reveal the real—not that he uses language. If Lacan accepts that we’re already in language (not just born into it or come to acquire it, that language structures our being even before our existence), then he’s drawing out a way of relating to language that is not how he talks of language. It’s a difference in relation (or form), not function. Thus, the comment the “unconscious is structured like a language” means the unconscious has a more embodied and relational life before we are constrained by the name-of-the-father and before we come to see the symbolic as the only way to understand life, and Joyce uses language to develop a relationship to the unconscious that accepts its embodied nature but without demanding understanding. Joyce develops a new relationship to language. Mitchell and Black state (correctly, I think) that the analytic goal for Lacan (with the neurotic) isn’t a removal of the symptom but a new relationship to it.12 Therefore, for the psychotic whose “symptom” (due to the foreclosure of the name-of-the-­ father) is a loss of the body (imaginary) / intrusion of the real, one needs a new relationship to the real and/in the body. It’s Loewald that offers an idea of what this might look like because of his distinction between different relationships to and within language. In other words, knowing that Lacan places a high value on the idiosyncrasies of language, it follows that 11 12

 Seminar 23, 77.  Freud and Beyond, 199.

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language (and the unconscious) is relational, and it’s, consequently, relationships that need to be addressed. Therefore, part of what this book does is explore what Joyce’s writing offers him—possibly—outside of its relationship to our everyday understanding of language. Finally, Lacan suggests Joyce’s use of language to establish a sinthome is apt because it sheds light on the way schizophrenic symptoms predominate within the realm of language. He also suggests that Joyce’s writing is a way to create a name for himself. Lacan, however, is using Joyce to support his theory. It is possible writing is essential to the creation of a sinthome, but there are other interpretations of Joyce’s writing as sinthomic in which other key elements contribute to Joyce’s forestalling his collapse into psychosis. Joyce uses language and writing, but what he really uses is what’s within and beyond language (the real), and he does so in very specific ways, ways that I elucidate in the forthcoming chapters and ways I see as crucial for the sinthome. The techniques he uses, I argue, exist naturally in dance, as do those elements of the symbolic that abide within language and touch on the real. I propose that although Lacan’s concepts offer a framework for looking at dance as a sinthome, to enhance this framework, concepts developed by others—but which nonetheless, I argue, fit within Lacanian theory—can offer additional insights and move Lacanian thought forward. If language (and meaning) is relational for Lacan, then seeing the sinthome in a new light—and the possibilities of dance as a sinthome—can help us relate to Lacan differently and see new meanings. So, while Joyce uses language and writing as his sinthome, what he really uses are specific processes that employ what is in (within and beyond) language. Specifically, I discern within Joyce’s writing three activities essential to his sinthome—mirroring, containing / developing a potential space, and play—and these processes, as I will show, are found more readily in dance. The sinthome, as I see it, is a process for creative possibility, a creative space or the development of a potential space, wherein one can see himself reflected without judgment and in which one can play with and thereby bind the elements of the real that threaten

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to overwhelm him, allowing one to live with the real rather than be controlled by it. I will now briefly discuss Lacan’s understanding of the psyche and the sinthome before discussing the components of the sinthomic process that I see operating in Joyce’s writing.

3 Setting the Bar(re)

If dance is a potential sinthome, then it is important to understand the elements that Lacan suggests comprise the psyche and how psychosis relates to that psychic structure. In this chapter, I offer an overview of the Lacanian theory that underpins my argument, not only covering the structure of psyche and Lacan’s understanding of psychosis but also two other elements that relate to the sinthome: objet a and (feminine) jouissance. Throughout this chapter, I also place dance in relation to Lacanian theory.

3.1 Being in the World The concept through which I am exploring the connection between dance and the psyche is Lacan’s formulation of the psyche as three interlocking rings or registers—the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real— fashioned in a Borromean knot. This Borromean knot as a representation of the psyche is a later development in Lacanian theory, and explained more clearly, it’s Lacan’s structural concept of the mind as three interlocking elements—or psychic modes through which we experience the world. That is, these three “rings” are the three aspects of subjectivity, and they © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Sherritt, Dancing an Embodied Sinthome, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7_3

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are knotted in such a way that should any one of these three rings break, then the entire psychic structure would fall apart, and one would lose touch with reality. Just as at the core of every knot we find an empty space, so it is in the psyche. This hole is also ontological in nature, one we all share, and there is no escaping it (at least not by choice). This hole or lack plays an important role in Lacan’s understanding not only of neurosis but also, by extension, of psychosis and the sinthome. Because of this hole at the centre of our psyches, we feel incomplete. Feeling incomplete is uncomfortable, and therefore, we want to become complete and spend our lives trying to fill that hole or find that missing piece that will make us whole again. Lacan conceptualizes the objet a as what occupies this hole: the (non) object that resides in this space and reminds us of it, causing the desire to fill it. We come to imagine there is someone or something that will complete us; thus, our endless repetition of desire as we (unconsciously) defend again this lack. In other words, we cover over the lack in ourselves and deny its existence. Furthermore, because this hole is the centre of the knot, it and the associated desire to fill it are related to each of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, concepts I’ll turn to now before returning to discuss the objet a (and its relationship to jouissance) more deliberately.

3.1.1 The Imaginary Each aspect of the psyche plays an equal role in the “working” psyche. First, the imaginary—as you may guess—is related to our imaginations and what we see or imagine (consciously or unconsciously) ourselves and others to be. The imaginary is what allows us to cope with reality—and is our reality—and it is a necessary precondition for the emergence of the subject. Lacan’s mirror stage can help illustrate this idea. The mirror stage initially takes place wherein a baby perceives herself in the mirror. The mirror image depicts a constancy and consistency that the baby, who still lacks motor control, does not have. This experience, then, sets up a split in the subject: the ideal image in the mirror as opposed to the “self ” that is, in reality, fragmented and subject to needs and urges over which the baby has no control. Lacan refers to this latter representation as the “body

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in bits and pieces.”1 The mirror stage, therefore, establishes the ego. In seeing oneself in the mirror, the baby then develops a representation of the “I,” which is really the ideal-ego, the imago of perfection that the child cannot equal but an image that comes to define her life by making her believe in a perfection that she will, from then on, always try to (re)attain. This stage, however, ushers in a dependence: the child is now dependent on the other for a sense of self (as the child is held to the mirror), which means the “I” emerges from a relation to the other. This stage sets up “imaginary identification,”2 making one believe a “true self ” exists even though it does not.3 The mirror stage, thus, establishes a belief in a pre-existing unity that contrasts a now-existing disunity. This introduces not only the belief that one can become whole again4 but also the fear that one is in “constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started.”5 The mirror stage, then, also sets up a fundamental anxiety because the image the child sees in the mirror contrasts the inner,

 Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34 (1953): 13. Lacan also refers to this as a “fragmented image of the body.” “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 78. 2  Lacan, Seminar 19, 147. 3  This is also Lacan’s criticism of Donald W. Winnicott: Winnicott sees “mirroring” as a route to the true self, a self which Lacan denies exists. Sherry Turkle, for example, notes that Lacan disputes the idea of a true or core self and believes this concept is merely illusion. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 178. The mirror, for Lacan, inaugurates the divided subject—divided between the ego-ideal and ideal-ego—and establishes the foundation for all (neurotic) psychic disturbances, disturbances that can only be removed by rejecting the concept of the ego or true self and embracing the divisions of the subject. I will discuss this further subsequently, especially as regards Winnicott’s concept of mirroring, a concept that illustrates, I suggest, how the mirror stage’s function is not static. 4  Lacan repeatedly contests the idea of being able to create a “one” throughout his later seminars. He refers to the unary trait as support of the imaginary identification; the unary trait is the pure difference of signification: it is different from other signifiers and, thereby, suggests there is an exception to the rule, so I can be the one who is whole, for example. It institutes an “imaginary identification [that] operates through a symbolic mark” Seminar 19, 147. Thus, it links the psyche together, illustrating why the lack of the unary trait in psychosis (the lack of the name-of-the-­ father) threatens the integrity of the psyche. 5  Jane Gallop, “Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’: Where to Begin,” in “A Special Issue from the Center for Twentieth Century Studies,” special issue, SubStance 11/12, no. 4/1 (1982): 123, https://doi. org/10.2307/3684185. This is also relevant to Lacan’s argument against science, which he sees as purely theology in Seminar 15. Science, he argues, assumes there is a knowledge to be found that pre-exists the subject. I will expand on this point later. 1

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felt reality. Thus, our bodies (and our relationship to them) are also a part of the imaginary. Although the mirror stage is often considered a stage that a child passes through in a developmental sense, it is also possible to understand it as a theatrical stage. It is a structure upon which a person plays out his life, and in that vein, the experience of the mirror stage and its effects recur throughout life: re-experiencing the feeling of disunity leads us to (once more) structure ourselves in relation to the other. To Lacan, the mirror stage sets up the common neurotic condition, and only three conditions exist: neurosis, psychosis, and perversion. There is no “normal.” The most common condition, the one colloquially considered “normal,” is neurosis. Understanding the mirror stage as a structure upon which neurosis plays out, however, also suggests that the mirror can then also be used to disrupt the psychotic process.

3.1.2 The Symbolic The symbolic element of the psyche is related to speech, language, and signification; language resides in the symbolic, and signifiers are what give experience a contextual frame and meaning. In other words, the symbolic is seeing the world through shared metaphors and “rules” for co-existing (with the name-of-the-father as the basis of this), and it encapsulates the phallic function as a restraint on the Oedipus complex: the “father”—as a symbolic prohibition that sets up the rules for co-­ existing—intervenes in the child’s desire, and the subject acquires the phallic function as a universal symptom. That is, we are prohibited from our “desire” to be the phallus for the mother by the acceptance of a certain metaphor, that of the name-of-the-father (in Lacan-ese). The Oedipus complex thus structures our lives: our “desire” to kill the father and marry the mother (to regain wholeness) becomes how we operate in the world, with different people or things as stand-ins. Additionally, being a function, f(x) in mathematical language, the phallic function, Φx in Lacanian notation, also ushers in a belief there is a way to master reality: by being the x that fulfills the function.

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We—as humans—cannot escape the symbolic; we entered it with the development of language, and the symbolic ushers in a concomitant belief that one can master reality: “due to speaking everything succeeds.”6 The symbolic structures our communal existence; therefore, although humans initially entered it via language, today everyone, including those without language (babies, for example), necessarily exists within the symbolic and must accommodate to it.

3.1.3 The Real The real, for Lacan, is different. It is not a way in which we understand the world, yet it still plays a role in our subjectivity because it colours our experience of the world. The real is the truth of the fact we cannot always process the world. Some things defy (and always will) our understanding or our imaginative and symbolic capabilities. The real reveals itself in those experiences that have no corresponding language or imaginary imprint, experiences that cannot be thought, symbolized, nor represented (for example, a trauma). It is the surplus that cannot be contained within the symbolic or imaginary but which, nonetheless, is required for those modes to exist. In other words, although the real may contribute to psychosis for some, the healthy psyche must also incorporate the real. Yet because the real exists, it occasionally forces its way into our reality, and the irruption of the real into reality is conceived as “tuché” (a missed encounter with the real, missed because a true encounter would require symbolization).7 As Cormac Gallagher explains, originally Lacan could only define the real negatively, but once Lacan starts to conceptualize the psyche with a triadic structure, he also begins to define the real positively as “the objects that cause desire – objects that act directly on the subject without the mediation of language or images and are characterized by their relationship to orifices, or better holes, that enclose nothings in the  Seminar 20, 56.  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 11: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis ed. Jacques-­ Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 53–64. For more on the real and the relation among the psychic modes of experiencing the world, see The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 22: R. S. I., trans. Cormac Gallagher, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-­content/ uploads/2010/06/RSI-Complete-With-Diagrams.pdf. 6 7

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body.”8 This aspect of the psyche is the hardest to describe because to describe it requires the language of the symbolic, yet however impossible it is to represent symbolically, it still exists precisely as what cannot be captured by the symbolic (or imaginary). In my understanding, the experience of the real is similar to the feeling you may have had when suddenly it seems like you’re no longer in reality but in a different place or time and when things around you suddenly seem unfamiliar. The real is what the body knows and cannot symbolize: it is how a smell can evoke feelings or a sound can trigger flashbacks without connections to the stories or narratives that would make these bodily experiences understandable.9 Others have explained this as “the forms through which content is conveyed – the human voice that delivers it; the syntactical form that constructs it; the diction, metre, rhythm, the poetics of form.”10 This is the realm of the presentational, and the real consists of the elements that, despite their insistence upon us, we cannot force into a form we can comprehend. It is a real that is the real of the drives, both the life and death drives, and is the something within those drives that insists on expression. This real cannot be symbolized; it “only can be pondered qua impossible.”11 As Lacan states, “In-sisting outside the imaginary and the symbolic, the real butts into, plays into, something that is the order of limitation…. The real only enjoys ex-sistence to the extent that it encounters, with the symbolic and the imaginary, a point of arrest.”12 In other words, the real  “Nets to Knots: The Odyssey to a Beyond of Barbarism,” The Letter, Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis 35 (Autumn 2005): 10–11, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/ uploads/2010/06/Aut_2005-NETS-TO-KNOTS-THE-ODYSSEY-TO-A-BEYOND-OFBARBARISM-­Cormac-Gallagher.pdf. 9  Trauma studies are invaluable for helping to conceptualize the real, but they have their limits. The real is not merely an external event that is non-symbolizable and results in “symptoms,” although often those with psychosis are consequently traumatized by systems that fail to help them. Nonetheless, trauma studies help illuminate the effects of the real and how they arise in the body as (potentially) overwhelming sensations. 10  Christopher Bollas, “Character and Interformality,” in The Christopher Bollas Reader (New York: Routledge, 2001), 239. 11  Seminar 23, 106. Alenka Zupančič describes this impossibility as “a stumbling block” or “something that interrupts a process.” The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 162. 12  Seminar 23, 38. 8

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cannot be expressed in language because language (the symbolic) has no way to account for it, nor can it be imagined because it exists outside of our reality. In a sense, then, it does not exist, since existence is related to what is speakable—Lacan says the real exists only as experience—but rather it ex-sists: it is external to our symbolic and imaginary capabilities, intruding into our lives as if from the outside. We recognize it only once something arises we cannot account for in the symbolic or the imaginary.

3.1.4 Psychic Entanglement The three aspects of the psyche work together: they not only limit each other, but jointly they also establish a coherent psychic reality. Lacan describes them as entwined like a knot, specifically a Borromean knot, meaning that each mode of understanding is mutually dependent on the other two. The symbolic and imaginary reveal a real because we don’t always have ways to explain or understand everything, yet at the same time, we attempt to cover over the fact we cannot account for everything—we cover over the real that the symbolic and imaginary reveal with the symbolic and imaginary in a constant movement to try to maintain a balance. Yet, the symbolic (and thus the imaginary) rely on the real (just as the real relies on the symbolic and the imaginary). In my understanding, each aspect cannot exist without the others because the others operate as limits; each mode of understanding has its primary function as well as a corollary responsibility of limiting the expression of the other modes so that (in a healthy psyche) no single mode (or its contents) can overwhelm the subject. Therefore, there is no dominant way of experiencing the world within the (average) psyche, although in any situation one realm may appear to take primacy over the others.

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3.2 The Art of Dance Within the Lacanian Psyche I now want to show how dance exemplifies the entwining of these aspects of the psyche. Harry Slochower refers to arts as operating within “the language of the senses, that is by the body and its movement in its corporeal polysemic guises.”13 His, concept of art, therefore, brings art into relationship with the elements of the psyche in the symbolic (language) and the imaginary (the body). The real comes in because if, as per Slochower, art relies on a bodily connection,14 and the real comprises the unrepresentable elements of experience that are often—and especially in psychosis—played out within the body, then the real will necessarily exist within art. Dance, in my argument, therefore seems ideally suited as an art to (re)create the connection among real, the symbolic, and the imaginary because dance employs all elements of the psyche deliberately, with the body playing a central role, whereas the other arts forms suppress the connection to the body or often try to minimize the body.

3.2.1 Dancing with the Imaginary Regarding the imaginary, dance, stripped down, always involves the body, a body that is clearly linked to the Lacanian imaginary. Foster notes in her research how the choreography of Merce Cunningham embraces this quality of the imaginary, so dance becomes the movement of the body alone.15 This idea of dance being a body is also evident in concepts of free movement or popular psychology ideas of dancing to release energy in  “Psychoanalysis and Art: Their Body Language,” American Imago 43, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 3, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26303862. 14  Ellen Winner, in a different context, argues that art that is emotionally arousing—and therefore, more affective—is so because of a connection to movement, which implies a bodily connection. She uses music as her example, and writes, “music makes us feel like moving. … Moving in these ways … may intensify the emotions we feel.” How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 87. Gilbert J. Rose, too, would accept this as his focus in on the power of the implicit motion in art, specifically music. See Between Couch and Piano: Psychoanalysis, Music, Art and Neuroscience (New York: Brenner-Routledge, 2004). 15  Reading Dancing, xiv. 13

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which dancing is meaningless (at least in the popular imagination), and dance becomes something that can exist outside of the rules.16 Dance is performance as well; therefore, performance is another way in which dance exists within the imaginary: performance deeply connects to how one presents oneself to others or to how one imagines oneself, either as an image for others or as the figure of the dance separate from the dancer. The imaginary in dance, thereby, is a continual oscillation between the fragmented body and the image one projects of coherence. Finally, as we know, the instrument of dance is the body, and the dancer must learn to work within the limits of his or her individual body, as each body is unique in its strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, and constraints. It is through the body and its movement that we understand not only our bodily limitations, but also, as per John Hodgson, “the nature of our being, our condition, relationships with others and our place in the universe.”17 The dancer, choreographer, and director Fosse, I suggest, epitomizes the nature of coming to terms with his body through dance; he used the limitations of his body to develop his own style of dance and embrace a different relationship to himself. He took the limitations of his own body and used them to create what is now a signature style.18

3.2.2 Dancing in the Symbolic Dance, like all art, takes place only in the symbolic, as does all of life. It may be that dance is the art form best suited to creating a sinthome because it is simultaneously distant from the symbolic (from the language we often come to see as defining the symbolic) yet still within it. There are, for  This is more accurate in terms of popular psychology and the association of dance with new-age therapies than it is of Merce Cunningham or other professional dancers. Even Isadora Duncan, who appears to throw away the rules and develops modern dance as a return to nature (and natural movement), nonetheless has a style (that is, thereby, rule-governed): you know when you are seeing her style of dance just as much as you know when you are watching Balanchine- or Fosse-style dance. 17  Mastering Movement: The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban (New York: Routledge, 2001), 178. 18  This is notable true, in terms of accepting the limits of the body, for Wendy Whelan, former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, as well. She was diagnosed with scoliosis early in her training, and although she received treatment, she nonetheless developed a curved back that ultimately became an aspect of her individual style. See Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan, directed by Linda Saffire and Adam Schlesinger (2016; Pleasantville, NY: Abramorama, 2017), DVD. 16

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example, rules—implicit and explicit—that govern different styles of dance and the greater cultural assessment of dances. The connection to the symbolic means dance also has a (tenuous) connection to meaning as well. Although there is no obvious or straightforward translation of a dance into meaning, dances are often created with a meaning in mind, even if the creation of a dance for a certain purpose does not always translate for the audience or if the audience reads something different in the dance than the creator intended. Furthermore, there are, as David Best argues, limits to the possible interpretation of a dance that exist in relation to the audience’s expectation, limits defined by the context, location, or, even, event.19 These limits to the interpretations of a dance exist even as dance allows for multiple interpretations, suggesting that dance, too, touches on the symbolic and is not merely the real being played out in the body.

3.2.3 Dancing the Real Dance is also a part of the real. Lacan relates the real to the “mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious” (which is also the mystery of the “parlêtre”).20 Paul Valéry relates dance to “the mystery of the body,”21 thus suggesting it is related to what is ineffable or mysterious and cannot be understood using Lacanian logic. Although Valéry makes no connection between his use of this phrase and Lacan’s parlêtre, he nonetheless sets up a parallel that suggests an intimate connection exists between dance and the mystery of the parlêtre, one that fits within Lacanian theory because the concept of the parlêtre itself is both the body qua spoken and speech qua embodied; Lacan is playing with their inextricability and the “mysteries” to which this gives rise. Furthermore, the real, for Lacan, isn’t language but arises as an effect of the resonance and tone among the other elements of language (including silence, something I will return to later) that exist over and above simple words and that are not directly communicative. In dance, rhythm,   “The Aesthetics of Dance,” Dance Research Journal 7, no. 2 (1975): 14, https://doi. org/10.2307/1477820. 20  Seminar 20, 131. 21  “Philosophy of the Dance,” 70. 19

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vibration, (im)pulses, and physical sensations all combine as essential elements of the dance. While some of these elements can be controlled or choreographed, others only appear within the act of dancing (as mysteries). The real can intrude on the dance and/or be made into the dance. Edward Denby writes that there is a risk in dance that arises because of dance’s use of rhythm: dancers are always on the precipice between balance and instability, but the inherent risk in that position is enhanced when one has to take that balance and instability and match it to the rhythm of the music.22 In other words, dance forces one to confront the real and its attendant risks, both in how it uses elements of the real and in how these elements regularly threaten or in-sist upon the dance.

3.3 Psychosis Psychosis, for Lacan, has to do with a fault within the psyche. The different components of the psyche are essential in Lacan’s understanding of psychosis because the symptoms of psychosis, or at least of schizophrenia, overwhelmingly exist in the symbolic. When Lacan first explores psychosis, he discusses Daniel Paul Schreber and how “the psychotic is inhabited, possessed, by language,”23 and when he much later starts to write of the sinthome—the element that allows Joyce to avoid psychosis—he focuses on the neologisms, fragmented writing, and imposed words of Joyce as evidence of possible psychosis.24 Lacan’s emphasis on language (that is, the symbolic) arises in part because of his understanding of the relationship between psychosis and the metaphor of the name-of-the-father, the metaphor that structures  “Forms in Motion and in Thought,” Salmagundi 33/34 (Spring–Summer 1976): 115, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/40546927. This potential loss of balance—or the “intolerable tension between ‘about to fall’ and ‘not falling’” is also seen by Rose as one of the central dynamics of dance. Between Couch and Piano, 146. 23  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 3: The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1997), 250. 24  See Seminar 23. He also first notes the relationship to the body, however. In particular, Stephen (aka Joyce) in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, losses the connection to his body. Lacan, Seminar 23; also see James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 161. 22

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one’s being and represents the function of castration. In his conceptualization of psychic functioning, normality is perforce neurosis, of living within the metaphor of the Oedipus complex, which is also living according to the law of the (big O) Other. The Oedipus complex involves the (repressed) acceptance of the authority of a certain metaphor, that of the name-of-the-father that I mentioned previously. This metaphor is the primordial metaphor that establishes the rules and codes of existence. It is the rule of law and ties desire to the law, regulating desire and prohibiting its fulfilment. We, however, repress our knowledge of this function and live under the illusion that there is a wholeness to the subject, even though the phallic function shapes the lack and, thereby, the desire to attain that wholeness. Lacan argues that without this metaphor (without the existence of the name-of-the-father), “the collision and explosion of the situation as a whole” cannot be prevented.25 In neurosis, this metaphor is repressed yet still exists, thereby avoiding this “collision and explosion.” By contrast, the explosion Lacan references is psychosis, which is a “nihilation” or “foreclosure” of the name-of-the-father signifier, of its metaphor: “It can thus happen that something primordial regarding the subject’s being does not enter into symbolization and is not repressed, but rejected.”26 This foreclosure is not conscious because “the Law is there precisely from the beginning, it has always been there, and human sexuality must realize itself through it and by means of it,”27 but it is a foreclosure nonetheless. The foreclosure is unconscious precisely because the only way one could consciously reject the metaphor of the phallic function would be to accept its existence, which then means one was still operating according to it. The need (as opposed to desire) of the psychotic, if he is to live in reality, is to be the exception to the name-of-the-­ father: the one who can step outside of the metaphor. Lacan goes on to argue that the nihilation of the name-of-the-father results in “the emergence in reality of an enormous meaning that … cannot be tied to anything, since it has never entered into the system of symbolization.”28 This  Seminar 3, 96.  Seminar 3, 205; Seminar 19, 14; Seminar 3, 81. 27  Seminar 3, 83. 28  Seminar 3, 85. 25 26

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is the emergence (into the psyche) of those things we cannot explain symbolically or subsume into the imaginary, i.e., it’s the emergence of the real. The collision thus ensues, and this “imaginary cataclysm” results in “dissociation, fragmentation, mobilization of the signifier as speech, ejaculatory speech that is insignificant or too significant, laden with no-­ meaningfulness, the decomposition of internal discourse, which marks the entire structure of psychosis.”29 In other words, without the name-of-­ the-father, those symptoms arise—the concretization and fracturing of language, the merger with objects, and the auditory hallucinations of voices that dictate one’s actions, etc.—that characterize psychosis (schizophrenia in particular). Todd McGowan describes this process as the subject being overwhelmed because he is unable to experience the (missing) structure that correlates with the loss of the name-of-the-father, and without that structure, there are no limits to the real.30 In turn, the real overwhelms the subject because she can’t cover it over or make meaning of it. Thus, if the universal developmental process means that one substitutes the name-of-the-father for one’s desire for the mother, which is the primordial or foundational metaphor that sets up the possibility of all other metaphors, then the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father is the loss of metaphoric possibilities. Therefore, the real has a significant place in Lacan’s theory of psychosis despite his and subsequent theorists’ emphasis on the symbolic. In a healthy psyche, the real is often experienced in the body and is contained within the psyche via the symbolic. Since one cannot directly symbolize the real, language—particularly metaphor—allows one to articulate something around the real so that the real is less intrusive. The symbolic reacts to the intrusion of the real by establishing a meaning where none exists. In psychosis, however, when one lacks the name-of-the-father and the ability to establish meaning, the real (as it’s first felt within the body) starts to fray the knot of the psyche. As the real presses in on one even more, the symbolic can’t ascribe meaning and the body (imaginary) becomes overwhelmed. The body then “leaves,” and the real, no longer  Seminar 3, 321.  “The Psychosis of Freedom: Law in Modernity,” in Lacan on Psychosis, ed. Jon Mills and David L. Downing (London: Routledge, 2018), 51. 29 30

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bound, spews forth into the symbolic; however, with the primordial metaphor missing, there is now a focus on metonymy instead of metaphor. Metaphor is the symptom that is interpreted by the analyst, and metonymy is the sliding of the signifier in the signifying chain. In other words, metonymy is the continual movement of the signifiers that displaces meaning; our symptoms are the metaphors we create to cope with this lack of meaning in the signifier itself. In psychosis, with the primordial metaphor missing, any meaning—and any metaphoric possibilities—of the signifier is effaced, and in its place exists only a concretization of language. Metonymy (desire) continues to operate but cannot be symbolized. The violence of trauma and its relation to the body are essential for fully appreciating Lacan’s image of Joyce as a “non-triggered” psychotic. Lacan’s understanding of psychosis draws on the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud conceptualizes psychosis as a disturbance between the ego and the external world (reality): the ego is dragged from reality and then creates a new reality in an attempt to repair this ruptured relationship to reality. This second step, however—the creation of a new reality—is never fully successful because, in Lacanian terms, the real persists and insists upon us. The symbolic fails to create a meaning, and thus, the real’s continued insistence necessarily shows effect in the imaginary. This pressure or persistence of the real creates anxiety around the body, which only furthers the desire to flee reality.31 Riccardo Lombardi emphasizes the importance of the body as it relates to Freud’s version of psychosis. Lombardi postulates, “if owning the body leads to the birth of the ‘person’ together with the first expressions of mental functioning correlated with the sense organs, then conversely, the negation of the body in psychosis gives rise to depersonalization,”32 or, in other words, in psychosis one is absent the  For the development of Freud’s thoughts regarding psychosis, see Freud, “Neurosis and Psychosis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19 (1923–1925), The Ego and the Id and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud, 147–54 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1961) and “The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis,” in ibid., 181–88. He later, in “Fetishism,” also argues that psychosis differs from neurosis because in psychosis all of the person disavows a part of reality so that part of reality is utterly absent, whereas in neurosis, the rejected part of reality is only disavowed by part of person. “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (1927–1931), The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works, ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, trans. Joan Riviere (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1961), 156. 32  Body-Mind Dissociation, 72. 31

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relationship with one’s body in the same way that Lacan recognizes Joyce taking leave of his body, thrusting the subject into a world of unreality. In the average situation, the real cannot be subsumed by the symbolic, so the imaginary acts as a break on the real: we imagine meaning where none exists. But in psychosis, when one is at risk of losing her imaginative capacity, one is left only with the meaningless real. I want to suggest, however, that the imaginary slips away in psychosis not as cause of but concurrent with foreclosure. Each element within the psyche relies on the others, and one can only think of one element in relation to the others. I posit that although the symbolic appears to be primary within Lacan’s conceptualization of psychosis, this is only because a diagnosis of psychosis requires the existence of a disorder of language.33 The other two aspects of the psyche still bear upon psychosis in ways that are less obvious. Lacan himself tells us that all aspects are “equivalent to one another. They are constituted by something that is reproduced in all three of them.”34 Far from undoing his previous thoughts,35 this shift in Lacan’s thinking (to focus on the symbolic) incorporates the symptoms of psychosis and his understanding of psychosis as foreclosure (a symbolic process): he was adding the symbolic (and eventually the real) to his earlier understandings of psychosis rather than ignoring or moving away from the imaginary. Even when his focus is on the symbolic (and the real), the imaginary is still very much a part of his theorizing: it is, after, the imaginary (the body) that threatens to leave in psychosis. Thus, just as the real, symbolic, and imaginary “can only be thought in their mutual implication,”36 understanding psychosis also entails looking at these elements’ interdependence. The real emerges, and since the real cannot be symbolized, it threatens the psychic structure to the point of negation of the body. Christopher Bollas describes the interrelation between the imaginary and the symbolic (within psychosis) as the loss of the human dimension  Seminar 3, 92.  Seminar 23, 37–38. 35  See Stijn Vanheule, The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). In this work, Vanheule argues Lacanian thought exists as four “eras,” representing “shifts in [Lacan’s] conception of psychosis” and his changing ideas over time, which move from the imaginary (including the mirror stage) to the symbolic (with a focus on metaphor and metonym as well as foreclosure), then to the eras that incorporates the real (objet a, jouissance), until the final era: the era of the sinthome. 36  Van Haute, Against Adaptation: Lacan’s ‘Subversion’ of the Subject, trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk (New York: Other Press, 2002), 292. 33 34

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of bodily movement or how “the I—the speaker of being—has departed.”37 Instead of characteristic (and idiosyncratic) ways of moving or speaking or gesturing, the person who experiences psychosis seems more android-­ like. The ability to execute ordinary movement is lost as the person has no relationship to one’s body anymore. Movement is automatic and void of personality. This fits with Lacan: if the self that I (and others) believe in (or the true self Donald W. Winnicott sees) is an illusion caused by our belief that the central lack in the psyche corresponds to an absence, then in psychosis, as the imaginary threatens to take its leave, we lose this (erroneous) sense of self and the idea of our bodies as ours. (We also, therefore, lose the empty space at the centre of the psyche, at least if the psychic knot unravels completely, but without the space, there is no vacuum point, or nothing to tether us to reality or to others.) If speaker of being, as the parlêtre, is what disappears in schizophrenia, this process also, results—paradoxically—in a focus on the body,38 even as the body slips away into an “android-like” nature. The body slipping away is a mechanism designed to protect the imaginary due to the intrusion (or in-sistence) of the real: “the self cannot be damaged if it is not there to begin with.”39 To put this another way, Bollas uses the term “metasexuality” to describe one way the person with schizophrenia copes with the loss of the name-of-the-father, by which he means the characteristic attitude of merger, or the return to a fusion of father-mother-infant that creates a “thingness” of the world into which the schizophrenic merges and becomes an inanimate part of, creating a non-human world.40 Although Lacan’s later seminars suggest the psychotic does not collapse  When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 76. 38  Julieta de Battista, “Lacanian Concept of Desire in Analytic Clinic of Psychosis,” Frontiers in Psychology, 8 (2017): 3, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00563. 39  Bollas, When the Sun Bursts, 95. 40  When the Sun Bursts, 99. Metasexuation is (or can be read as) evidence of the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father. It is the collapse of sexual difference, i.e., the beyond of sexuality. In Lacanian theory this can be understand as a failure of feminine jouissance in that it is a form “beyond” sexuality but a broken form: it, according to Bollas, “join[s] two eras and two selves into one” without joining the two forms themselves. There is an internalized division that structures the psyche, which Bollas argues leads to a desire for union. Ibid. Metasexuation, however, also suggests that a psyche at risk of psychosis shares this collapse of sexual difference; thus, the pre-psychotic needs to find a way to accommodate this (altered) psychic structure. 37

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into the imaginary so much as the imaginary takes flight, the idea to take from this is that symbolic meanings disappear, leaving only the concrete objects that a person cannot distinguish from herself. The psychotic process, then, raises questions of existence. The lack of metaphorization occasioned by the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father means that because one cannot generate meaning or a feeling of identity, there is only a “gaping hole” concerning questions of existence.41 This, I argue, is why the emphasis in psychosis on orifices and “empty bags,” those structures that mimic the gaping hole of existence and have a deep connection to the real. Unlike the neurotic who views the hole metaphorically as something that can be filled, the psychotic eradicates the hole itself in that it becomes just another instance of a thing. In this way the psychotic also eradicates the lack (of meaning) that permeates existence. To summarize, the Oedipus complex and phallic function are developmental processes that are universal or, rather, mostly universal. Psychosis for Lacan is the foreclosure of these processes. Without the name-of-the-­ father, the un-processible or non-understandable experiences (of the real) cannot be symbolized and thereby threaten one’s imaginative capabilities and, in Lacan’s terms, the imaginary (and one’s relationship to one’s body and one’s ability to conceive of reality) threatens to “take it’s leave.” This shatters the psyche, undoing its knot. Thus, without the name-of-the-­ father, there is no desire for wholeness—because there is no belief in a lack in the self or other—but rather a desire to merge objects or opposites that appears via imposed voices and a concretization of language. In other words, the foreclosure is of metaphoric possibilities and of meaning. One result of this foreclosure is that enjoyment (or Lacanian jouissance, which I will discuss more later in this chapter) is unrelated to the Oedipus complex or the pleasure of the phallus—the psychic conflict in psychosis is unrelated to sexuality—but to a pleasure of absence, the absence of the name-of-the-father, and to what is ineffable and reveals itself as the

 Michele Ribolsi, Jasper Feyaerts, and Stijn Vanheule “Metaphor in Psychosis: On the Possible Convergence of Lacanian Theory and Neuro-Scientific Research,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 5–6, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00664. 41

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always-incomprehensible effects that play out within the body (i.e., a jouissance associated with the real). An important note is that as regards neurosis, psychoanalysis helps the analysand establish a new relationship to one’s lack and accept one’s internal divisions and lack. In psychosis, too, one develops a new relationship to the lack, but because the psychotic eradicates the lack and merges with it as a thing, this new relationship is not about seeing how the lack structures the psyche, but about seeing it as an emptiness rather than a thing. Looking at the psychoanalytic process as regards neurosis, however, gives us (me) a place to start from, but of course the process as regards psychosis differs. The “acceptance” of the lack or of one’s divisions (a term I use through this book) is, for the psychotic, both the acceptance of the lack of the name-of-the-father and the acceptance of the existence of a lack as an empty space, which then means that there is a hole in the undifferentiated mass and a way (possibly) to escape psychosis. I also mean, then, that the fragmentation of the psyche (i.e., the separation of the psyche’s elements) in psychosis brings not just merger but division: if there is no “me” in psychosis, then “my” leg (or my body) doesn’t belong to me and the inability to see a connection to my body is one way I exist “in bits and pieces.” The competing and conflicting ideas of acceptance of fragmentation and lack in neurosis and psychosis can be brought together in the idea that psychoanalysis helps one to accept one’s fate, regardless of whether that fate is having a psyche structured by the name-of-the-father or a psyche that is missing that foundational configuration.

3.4 Sinthome In Seminar 23 Lacan proposes that Joyce, through writing, keeps his psyche intact or, in other words, prevents psychosis. Yet Joyce’s works— especially his later works—are often difficult to read. Indeed, many consider them unreadable. The language Joyce uses is not the language that we expect and does little to ground a reader. Indeed, Joyce, in Finnegans Wake as the most extreme example, fractures and recombines language in novel ways. The book is, in essence, psychosis in book form, yet as noted, Lacan sees psychosis only in Joyce’s literary works. The idea is that the

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neologisms, fragmented writing, and impression of imposed words in Joyce’s works mimic psychosis while those same works also compensate for a psyche that shows evidence of psychosis. Returning to the psychic structure: the interdependence of the real, symbolic, and imaginary is why psychosis is a problem—these elements become disconnected. More specifically, when Lacan speaks of Joyce writing of his body as “divested of, like a fruit peel,”42 he recognizes this impulse as an un-triggered psychotic element of Joyce, an indication of the fraying of the psychic knot. Lacan, however, notes that despite this impulse, Joyce remains within reality precisely because of his works, those creations that knit a sinthome to keep the knot of his psyche tied and that permit him to live within a symbolic structured by the name-of-the-­ father despite not having this primordial signifier available to support his psyche. Instead, the sinthome becomes the support, allowing him to live according to a jouissance that differs from phallic jouissance (Lacan’s feminine jouissance). Although Lacan originally suggests that the Oedipus complex could be a sinthome, his subsequent discussion suggests, instead, that the Oedipus complex is a symptom, grounded in reality and defining a neurotic (or common) way of coping with reality. The name-of-the-father (as the limit) is the repression of the Oedipus complex and ensures that within the three-element Borromean knot, phallic jouissance dominates. This process relies on the repression of the name-of-the-father that allows one to function in the world with the psyche intact. The sinthome, on the other hand, is a concept that Lacan uses to describe how Joyce keeps the imaginary from “slid[ing] away”43 when the psyche is not held together by the name-of-the-father metaphor. To Lacan, Joyce’s work reveals “the consequence that results from the mistake in the knot, namely, that the unconscious is tied to the real”;44 In other words, Joyce “cancelled his subscription to the unconscious”45 (i.e., foreclosed on the name of the father). That is, Joyce’s writing is for Lacan  Seminar 23, 128.  Seminar 23, 131. 44  Seminar 23, 134. 45  Lacan, “Joyce the Symptom,” in the Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 23: The Sinthome, ed. Jacques-­ Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Malden: MA: Polity, 2016), 144. 42 43

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an index of psychosis, but since it is confined to his writing, he posits that Joyce somehow managed to live without the metaphoric name-of-the-­ father yet without falling into psychosis: Joyce creates a sinthome. Graciela Prieto defines the sinthome as “no longer either a message or a metaphor but the jouissance of an element of the unconscious, an arbitrary element, which Lacan calls a letter because it is outside the signifying chain and thus outside meaning.”46 In this definition, Prieto draws out the sinthome’s relationship the real: the element of the unconscious to which it connects is not a word but a letter, something that on its own has no meaning. Without a meaning, it cannot itself be analyzed because there is no meaning within the letter, only the response (as jouissance) to the phonation of the voice that is manifest in the body and touches on the real. The sinthome, therefore, is what allows one—Joyce is Lacan’s example—to live as if one were non-psychotic; it’s what enables Joyce to live with untriggered psychosis.47 This sinthomic link then changes the structure of the psyche. Whereas the intact psyche centres around a central hole or lack, the psyche held together with the sinthome is de-­centred, giving rise to an “unknown” knowledge that reveals itself through its effects. Simply put, the sinthome is a fourth element added to the Borromean knot (i.e., to one’s psyche) that results in an individual subjectivity wherein one gains knowledge of the individual truth of one’s desire and reconnects to one’s body by opening oneself “to the real through the imaginary.”48

 “Writing the Subject’s Knot,” 173.  Darian Leader proposes Joyce’s forestalling psychosis means he is “non-triggered”; see Darian Leader and Judy Groves, Lacan for Beginners, ed. R. Appignanesi (Cambridge: Icon Books, 1995), 167. I agree: if Joyce’s psyche is not structured by the name-of-the-father, then even when his psyche is held together by a sinthome, the conditions are there for psychosis should they ever be provoked. 48  Juliet Flower MacCannell, “The Real Imaginary,” Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 1 (2008): 55. 46 47

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3.4.1 Corollaries of the Sinthome I want to step back for a moment and discuss analysis with the neurotic. If the neurotic psyche is structured by the name-of-the-father, which ensures the impossibility of achieving (the imaginary) wholeness, then one of the issues analysis must confront is that of mastery. For Lacan, mastery pertains to the master’s discourse, which is one of his four discourses discussed in Seminar 17 and relates to the act that Lacan refutes as a fiction, the act related to science that presupposes a subject supposed to know.49 The other discourses belong to the hysteric, the analyst, and the university, and although I’m focusing on the master’s discourse and its difference from the analyst’s discourse here, it’s important to note as well that the analyst’s discourse is not just turning from the hysteric’s discourse while maintaining a centre—it changes that centre: a true subversion.50 The act of science conforms to a belief that everything can be known; there is no real, only elements beyond our grasp currently or experiences we cannot explain yet. Owen Whooley suggests this is the fallacy of psychiatry: psychiatry has remained relevant because it manages our ignorance, pivoting in light of new information to suggest the knowledge of mental illness is only unknown for now.51 Mastery is not just an issue within science, however; the mastery that Lacan disparages applies to our belief in mastery over our everyday lives as well, such as when we desire to know what the future looks like and believe we can control that future completely, for example. In contrast to this discourse of mastery is the analyst’s discourse, which is a distinction essential for the psychoanalytic act. Lacan argues the psychoanalytic act is not an act of science—because it is impossible and is where drive and desire unite in the real—but an act of logic, for “if there is something which most … instinctively repels the psychoanalyst, it is that knowing everything about psychoanalysis … qualifies the  See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 17: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007). 50  This is an important point. I will return to the hysteric’s discourse and its relation to Joyce briefly in my conclusion. 51  Owen Whooley, On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 49

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psychoanalyst.”52 Whereas science is concerned with knowledge (it manipulates symbols to derive conclusions that it then accepts as facts, facts purportedly without a subjectivity attached or facts that exist apart from and regardless of us), logic’s concern is truth, particularly a subjective truth. Lacan, in his discussion of logic, illustrates that logic contains inherent divisions, for although it may appear that “all S are P” and “no S is not P” are equivalent, for Lacan they indicate a divided form, and the latter states something very different from the former. Thus, the psychoanalytic act is not a “knowing” that permits one to become a psychoanalyst, but a paradigm shift related to the development of a subject that knows that it cannot know, or a subject that accepts it is divided. Furthermore, the psychoanalytic act and, by extension, the analyst’s discourse tie directly to feminine jouissance: the analyst’s discourse reveals that sex is the index of the unconscious: the unconscious is sexuated in nature, but in a way that does not align with biological sex or constructions of gender. Rather the unconscious arises as an ontological question of how to be a woman or man, but it fails to fully represent an answer. Rather than a search for mastery, the analyst’s discourse reveals there is something beyond knowledge by producing a break or discontinuity in our experience because of analysis’s emphasis on lalangue rather than language, which is the equivalent of looking at the sexual relations via set theory and Aristotelian logic rather than grammar or symbolism. Set theory, mathemes, lalangue: these elements produce a break in part because they lack the preconceived ideas of meaning that accompany ordinary language. They remove us from the belief that we can know anything with absolutely certainty. Psychoanalysis does not depend on a mastery of its subject matter outside of experience, but it does depend on the experience of the real and on logic, the field “in which the subject supposed to know is nothing,” and “because there is nothing there,” psychoanalysts “are between the two, finding support in logic on the one hand, on our experience on the other.”53 This “between the two” is also

52  Seminar 15, XIV 11. For a clearer understanding of this idea of the psychoanalytic act as an act of logic, see Gallagher, “A Reading,” 10–11. 53  Seminar 15, X 15.

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the location of “woman”: “she [woman] is located between the 1 and the 0.”54 I need to take a short digression and talk about the objet a, which is essential to the psychoanalytic act. Objet a is the term Lacan uses for the object cause of desire or the object of desire (for the other), and it represents the object of desire that someone who is neurotic uses to fill the hole of desire—the ontological lack—at the centre of the psyche (and, as I said, causes the desire to fill the hole), which implies that it touches on all three elements of the psyche: the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary.55 It’s important to note that objet a is what “exists” at the centre of the knot, yet it doesn’t really exist; it is part of the real. As a part of the real, we don’t see the objet a; all we see are its substitutions, those things we use to try to take the place of the void that sits at the centre of the psyche. In other words, our repetitions of searching for wholeness reveal the existence of a real, the existence of the objet a, but without revealing the objet a itself. The objet a is the representation of those elements of the real that Gallagher, as I mentioned earlier, says cause desire and are “characterised by their relationship to orifices.”56 In neurosis, the metaphor of the name-­ of-­the-father is repressed, which sets in motion the Oedipus complex as the subject tries to complete the self by filling the empty space with the objet a. (Neurotic) subjects, in other words, are constituted by the repeated attempts to decipher the desire of the other, believing they can become whole, but this is pure fantasy; in truth, we find we can never fill that void to establish a wholeness.57 The analyst’s discourse, then, hopefully occasions the psychoanalytic act, which in most analyses, is the end point of analysis (as per Lacan). The gap previously mentioned between zero and one also exists between the act and the doing as Lacan outlines in Seminar 15, and the moment  Seminar 19, 181.  It’s a part of the real, yet we imagine it has a “real” counterpart in reality so search for it according to the rules of the symbolic that forbid it. Alternatively, it’s a symbolic representation of the “real” nonexistent loss of a nonobject that produces an imaginary belief in wholeness. 56  “Nets to Knots,” 11. 57  In my view, this belief in wholeness can be summarized using Leo Bersani’s concluding words in his work with Adam Phillips: “what may be the most profound ‘mistake’ inherent in being human: that of preferring our opposition to the world we live in over our correspondence, our ‘friendly accord’ with it.” intimacies, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 125. 54 55

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of the “psychoanalytic act” is the moment that establishes psychoanalysis as “the connection between an act and a doing.”58 While the act, as the assertion, is a fiction—the point where the analysand sees a “self ” that is whole and internally coherent—the “psychoanalytic act” differs from an ordinary action because at its centre is “this acceptance of being rejected like the [objet a].”59 The doing of the analysand rests on a non-relation to the signifier; this doing appears through free association that works via transference to reveal a knowledge, but this knowledge is knowledge without a subject.60 The psychoanalytic act, then—that is, the moment the analysand passes to analyst—is a failed act (in the scientific understanding of an act), but because it fails, it is therefore successful.61 It starts with the “falsified subject supposed to know,” but at the end, it constitutes a “subject which is not in the act” in that the psychoanalytic act restores the lack in the subject supposed to know. Lacan is saying that the psychoanalytic act starts with the “announcement” and, therefore, with a subject supposed to know (that is, a subject who “knows” what a psychoanalyst is or what psychoanalysis is) but then fails as an act of knowledge as the now-analyst identifies with the “residue” of the subject supposed to know, or, rather, identifies with the objet a.62 The “knowledge” of the analyst becomes the recognition that there is no objet a, just the real of the drives that structures the gap. This privileges psychoanalysis because it,

 Seminar 15, VII 8. Lacan subsequently argues this is important: “It must all the same be noted that this gap, which still remains between the act and the doing, is what is at stake.” Ibid., VII 10. The primacy of psychoanalysis as a connection between an act and a doing is further brought into relief when we consider how it is impossible to say whose act the psychoanalytic act is: the analysand’s or the analyst’s. The act itself exists in a gap wherein the analysand becomes analyst and is an act without a subject, an idea I will return to later. 59  Seminar 15, XV 14. 60  Acquiring knowledge is, for Lacan, related to the master’s discourse, and this acquisition strengthens phallic jouissance. Analysis subverts this discourse because of its delayed and deferred meaning: each time in analysis when one thinks one “knows,” new information puts that belief into question, and one slowly learns that desiring knowledge is not only futile but tragic. Adam Phillips writes, “But the tragic hero, as Lacan intimates in his reference to Oedipus, may be precisely the one who cedes his desire by transforming it into a desire for knowledge. He gives up on what he originally wanted, and wants knowledge instead.” Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 148. 61  “There is nothing so successful as failure with respect to the act.” Lacan, Seminar 15, V 3. 62  Lacan, Seminar 15, X 11. 58

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then, “constitutes the connection between an act and a doing.”63 This psychoanalytic act is, therefore, the recognition of a limit and the accepting of a “constitutive division” within oneself.64 In other words, the psychoanalytic act has no “actor” (there is no subject of the act) and “takes the place of an assertion whose subject it changes.”65 This act is the point where the analysand becomes analyst, and the analyst’s discourse helps achieve this because at the beginning of analysis, the analyst places herself in the position of the objet a, that is, she places herself in the space of the lack at the centre of the (intact) psyche to show there is nothing there, thereby frustrating the analysand’s attempts to decipher her (the analyst’s) desire and eventually allowing the analysand to insert his own desire into that position of lack (thereby recognizing a lack). The act thus reveals the “ethical subject,”66 a term that, for me, becomes more important later; at its most basic, the “ethical subject” describes a subject who accepts one’s fate and re-orients oneself to desire. Once the analysand does this, he “becomes” an analyst, which means analysis for most people helps them to reject mastery and accept the uncertainty that permits them to develop a new relationship to phallic jouissance. Thus, the only way to escape the phallic function is to act in conformity with one’s own desire and embrace (by occupying67) one’s lack. The process of occupying the lack characterizes what Lacan calls the psychoanalytic act, and the psychoanalytic act is more difficult—yet crucial—in psychosis.68 In psychosis, however, the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father signifier “is a rejection of the ontological necessity of the object’s loss.”69 Therefore, unlike the neurotic, the psychotic does not believe in (that is,  Lacan, Seminar 15, VII 8.  Lacan, Seminar 15, XIII 4. 65  Seminar 15, Annex III 1. 66  See Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), 103–4. 67  Occupying the lack does not mean filling the lack. It means occupying the lack as a lack. Alenka Zupančič analogously describes what I mean by stating, “there is a place that is ‘occupied by the lack’ which is ‘full of the lack.’” Ethics of the Real, 242. 68  To be clear, I’m not suggesting the sinthome is related to the psychoanalytic act, per se; rather, the sinthome establishes something akin to the analyst’s discourse, leading to an act analogous to the psychoanalytic act; I will elaborate on this point later. 69  McGowan, “The Psychosis of Freedom,” 53. 63 64

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understand) a lack at the centre of his being: the maternal desire is not subsumed by the signifier of the phallus, and as a result, the desire of the other cannot be symbolized.70 The psychotic recognizes neither the lack in the self nor the lack in the other, and as Van Haute argues, the psychotic “thus has no grasp of the constant sliding of meaning under or along the chain of signifiers.”71 This troubled relation to signification does not mean the psychotic is not subject to desire, but that the psychotic, in not recognizing a lack, has no need to try to fill an empty space with the substitutes for the objet a. Conversely, desire in psychosis is “a not symbolized desire, without the reference that introduces the phallus as a signifier of the lack.”72 This is the desire to merge disparate objects or opposites or what Alenka Zupančič references as the “psychotic falling of the subject into the object.”73 The objet a for the psychotic does not cause desire but exists as real; Lacan states the psychotic has the objet a “in his pocket.”74 If objet a is the surplus jouissance that cannot be accounted for in the symbolic, then for the neurotic, this becomes metaphorical and structures the search for wholeness, but for the psychotic the objet a is part of what impinges and insists upon him; the objet a exists only as its real (i.e., only in the real) without covering it over with the symbolic or our imaginary (re)creation of a wholeness.

 See Seminar 20, 126–27 for how desire operates in neurosis.  Against Adaptation, 232. 72  De Battista “Lacanian Concept of Desire,” 2. In using de Battista’s argument, I am accepting that desire exists for the psychotic—as characterized by (a broken) feminine jouissance—and am disagreeing with Élisabeth Roudinesco who argues that “[anxiety] arises when the lack of the object, necessary to the expression of desire, is lacking to the extent that it fastens the subject to an unnameable real that escapes and threatens it. This ‘lack of the lack’ suffocates desire and is then translated into fantasies of self-destruction: chaos, imaginary fusion with the maternal body, hallucinations, spectres of insects, images of dislocation or castration.” Lacan: In spite of Everything, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2014), 77. Desire and drive are interconnected, so desire always exists; jouissance must therefore exist too, even without the name-of-the-father or castration (but it will take a different form). 73  The Odd One In, 181. Zupančič’s statement here is just a passing reference that describes what comedic repetition is not; to me, this explains succinctly the merging with the object in psychosis: the object is not a cause of desire but that which consumes me or of which I am a part. 74  The French is “… qu’il a sa causes dans sa poche, c’est par ça qu’il et un fou.” “Petit discourse aux psychiatres de Sainte-Anne,” lecture, November 10, 1967, unpublished, transcript available: http:// www.psychasoc.com/Textes/Petit-discours-aux-psychiatres-de-Sainte-Anne. 70 71

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Feminine jouissance is, thus, linked to the sinthome as its consequence because in psychosis, with the symbolic not working on the objet a, the jouissance of the psychotic differs, too. The psychoanalytic act, then, can help us understand the difference between the neurotic and the psychotic psyches. At the end of the psychoanalytic act, the psyche retains its empty centre but without the objet a; the rejection of the objet a is also the acceptance of the (central) gap or void and a re-orientation to phallic jouissance. In psychosis, any successful “psychoanalytic act” must acknowledge and account for the impossibility of phallic jouissance while still recognizing the need and desire connected to the drives. Since the metaphor of the name-of-the-father is foreclosed in psychosis, phallic jouissance is foreclosed too, and “the psychotic problematic is not characterized by a conflict within the order of sexuality as such.”75 Jouissance is Lacan’s concept describing what is beyond human limits, beyond the law and beyond the pleasure principle.76 To fully explain jouissance would require a book in itself: although it is often described as “enjoyment” (the word I used in Chap. 1), it is not merely enjoyment or pleasure but the confluence of (or simultaneous experience of ) the pain in pleasure, the suffering in enjoyment, or the death in life. Jouissance proper (or phallic jouissance, the jouissance that operates in neurosis) is an orientation to the other that accepts there is a one (or a wholeness) to be had, which is a product of the Oedipus complex and castration: jouissance is the experience of the subject who wants to achieve oneness and relies on the imaginary to do this, for example, by believing that there is a Woman—with a capital W—that can make me whole; to achieve this I repeat the (mathematical) expression (1-) + a + a + a + a in the attempt to create a “true” one77 or provide obstacles to the repetition of this 75  Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 295. Again, this is because in psychosis, one subsumes the divisions into a new metasexuality that incorporates both father and mother and thereby annuls any conflict. 76  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Routledge, 2008), 235–52; see Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961) for more on the pleasure principle. 77  The idea is the subject (the negative one) searches for the objet a to create a one without the negative, i.e., to create a whole. In mathematical terms, the expression (1-) + a … is thought to be the left half of the equation, (1-) + a + a … = +1.

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equation rather than accepting there is an ontological lack in oneself and one can never be whole. Lacan’s references to woman in contrast to the set of men do not map onto the sexual division of men and women, but he uses the (now controversial) term “men” to demarcate those who are subject to phallic jouissance, i.e., those whose orientation to the world is structured by the (name-of-the-)father. In Lacanian logic, Lacan locates phallic jouissance as the universal affirmative of all S are P: all speaking beings are submitted to the phallic function. He then appears to situate feminine jouissance in contradiction to phallic jouissance as the particular negative of some S are not P: some women are not submitted to the phallic function. Yet the two versions of jouissance are not in contradiction because they both hold the same truth value: the phallic function is the condition of all humans, and there is a jouissance “beyond” the phallus that supplements phallic jouissance as a jouissance of absence (of the phallus). But, if we accept that there are two versions of jouissance, what might Lacan mean by his statement, “Were there another jouissance than phallic jouissance, it shouldn’t be/could never fail” to be that one?78 Potentially, we should read this as it (that is, feminine jouissance) does not exist because it cannot be symbolized (and any original “fusion” is imaginary), yet it does exist (in a way) because people experience it. Lacan uses logic to show the necessity versus contingency of jouissance. Phallic jouissance is necessary, but feminine jouissance is contingent: in the conditional if-then structure, the antecedent can be false and the consequent true (just the consequent cannot be false if the antecedent is true). In other words, if A exists, then B must also exist, but B can exist in the absence of A. Thus, it can be false that there is another jouissance—because there cannot be another, no other exists in the symbolic—but it can still be true that it shouldn’t be/could never fail to be that one—feminine jouissance. Feminine jouissance thus has a logical possibility of existence despite being impossible and exists insofar as it is “extra”; consequently, Lacan can say that feminine jouissance ex-sists—it persists because of its relationship to the real, to an external that insists upon it. It is produced because of the being that is “opposed” (in opposition to) the being that  Seminar 20, 59.

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loves God so as to love ourselves; it is produced because of the being of signifierness, whose locus is the locus the Other, which is also where the father function is inscribed—which is beyond the “set” of men. Both this “extra” of feminine jouissance and the affinity of the word ex-­sists (as opposed to exists) to ecstasy are two of the many reasons others attribute a belief in “God” to Lacan.79 Feminine jouissance is described as that of mystics and the jouissance of a religious ecstasy—a jouissance that is beyond (the phallus) and appears (to some) to enter the realm of God. However, Lacan’s interest in religion and his references to mystics are not because he believes in God but because he believes Catholicism—the only true religion according to him—is the only religion that accepts there is a real rather than only those things we have yet to understand but that belong to the symbolic.80 The sinthome, then, mediates the relationship between the real and the symbolic (indeed, among all three of the psyche’s elements) from within the imaginary, to be able to limit and distinguish each element, all while making feminine jouissance—or the jouissance that accepts the not-­whole of the Other (as of the self ) and that is (exists) “beyond” the phallus—possible. This jouissance, Lacan suggests, characterizes Joyce because Joyce imagines himself as not subject to the phallic function. Rather than living in accordance with the (imaginary) desire of the other, the sinthome establishes access to a different desire, feminine jouissance. (Feminine not because it belongs to women, but because it relates to the inability to distinguish subject and object[s]—and to the desire to merge them—that harkens back to a [non-existent] maternal union. Thus, the ontological question I referenced earlier about how to be a woman or a man cannot be answered by the unconscious because it’s a question only answerable in relation to others.) This jouissance, however, supplements phallic jouissance rather than complementing it: if it complemented phallic jouissance it 79  Slavoj Žižek and others, however, make a more compelling argument that God exists for Lacan irrespective of religion: God is an instance of a structuring law that, therefore, has no existence (in reality). “The Big Other Doesn’t Exist,” Journal of European Psychoanalysis no. 5 (1997), http:// www.psychomedia.it/jep/number5/zizek.htm. See also Adrian Johnston, “Lacan and Monotheism: Not Your Father’s Atheism,” Problemi International 3, no. 3 (2019): 109–41, https://problemi.si/ issues/p2019-3/06problemi_international_2019_3_johnston.pdf. 80  See Lacan, The Triumph of Religion, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

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would further contribute to the fantasy of wholeness by suggesting that together phallic and feminine jouissance could create a One.81 The result of this different orientation to the phallic function, however, is that there is no dichotomy between the two versions of jouissance because there is no neat and tidy psychic function that separates them such as we create (imagine) by focusing on biological sex or socially constructed gender. Therefore, in returning to an earlier point, we can say that feminine jouissance is a contradiction as it simultaneously does not exist because it cannot be symbolized and nevertheless does exist because people experience it. Thus, Joyce’s sinthome is paradoxical because it allows him to experience feminine jouissance that doesn’t exist. This ties to the sinthome in another way as well because the sinthome instantiates what appears to be its own paradox: the ability to exist in the symbolic without a psyche that is structured by that symbolic (albeit in a different form than what results from psychoanalysis with the neurotic). The sinthome permits the mind to function without relying on the metaphors that provide meaning. The sinthome is a process that itself has no meaning yet allows for what I term the possibility of meaning, in part by permitting the possibility of a feminine jouissance, or a new relationship to the impossibility of a phallic jouissance due to the missing name-of-the-father. I want to clarify my term, however; I’m using the term paradox because that’s how we see not only feminine jouissance but also the co-existence of the imaginary whole self next to the fragmented subject from the mirror stage. Yet the examples I use (and will use) throughout this book are not paradoxes. To say feminine jouissance exists is not accepting a paradox but noting that this apparent paradox is really just presenting different ways of understanding or viewing two sides of the same concept; I understand the two versions of jouissance as Lacan’s moebius strip wherein one “side” is the other. It’s why the two version of jouissance are not complementary. Language makes us; we make (and shift) language. This process is  This, I think, is what Zupančič is saying when she writes of how the temptation to recognize the other as an answer to our prayers “immediately closes the accidentally produced way out of the impossibility involved in the relation between demand and its satisfaction, and it closes it precisely by transforming this impossibility into a possibility.” The Odd One In, 134–35. In other words, we close the gap created—the one that could offer a way out of impossibility—by making it into something that can possibly be filled. It takes the pleasure produced in the encounter with the other, the supplementary pleasure, and turns it into a complement. 81

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recursive, and neither side can exist without the other. We’re not cutting nature at its joints (as Plato would believe we can) to reveal two contradictory (or complementary) elements; we’re actively creating that nature. This is why, when I write of “paradox,” I’m identifying those seemingly opposing elements that are, in fact, necessary for each other. The death drive, for example, can only exist alongside a drive to live. The idea of the moebius strip can also help us see that feminine jouissance is not the complement to phallic jouissance. They aren’t opposites; each can only exist if the other exists, and when “together,” they, too, circle around any emptiness.

3.5 Dance, Psychosis, and the Sinthome Dance is often portrayed as something that can fill the hole, creating a “whole” person; in other words, it is often deeply connected to the phallic fantasy. One of the most common tropes found in films that depict dance is that of dance as the mechanism for overcoming obstacles. Dancers find their individuality, but not the individuality that a sinthome would suggest; rather, dancers find the individuality that exists within the phallic function. This trope takes various forms. Dance in Billy Elliot,82 for example, is both a way to live according to oneself rather than one’s father and the route to a fulfilling life. I could offer multiple other examples, but I already have (see footnote 20 in Chap. 1), and my point is that often dance becomes a vehicle to create a film that overtly supports the phallic function and/or a reorientation to it. Even those films that aim to show something different—the pain of dance and the work it involves—inevitably shore up the phallic function or suggest that the desire to dance may lead to mental illness in the pursuit of perfection.83 Thus, the other main dance trope is the relationship between dance and mental illness. For example, Black Swan84 ostensibly  Billy Elliott, directed by Stephen Daldry (2000; Los Angeles: Universal Focus, 2001), DVD.  I’m focusing on psychosis here, but dance has a long-standing connection to eating disorders in research, and one made-for-TV movie, Dying to Dance, focuses on anorexia and ballet. Directed by Mark Haber, aired August 12, 2001, on NBC. 84  Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky (2010; Los Angeles, CA: Fox Searchlight, 2011), DVD. 82 83

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depicts dance as an obsession that leads to psychosis and, ultimately, the sacrifice of the self, that is, death via suicide. I discuss the film more in Chap. 7, but unless one explores it closely, one can easily misread it as showing how the demands of dance cause a fracturing of the self and a loss of reality, ending in a denial of desire. Because the film requires deliberate engagement with it to read it any other way, most audiences fail to see beyond that trope, and dance is seen only as a (possible) contributor to severe mental disturbance. Well-known examples of psychosis in real-life dancers intensify the connection to the real and the threat of (mental) disbalance. I mentioned Nijinsky earlier and how De Cuyper and Dulsster suggest that dancing was a sinthome for Nijinsky, delaying his psychotic break. Regardless of how one sees dance operating in Nijinsky’s life, Nijinsky does link psychosis and dance in the modern imagination. His dancing always seemed in “excess,” but it is his choreography that clearly illustrates an excess jouissance: in L’Après midi d’un faune, he masturbates onstage, and The Rite of Spring depicts sacrifice through dance. I suggest that the reaction to his dances—the audience of The Rite of Spring incited a riot—are indications of how Nijinsky’s choreographies reveal too much of the real and indicate the beginnings of Nijinsky’s psychosis.85 He may have attempted to develop a sinthome, but his works show a mind that continually disentangled until it could no longer be stitched together. De Cuyper and Dulsster do not explain why they believe Nijinsky’s lost his sinthome, but Murray Jackson offers one idea: Nijinsky’s dancing “contained a displacement of his aggressiveness” and was to gain “public adulation.”86 Only once he could no longer dance did he descend into psychosis. More specifically, after the loss of his brother and after Sergey Diaghilev fired him  As I will explain later, this is very different from the (impossible) ethical act that is a “purposeless” sacrifice of life that cannot be explained; The Rite of Spring depicts sacrifice for the other. The riot is often assumed to be the result of Igor Stravinsky’s score, but Daniel K. L. Chua clarifies it was the choreography. Stravinsky did, however, establish the sacrificial theme and have a hand in the choreography. “Rioting with Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the ‘Rite of Spring,’” Music Analysis 26, no. 1/2 (2007): 59–109, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25171386. 86  “Vaslav Nijinsky: Living for the Eyes of the Other,” in Creativity and Psychotic States in Exceptional People: The Work of Murray Jackson, edited by Jeanne Magagna (New York: Routledge, 2015), 62; Jeanne Magagna and Murray Jackson, Introduction to Creativity and Psychotic States in Exceptional People: The Work of Murray Jackson, by Murray Jackson, ed. Jeanne Magagna (New York: Routledge, 2015), 2. 85

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from the Ballet Russes, Nijinsky did not have the support that he needed to use dance as a sinthome. I, in opposition to De Cuyper and Dulsster’s suggestion, posit that Nijinsky’s dancing (and choreography) revealed the real even as it continued to intrude: in sum, the psychosis you can see in his dance wasn’t confined like we see in Joyce’s works. Dance for him was not about struggling to exist with the real—unless it was only ever a failed struggle—but about an attempt to cover over the real and wholly belong to the symbolic while being the objet a for others (and using others as his own objet a). It was a failed attempt to pretend he was not psychotic and embrace narcissism.87 The common tropes of dance alongside the instances of mental illness in real dancers may suggest that dance is ill-suited as a sinthome, as it encourages a commitment that leads to mental breakdown rather helps keep the psyche intact. Although Nijinsky’s efforts to avoid psychosis may have failed, I do assert that dance is ideally suited for this bringing of order to the apparent chaos of psychosis, in part because of its deep connection to the body. Dance requires a body. Joyce’s writing may have effects in the body, but it can exist without a body. Dance cannot. As Carrie Rohman reminds us, “for the dancer, the body itself is the medium, the body itself or biology itself inhabits the sensations, the vibratory, the forces of the earth and the cosmos, the affective.”88 It then stands to reason that dance can act as a sinthome by breaking through the real to suture the imaginary to the real and keep the symbolic connected to both, given how dance maps onto all areas of the psyche yet relies on the body. This idea is especially true when you understand the sinthome as a combination of processes—the ones I mentioned earlier: mirroring, binding or creating a potential space, and play—that permit the unavoidable intrusions of the real while maintaining a tie to the body, and I now turn to look at these processes more closely.

 Maybe this was a failed attempt because he was unsupported. Joyce had Nora; Fosse—whom I discuss later—had Gwen (Verdon). Nijinsky, quite possibly, was trying to establish a sinthome on his own. 88  Choreographies of the Living, 106. 87

4 The Being of a Sinthome

As we’ve seen, Lacan suggests Joyce’s use of language to establish a sinthome is apt because schizophrenia’s symptoms materialize predominately within the realm of language. Consequently, Lacanian theorists often focus extensively on Joyce’s use of language, whereas I argue that there are ways to interpretate Joyce’s writing as sinthomic that prioritize other key elements as constitutive of the process by which Joyce forestalls a collapse into psychosis. As I mentioned, it’s how Joyce uses language that matters, and I propose that Lacan’s seminar offers justification for exploring dance’s possibilities as a sinthome, and to do so, I want to bring in additional psychoanalytic concepts (developed by other analysts but which nonetheless fit within Lacan’s argument). These additional concepts can help further theorize the sinthome and provide new insights into Lacanian thought.  Lacan posits that Joyce’s works show evidence of a sinthome—and a new relationship to language—yet Lacan doesn’t fully explore how Joyce’s works support the creation of a sinthome. This chapter proceeds by exploring three processes I see as essential to the sinthome; I introduce one process and explain its importance and place in psychoanalytic theory, then illustrate the way(s) it appears in dance before moving on to the next process. The order of these processes reflects the order of their © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Sherritt, Dancing an Embodied Sinthome, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7_4

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importance, in my mind, to the development of a sinthome (least to most). I am not suggesting this order corresponds to a temporal order. These processes work together circuitously, not in any linear fashion. I then bring everything together to show how these processes, when used together, can facilitate the creation of a sinthome (whether via Joyce’s works or through dance) that permits lack and paradox and establishes access to feminine jouissance, allowing one to live a “normal” existence despite being at risk of psychosis. The goal in this chapter is to think psychoanalysis through dance (and dance through psychoanalysis) and explore how dance may help one to accept the ontologically de-centred subject. In other words, I show how dance, as an art, not only embraces creativity, but develops the possibility for that creativity. I then end this chapter with illustrations that throw the difficult theoretical concepts into greater relief. I show how the processes of the sinthome (as I’ve outlined them) appear in Joyce’s writing (mostly Finnegans Wake) and Fosse’s dancing and choreography. I suggest that for both men, their respective arts help them survive (and thrive) in a world that persistently discomforts them and disturbs their abilities to maintain a sense of reality. Finally, I offer one last example, more firmly rooted in the dance world, to show what developing a sinthome may look like when divorced from the world of choreography.

4.1 Mirroring The first element that I see operating within the sinthome is the mirror. For my arguments here, I draw on Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, which as I’ve mentioned is when the baby is held up to the mirror (by the parents), and what the baby sees in the mirrors is a “whole” child, with a constancy and consistency that he does not experience elsewhere. Lacan doesn’t relate this to the sinthome; rather, this image the baby sees sets in place the desire of the child (then adult) that persists throughout life: to overcome the “self ” that is fragmented, subject to needs and drives beyond its control, and to return to a pre-existing unity (that contrasts the now-existing disunity in that the image is not what I experience internally). But what if the mirror can also usher in something else? What if

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we can learn to see ourselves as fragmented or learn to see things as they are rather than as we imagine them to be? In this section, I argue the mirror doesn’t only present us with an image of our wholeness: it can also reveal parts of ourselves that we never knew existed or that we have disavowed. James M. Glass refers to the delusions of schizophrenia as “the internal mirror of political authoritarianism”1 yet also argues that “in psychoanalysis, the analyst becomes the mirror for an underlying emotional logic informing all speech acts in the therapeutic situation. … Countertransference … represents a profound communication, a joining of the self on a level that is unspoken but essential to the outcome of the entire process.”2 Glass’s second concept of the mirror suggests to me that the support offered to Joyce by writing, the support that allows him to accept the drives and the (real) conflicts of his subject, can be provided via the mirror and may also be offered by dance: all of these elements— dance, poetic writing, psychoanalysis—may employ a type of mirroring that not only subverts the effects of the original mirror stage but offers an alternative to psychosis.

4.1.1 Theorizing the Revelatory Mirror Others beside Lacan have developed concepts of the mirror in their theories; Donald W. Winnicott is one example. Winnicott’s relevance for my argument here is his suggestion that the mirror stage can be recreated or re-done within the psychoanalytic encounter.3 This insight is consistent with my earlier contention that the mirror stage is not a one-time event, but is necessarily recursive. You will recall that Lacan disagrees with Winnicott’s version of the mirror stage because Winnicott sees mirroring  Delusion: Internal Dimensions of Political Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), xiii. His statement also relates to ambivalence, as Glass also writes this about “authoritarianism”: that “what is remarkable about delusional knowledge is its refusal to consider any aspect of experience that might involve feelings of ambivalence. Delusion provides a certain, often unbreakable identity. … It destroys freedom and possibility.” Ibid. 2  Delusion, 89. 3  Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge Classics, 2005), 158. 1

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as a route to the “true self,”4 yet Winnicott acknowledges Lacan’s influence on him regarding the development of his own version of the mirror stage.5 I suggest these two versions of the mirror stage can be brought into a useful, tension-filled co-existence. Lacan dislikes Winnicott’s concept of the “true self ” because Lacan holds there is no “self ” that exist outside of our relation to the other: the true self is an illusion. What is at the “core” of our (neurotic) existence is really a lack, a lack which is neither nothing nor an absence, merely an empty space. Thus, each of us has a core emptiness—not a core (true) “self.” Whereas Winnicott’s mirror produces an image of the self as a “whole,” taking the “true self ” to be the inner core of a person or the personal, interior aspect to the self that one uncovers in psychoanalysis, Lacan’s mirror only ever reveals a subject’s habitual way of being as it has been developed through relation with the other. Nonetheless, I hold that Lacan would accept mirror can be revelatory: the mirror may not reveal the self as a distinct independent entity with a core hidden from everyone, but it can reveal the different aspects of how I relate to others even when those aspect only further confirm my fragmentation or my lack (of the-name-of-the-father, for example). In other words, Lacan’s mirror stage recognizes that when we are confronted with the self in bits and pieces, we immediately imagine a contrasting wholeness, but if we look beyond its imaginary implications, we can see that the mirror stage also reveals our dependence on another and how our relationships influence our images of ourselves. For Winnicott, the mother is the mirror, and when the baby looks into the mother’s face, the baby genuinely sees itself—at least in the “good enough” version of parenting.6 This reflection helps the baby organize his  The “True Self ” does not have a definition per se but is Winnicott’s recognition that there is a counterpart to the “False Self,” which is the part of the self “turned outwards and … related to the world.” Winnicott, “On the Contribution of Direct Child Observation to Psycho-Analysis (1957),” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis,1965), 140. 5  Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 149. 6  The concept of the “good enough” mother refers to the mother who adapts to the child’s needs almost completely at birth and gradually adapts less, helping the growing child cope with failure. The “good enough” mother will necessarily fail/frustrate the child but makes failure bearable. Playing and Reality, 14. This process does not have to reside in the biological mother; it is a function that can be fulfilled by anyone who is consistently in the child’s life. 4

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experience; however, when the mother’s answering gestures do not mirror the baby’s, mirrors become “a thing to be looked at but not to be looked into,” as the disconnection between mother and baby confuses and frustrated the baby.7 This shift in focus suggests that the mirror stage is the stage in which a baby comes to organize experience and introduces the baby to a “true self ” as it comes to see itself in the (m)other, i.e., in relationship; Winnicott’s mirror is, therefore, illuminating how our belief in a “true self ” is dependent on the other. One important aspect of “good enough” mirroring as done by a parent is that mirroring needs to be “marked.” In other words, the mirror (parent) can reflect what is occurring in the baby but cannot take on the same depth of experience. The mirror needs “empathic containment”;8 the parents, that is to say, cannot take on the emotion of the child—the parents cannot be inconsolable if the child is, for example—but must contain that affect: the parents see, contain, and (markedly) reflect experience in a way that psychically helps nourish and sustain the child. My argument, thus, is that avoiding psychosis or developing a new relationship to the reality of our fragmentation are contingent upon a type of mirroring that reflects a person as that person is, not as an ideal self or a “true” but hidden self, but in all her all incongruities, complexities, and illogical aspects, including her lack and all the divisions and fragmentation that entails. For one to see these elements of a subject, however, without immediately creating the fantasy of an ideal-ego, the reflection must be a reflection without judgment. Mirroring is not commenting on the person, but revealing aspects of that person that he cannot see himself. Kristeva argues the mirror produces spatial intuition and permits differentiation into objects (in the psychoanalytic sense of the term) so as to move beyond the semiotic chora, or the “ordering” via the  Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 152.  This is an extension of both Winnicott’s concept of the holding and Wilfred R. Bion’s concepts of container and contained and how with psychotic patients, one of the analyst’s functions is to contain the mental (dys)functioning of the analysand in order understand something the analysand may not understand himself, or to help transform beta bits into alpha elements (components of and for thought) via the alpha function. See Wilfred R. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (London: Routledge, 1961) and Wilfred, R. Bion, Learning from Experience (New York: Basic Books, 1962). I will return to this. 7 8

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mother’s body,9 but one cannot get to that “beyond” without that chora. One needs the experience of engulfment or non-separation from which separation can arise. In other words, the mirror stage is a necessary precursor to the acceptance (albeit repressed) of the name-of-the-father. For the psychotic who has foreclosed on the-name-of-the-father, the mirror stage may need to be re-experienced in order to move beyond the concrete understanding of words and the merger with objects that characterizes the psychotic experience in order to develop a new relationship to the engulfment (by the real) that one experiences. Thus, in psychosis is where the change in the function of the mirror becomes most appreciable and necessary. Whereas most people see others as they imagine the other to be, I see mirroring within the sinthome as offering a disinterested reflection. In current analytic theory, the analyst’s function, or a part of it, relies on seeing what the analysand cannot see himself: not just as revealed in the analyst’s interpretations but also by recognizing that the analysand only sees part of himself and filling out the other aspects that he has disavowed or repressed. It is seeing the analysand without motivation. One caution about mirroring, however, is that mirroring is never as easy as just identifying the divisions within a person to “remedy” them or make them conscious because in our everyday colloquial understanding, my mirror image is me (that is, the mirror can only be reflecting me, and I am fragmented and incomplete) and I am the (ideal) reflection that I see in the mirror (and in psychosis, the mirror image—and the mirror—is merged without “me” even more). Thus, mirroring carries with it a fear. Bollas notes how images that make them believe they are not whole often scare children with schizophrenia, but when accompanied by proof they still exist, these images can then be assimilated into their consciousness: when children visited a local pool, they feared the water initially because images of themselves within it appeared fragmented and distorted, but the repetition of entering the water helped those children recognize the reality that they remained intact.10

 Revolution in Poetic Language, 25.  When the Sun Bursts, 19–20.

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4.1.2 Dance Reflections Dance seems ideal for re-experiencing the mirror stage since the use of the mirror in dance is as ubiquitous as it is controversial. Dance, purposefully and consistently, re-enacts the mirror stage: dance practice—more often than not—occurs in front of mirrors and, as Sparshott notes, these mirrors often haunt dancers: not only are dancers often surrounded my mirrors, but they internalize these mirrors so that mirrors exist for them even if no mirrors are physically present.11 This picture may not intuitively offer support for the acceptance of all aspects of a subject; indeed, it seems to suggest the mirror strengthens neurosis as the dancer perpetually inhabits a relationship to oneself that is reliant upon the all-or-­ nothing binary of the mirror stage. Alternatively, as dancers focus on the body in the mirror, dancers may come to see themselves as the body, which theoretically could suggest that dance may precipitate psychosis by encouraging a loss of “self.” This effect may even be enhanced as others (audiences) see dancers as (the parts of ) the body rather than seeing the dancers (as subjects), which could reinforce the fragmentation of the person and concomitantly usher in dissociation if “the mind excludes the body for fear that the body could exclude the mind.”12 Yet, if mirrors can reflect one’s fragmentation without reifying it, then the use of mirrors in dance may, likewise, usher in a new understanding of the subject by revealing not just the image but the real as it moves through the image, forcing a confrontation with that “body in bits and pieces.” In dance, the mirrors that occupy the space, not of the dance itself necessarily but certainly of rehearsals and training, are not just the shiny reflective surfaces that line the walls of studios. Just as the analyst can act as a mirror in psychoanalysis, the instructor or choreographer often acts a mirror for the dancer, showing the dancer corrections or adjustments by first reflecting what the dancer does, then showing the alternative. This helps the dancer to feel the difference in movements within the body  “The Philosophy of Dance,” 280.  Lombardi, Body-Mind Dissociation, 120. Lombardi is not relating his comment to dance; rather, he is writing specifically about the negation of the body in psychosis. I am suggesting that this negation of the body could be precipitated by an “other” who sees the dancers only as the body in parts. 11 12

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while also supporting the dancer to know that she is not alone with her image. In psychosis, sensations, affects, thoughts, and perceptions in-sist on the person and such overstimulation can easily overwhelm someone; at such times, these sensations become separated into a different “reality”: hearing voices or losing all sense of time and existing apart from the external reality others share. The mirror can lessen this effect because the mirror is not just for the dancer to see herself: the physical mirror is a way to help ground the dancer in reality, and the instructor as the mirror lets the dancer know she is seen and that someone else has experienced these sensations. The importance of mirrors in dance cannot be underestimated. Mirrors are so ubiquitous that occasionally they become a part of the dance itself. Two examples of choreographers that use mirrors in their dances are Jerome Robbins and Savion Glover. Glover brings the mirror into Bring in Da Noise, Bring in da Funk, and Robbins uses the audience as an invisible mirror in his interpretation of Afternoon of a Faun. For Robbins, especially, mirrors relate to the different parts of the self. Even before he choreographs using the mirror, he sees mirrors as revealing his masks, his different selves: “The evil, the good, the bad, the smiling, sneering, artistic, malicious, destructive benevolent, rapacious, egotistical, sacrificing and selfish are all my selves … all me.”13 In Robbins case, mirrors reveal the divisions of the self in a way that the subject can accept that each different image, each “mask,” is nonetheless “me.” Mirrors, then, do not have to divide the subject into an ego-ideal and ideal-ego, creating a longing for a whole, but can allow the “body in bits and pieces” to exist as a body in bits and pieces. Thus, mirrors may not create the desire for a whole but, instead, offer an image of a collection of disparate parts, thereby confronting the reality that the body only exists in multiplicity. The experience of the mirror in dance may then supply not a “wholeness” in the sense of being whole in oneself but a wholeness that means through the connection with the mirror, each aspect of oneself can be seen in the world and, thus, come to be held as a conglomerate of disparate parts  “My Selves: An Attempt to Express My Character as I See It” in Jerome Robbins, by Himself: Selections from His Letters, Journals, Drawings, Photographs, and an Unfinished Memoir, ed. Amanda Vaill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019): 20. 13

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within the dancer, including the lack (ontological or of the name-of-the-father). While the mirror, as Deborah Anna Leupniz asserts, is deceptive in that it reverses right and left,14 in its distortion of reality it merely reflects an image of the subject without any motivation or commentary or involvement. For example, as the dancer practises, he may see the “sloppy” turnout in the mirror, but the mirror does not make that judgment; it just shows his turnout as it is. In music this may work similarly: “In philosopher Stephen Davies’ words, sadness from music lacks ‘life implications.’ Sadness from music is pure and unadulterated; sadness from life events is tinged with anxiety because we know we need to figure out how to cope.”15 This example from Ellen Winner demonstrates how music mirrors our emotions (and, therefore, our experiences) but in a way that makes them more manageable precisely because they are marked; as a result, nothing can become too overwhelming, too real. Thus, the image in the mirror may no longer present an image to fear, but instead would offer a way to realize one’s objectification and act as a necessary precondition for the “ethical subject.”16

4.2 Containing and (Potential) Space The mirror may reveal fragmentation or the things we can’t and don’t want to see, but for Joyce—or anyone like him—being confronted with one’s fragmentation alone may cause the psyche that is already unstable to completely unknot itself. Thus, mirroring alone is not enough, and the next process that I see as essential for the sinthome is the ability to bind or contain the psyche that threatens to fragment. The mirror’s reparative function, I believe, is in part achieved only if the mirror provides the “empathic containment” I mentioned earlier.  “Thinking in the Space between Winnicott and Lacan,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90, no. 5 (2009): 961, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00156.x. 15  Winner, How Art Works, 54. Rose, similarly, suggests all arts encourage one to feel more consciously what was always latent but inexplicable. Between Couch and Piano, 42. This idea can be seen as an implicit mirror as the aesthetic emotions mirror the inexpressible real. 16  Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, 153, 103–4. 14

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Lacan sees Joyce’s writing as providing a means of organizing experience so that it is not overwhelming, and the sinthome is, essentially, all about keeping the elements of psyche bound, specifically finding a way to bind the real because it is the unbound intrusion of the real into one’s experience that initiates a psychotic break. If one can bind the real, then one can create a space of separation from it. I see this space as a potential space, another concept developed by Winnicott. Lacan never discusses potential space per se, which is also known as the transitional space or dream space in psychoanalytic literature, but his arguments about how Joyce accepts the intrusions of the real suggest that acceptance relies on creating a distance from the real.

4.2.1 Theoretical Space to Dream and Contain the Real To explore binding and containing more in depth, I look mainly to the psychoanalytic theories of Wilfred R. Bion, Thomas H. Ogden, and Philip M. Bromberg. Boundaries are important for Bion’s psychoanalytic understanding of the role of dreams and nightmares. Psychosis can be conceptualized as a living nightmare, and, therefore, Bion’s theory— alongside Bromberg’s and Ogden’s contributions to our understanding of dreams—can also help conceptualize the sinthome. J. S. Grotstein summarizes Bion’s understanding of psychopathology as the condition that arises when a person cannot adequately dream. The inability to dream means that dreams can no longer function to fulfill an unconscious wish or to bind psychic energy and bring it under the pleasure principle as per Freud;17 in other words, dreams lose their “reparative mythic function,”18 or their capacity to creating meaning. Thus, working with psychopathology requires first and foremost that the analyst restores the analysand’s ability to dream so dreams can act as a container for transforming our  The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010); Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 41. To be clear and as pertains to the wish fulfilment functions of dreams: the dream is not a preference for a specific state of affairs—it cannot be considered a wish in the conventional sense—but is a biological and mental urge to release a certain energy. 18  “What Does It Mean to Dream? Bion’s Theory of Dreaming,” in A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion’s Legacy to Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 2007), 25. 17

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unconscious impulses and wishes.19 Regarding psychosis in particular, Grotstein further concludes that Bion “hints at” the idea that those who suffer from psychosis suffer from “defective dreaming.”20 Ogden, too, relates psychosis to dreaming and describes psychosis as undergoing experiences that cannot be dreamt,21 which are, instead, comparable to night terrors or “undreamt dreams,” experience that are then “held in … pockets of psychosis,” which are spaces of dissociation and concretization.22 I would also include as indications of undreamable experience, interrupted dreams, those dreams that wake us screaming or crying with a pounding heart in the middle of the night, for example. The content of these dreams is less important than their form or style or the fact they are interrupted. Thus, although dreams (including nightmares) help us hold non-processable experiences, undreamt dreams that are never started or are left unfinished, lose any containing capacity. In Lacanian terms, in psychosis the real intrudes into reality and is not able to be bound, by dreams or anything else. In place of these undreamt dreams, in contrast to the dream space, is the loss of imagination and reality;23 we lose the space wherein we can both contain experiences that we couldn’t process during the day and transform those experiences into something manageable, and we are left with an empty space devoid of creativity. Thus, while Bion aligns with Bromberg’s general theory of dreaming that posits dreams (and nightmares) help us maintain a connection to reality because they operate unconsciously to bind experience that may otherwise overwhelm us, Ogden adds an essential element of dreaming that acknowledges the moments of no comprehensible narrative or only uninterpretable narrative. To juxtapose these two ideas more directly: the dream (and nightmare) is a dissociative experience that exists to hold  “What Does It Mean to Dream?,” 26.  “What Does It Mean to Dream?,” 268. 21  Thomas H. Ogden, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries (New York: Routledge, 2005), 24. 22  This Art of Psychoanalysis, 24. Ogden’s full comment about undreamt dreams is they are held in “psychologically split-off states such as pockets of autism or psychosis, psychosomatic disorders and severe perversions.” Ibid. 23  Thomas H. Ogden, “On Not Being Able to Dream.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 84, no. 1 (2003): 23, https://doi.org/10.1516/1D1W-025P-10VJ-TMRW. 19 20

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(and process) otherwise unprocessed experience24 whereas the night terror, undreamt dream, or interrupted dream is an indication of an inability to contain those same unprocessed experiences (i.e., the experience of the real). Grotstein suggests Bion’s goal of analysis with the psychotic is to create the possibility for metaphor or to institute a containing function,25 which is a large part of my argument regarding Lacan’s sinthome for the pre-psychotic. This possibility (for metaphor) is also discussed by Jonathan Lear: that is, psychoanalysis is not tied to making meaning (or a meaning) but to opening up possibilities,26 including the possibility that there is an unknown that will always escape meaning or, as applied to Lacan, that we can re-orient ourselves regarding the knowledge and instances of the real, accepting that real and restraining its persistent intrusion into our lives (not eliminating it). I am saying that by binding experience, dreams also have the ability to bind the real; dreams become a container, in Bromberg’s parlance, for the affects that reveal the real, and the analyst’s work is that of containing, of helping the analysand by holding the effects of the real until the analysand can learn to do this on her own, which only occurs in an analytic environment that offers increasing safety to the patient.27 Essential to my understanding of this process are Bion’s concepts of the alpha-function (α-function) and beta-elements (β-elements). β-elements are the sense impressions that the infant experiences as bad objects and needs to expel (by projection into the mother).28 The α-function is the function by which the mother (in the non-pathological scenario) accepts the infant’s projections of β-elements and processes them to make sense of these  Philip M. Bromberg, “Bringing in the Dreamer: Some Reflections on Dreamwork, Surprise, and Analytic Process,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 36, no. 4 (200): 694, https://doi.org/10.108 0/00107530.2000.10745795. Bromberg is here discussing using dreams in psychoanalysis, suggesting that night dreams are an everyday experience of dissociation. 25  Grotstein, “What Does It Mean to Dream?,” 268. 26  Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 27  Bromberg, “Bringing in the Dreamer,” 690. 28  Bion’s theory rests heavily on Melanie Klein’s theory of projective identification. See Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27 (1946): 99–110, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3330415/pdf/160.pdf. This isn’t an active process. The baby’s mind isn’t developed enough to understand her experiences, but the mother recognizes this and steps in to help the baby makes sense of them. 24

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β-elements for the infant, turning them into alpha-elements (α-elements), which are those elements that can then be thought of and, thus, worked though. Analysis helps institute Bion’s α-function, and its containing function allows for dialogue between the dreaming-self and the dreamer-­ self to develop, which Bromberg argues is a creative, interpersonal process.29 That is to say, the creativity that arises, then, is not merely a process between the dreamer-self and the dreaming-self; for Bion, the mother is essential to this function when it occurs developmentally. When the normal developmental experience hasn’t happened, however, the analyst can assume that function (the α-function not the maternal function) in the clinic. The creativity that can occur between the different aspects of the self only arises from a containment that is interpersonal in nature. When we begin to contain the real or our non-processable experiences, we create a space where the real no longer in-sists (or does not always in-­ sist). This space is Winnicott’s potential space. And Winnicott is also who defines it as a space of creativity. This is the area of developmental transition that exists between my experience of myself as the centre of a world that I control and my recognition that other things (and others) exist outside my control.30 For Winnicott, this space is a necessary space for the development of the individual, yet this space, is only ever a potential space and not an actual space: it is only a hypothetical possibility in which the mother and infant as separate individuals co-exists with the (infant’s) impression of the mother and child (and, I would add, the world) as a single unit.31 As a space of creativity, the potential space offers the infant a place to learn who he is as an individual while maintaining a connection to the other. Without this space the child remains within a concrete reality. Bromberg relates how dreaming (or the “dream space”) is analogous to Winnicott’s transitional space: both represents attempts to symbolize

 “Bringing in the Dreamer,” 690.  Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 135. 31  “Thomas H. Ogden: On Potential Space,” in In One’s Bones: The Clinical Genius of Winnicott, ed. Dodi Goldman (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 2013), 228. 29 30

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what is non-signifiable.32 In other words, these spaces are preconditions for the development of meaning, and because of the unstable relationship of the signified and signifier, the development of meaning is always a creative act. Mari Ruti characterizes creativity for Lacan (at times) as “an art of living”33 that not only requires the other but is also as much about the other as about the subject. Additionally, creativity requires fashioning a new object by using the objet a (i.e., the real).34 Thus creativity (and the creation of a sinthome) is a relational process that uses the real, and it is not just the binding of our affect and sensory experiences that is important for the sinthome but also how they lead to the development of Winnicott’s potential (transitional) space. Winnicott brought the importance of creativity into the clinic by being creative himself and reconceptualizing Freud. He conceives of the potential space as the place of creativity that offers us a new way to be that isn’t so black and white. For Bromberg, this means that once the dissociations of dreams are integrated into the self, one meets the definition of health, which he sees as “the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. This is . . . what creativity is all about— the capacity to feel like one self while being many.”35 Thus, what is important to keep in mind is that the potential space is a bound space, even if not a physical space. It exists as the space between (and that incorporates) fantasy and reality. A place where fantasy can exist, but within the limits of time and space that structure our reality. The containing feature of the dream and its function to create an ensuing dialogue ensure there is no failure of the potential space, yet for the psychotic who merges (with) objects and encounters language concretely, the potential space doesn’t exist. Loewald (whom I mentioned in Chap. 2)  Philip M. Bromberg, “On Being One’s Dream: Some Reflections on Robert Bosnake’s ‘Embodied Imagination,’” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 39, no. 4 (2003): 699, https://doi.org/10.108 0/00107530.2003.10747229. 33  “The Cure When There Is No Cure: Mourning and Creativity,” (presentation, Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism Speaker Series, University of Western Ontario, February 5, 2021), MPEG-4 movie, 00:06:40. 34  For Ruti, the objet a has another side beyond its role is causing and supporting our desire; it can also “serve creative capacities.” “There Is No Cure,” 00:15:25. 35  “Shadow and Substance: A Relational Perspective on Clinical Process,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 10, no. 2 (1993): 166, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0079464. 32

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has recognized that until one can sort out the different realities (inner and outer), there is no room for an intermediate area.36 Thus, the sinthome must also institute a way to create that space. In a sense then, dreams—in containing the real and permitting its continued existence albeit in a limited way—create a sense of order, an order that allows someone to exist and operate successfully within the symbolic despite the threat of the real. Perhaps the best illustration of this phenomenon is that of John Nash, the brilliant mathematician who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia in the 1950s and 1960s but went on to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994 for his earlier contributions to the field. In the 1970s his illness appeared to be in remission despite his refusal to continue taking anti-psychotic medication. In Sylvia Nasar’s biography of Nash, she quotes Nash’s certainty that he will not relapse: “‘It’s like a continuous process rather than just waking up from a dream … When I dream … it sometimes happens that I go back to the system of delusions that’s typical of how I was … and then I wake up and then I’m rational again.’”37 In other words, Nash’s chaotic dreams contribute to the order in his waking life. This “order,” then, is a part of what is necessary when the real threatens too much. In other words, for most of us, dreams act as a protectant: they bind (and thereby contain) the unprocessed and non-processable elements of our experience and transform those elements in a way that allows us to live with them.38 Dreams may be a way that many people—unconsciously—bind the real, bracketing it off in its own space, so to live with the real while not having it overwhelm them or intrude upon them during daytime hours. This process is then useful for analysis: the analyst and analysand can work together to explore these split-off states and assimilate the bodily experience and affect of the dream into the analysand’s everyday being. In part, this occurs as the analysand uses the analyst as a  Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 37  A Beautiful Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 389. 38  John E. Mack, for example, in his overview on dreams and psychosis within psychoanalytic thinking, writes that both John Frosch and M. Katan posit dreams containing content that later appears in delusions “may reflect an effort to prevent the illness or master the conflict.” Mack, “Dreams and Psychosis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 17, no. 1 (1969): 208, https://doi.org/10.1177/000306516901700110. 36

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container. In psychosis, this process is more necessary because the dreams are undreamable. The psychotic can’t start by exploring his split off states; the analyst must work to contains those states, and only then can they begin to be dreamt.

4.2.2 The (Potential) Space of Dance, Bound in Time Dance involves steps and movements, and it thereby creates bodily sensations and expressions of the real, sensations and expressions felt within the defined space and time of the dance (i.e., that are contained) and that can, over time, be assimilated, integrated, and experienced, not as parts of a whole, but as parts of the subject who is subjected to drives and desires that often conflict. The real is bound when dance teaches us that the duration of these sensations is limited. Dance also offers contained access to the real because if the real is too much, the dancer can revert to the learned moves to lessen the intensity of the sensations or affects, to rein them in. Furthermore, as I mentioned, the dance instructor or choreographer (like the analyst) can operate as a mirror just as the analyst does, and in so doing, can also help the dancer contain the real—by modelling how to contain the real and let it flow through one’s body— and, eventually, use the real within the dance to maintain the knot of the psyche. Mirrors thus have a role to play in this binding, too. The space between the mirror and dancer can thus be conceived of as a potential space. The gap between the mirror and the dancer is a space wherein a new way of living becomes a possibility because the reflection is experienced as “marked”; the space between then acts as a container and becomes a threshold for new ways of being. This space becomes a creative space and allows the dancers to develop a sense of their fragmentation without the blandishments of creating a “whole” subject and to accept their fundamental divisions because “it’s in the mirror that they see both the ideal

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versions of themselves they hope to show the public as well as their own failings.”39 In other words, the mirror and the dancer are not dualities playing off one another but a triad of subject-space-mirror, and as the practising dancer is surrounded by mirrors, the mirror stage, recreated in the studio, may have a different function from the original mirror stage. Working at the level of the real, then, means the mirroring aspect of dance may be able to re-connect the imaginary aspects of the psyche that threatens to slip away in psychosis because of its relationship to the binding and the development of a potential space. Even if physical mirrors are not a part of dancing or dancing training, they often exist in a psychological form, thus allowing for this binding and the development of a potential space. However, this space in the middle is not a purely safe space but one that holds simultaneously the paradox of pleasure and fear (of seeing oneself differently, for example), and the paradox of pleasure and fear is an important element of the last process I see within the sinthome: play.

4.3 Play Lacan himself never explicitly explores play, but he nevertheless knows the importance of play in psychoanalysis. As Sherry Turkle writes, “For Lacan himself, wit, word games, jokes, mythology making, the material of the poet, were all part of a kind of play that is inseparable from what is most serious about the psychoanalytic enterprise … subvert[ing] the line between work and play.”40 Play, I contend, is the process that is essential for the sinthome. The other processes matter and must exist, but without  Alastair Macaulay, “The Many Faces of ‘Black Swan’ Deconstructed,” review of Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, The New York Times, February 9, 2011, https://www.nytimes. com/2011/02/10/arts/dance/10swan.html.This is taken from a review of the movie, Black Swan; however, the movie which brings this aspect of the mirror into relief is only relying on it as an aspect of dance in general. 40  Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud’s French Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford, 1992), 233. The full quote about the importance of subverting the line between work and play is: “if analysts do not subvert the line between work and play, they are doing neither science nor poetry, and if analysts do not subvert the line between science and poetry, they are not psychoanalysts at all.” Ibid. 39

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play, the existence of the other processes leads less to effective living and more to mere existing. One needs to play with the reflection in the mirror or the elements of the real, for example, if one is to create order in the disordered psyche. What, however, is play? This question rarely arises because most of us “play” without wondering what it is we are doing. In this section, I add philosophy to the psychoanalytic theories of play, so we can start with a shared idea of play.

4.3.1 Play in Theory Philosopher Johan Huizinga, in his look at play in culture, discusses the boundaries of play and describes play as an absorbing, aesthetic activity that occurs “quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life” yet within the limits of time and space, and play involves both repetition and a “tension, … uncertainty, chanciness.”41 Play’s existence within the limits of time and space is what distinguishes it from reality (or “ordinary life”), meaning it exists within a very defined space and time, and play is intimately connected to seriousness in that one often turns into the other.42 Play always contains antithetical elements, ones that may become more agonistic when play occurs in groups or as the element of competition is added,43 something you might see in sports, for example. Play is unexplainable by logic,44 yet is an intrinsic and undeniable part of all epochs and forms of life. To see the importance of play within psychoanalysis more directly, Winnicott is again of use. Winnicott offers a look at play, an element that he sees as essential for psychoanalysis to have effect.45 Playing, according to Winnicott, “has a place and a time. It is not inside by any use of the  Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge, 1949), 13, 10. See pages 1–24 for more on the nature of play. 42  Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 8–9. 43  Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 47. See 155 for an idea of how these antagonistic properties operate. 44  Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 213. 45  Playing and Reality, 68. For Winnicott, playing as a doing is also related to mirroring and is always a creative act. See “Playing: Its Theoretical Status in the Clinical Situation,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49 (1968): 591–99. 41

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word. … Nor it is outside … as truly external, outside magical control. To control what is outside one has to do things, not simply to think or to wish, and doing things takes time. Playing is doing.”46 Playing is doing also in the sense that this is a playing with reality so to understand it and its limitations.47 For most people, playing helps them to exist within the symbolic under the law of the name-of-the-father, yet doing, for Lacan, is also related to the psychoanalytic act that creates a new organizational structure. Play is connected to all the other processes I’ve discussed in relation to the sinthome. First, mirroring brings out the elements one cannot see, and for one to fully embrace these elements as a part of his subjectivity, he needs to play with them, try them on, see if they fit, or see how they might fit. If all one does is see one’s reflection and stare at the mirror, one will never get beyond the mirror stage. Second, if we think back to the importance of containment in that the containment of dreams creates order, then play is also an important element in containment. Huizinga defined one of the positive features of play as how “it creates order, is order.”48 The binding of the real, I suggest, is a part of what Lacan describes as making a hole in the real to establish a sinthome. This binding both permits and results from play. Additionally, undreamt dreams as limited spaces that close on creativity and play may result in living in a state of dissociation in which, as I previously explained, “everything is concretized,” a state that also “forecloses play.”49 Play also brings us back to the body: playing requires the body50 (and thus the imaginary), but it must never become too real: play always requires boundaries, and those boundaries must be marked. For example, when play swerves too close to a fearful reality, play becomes a threat. The child (or playmate) no longer acts as a lion, but is a lion. Without a  Playing and Reality, 55.  Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (New York: Routledge, 1990), 79. 48  Homo Ludens, 10. 49  Phillip M. Bromberg, “Hope When There Is No Hope: Discussion of Jill Scharff’s Case Presentation,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 21, no. 4 (2001): 525, https://doi. org/10.1080/07351692109348955. 50  Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 69. 46 47

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marked quality, what could have been a fun game that only brushed against the enjoyment of danger becomes a frightful reality. When this occurs repeatedly, the child does not develop a way to play healthily. Ogden, too, describes how the failure of the potential space results in a failure to play. At its most extreme, Ogden states that the failure to play leads to the “foreclosure of the possibility of generating both realistic and fantastic meanings,”51 recalling (perhaps unconsciously) Lacan’s concept of foreclosure (of the name-of-the-father). When experiencing psychosis, one often turns abstract concepts into concrete realities, but in so doing, “forecloses play” by severing access to illusion52 or, rather, by allowing the body to escape: play is impossible. The necessity of the body for play and the potential of the real becoming too real, I suggest, are the fearful elements that exist within the joyful element of play, the duality that both Winnicott and Huizinga note defines play. The anxiety-informing nature of play also makes the boundaries of play, in time and space, necessary: as Adam Phillips argues, one of Freud’s great teachings was how “we are at our most insistent about boundaries when we sense their precariousness.”53 Boundaries are needed for one to feel safe enough to explore. Knowing that there is a limit to exploration, one can freely explore. When boundaries are loose or non-existent then there arises an insistence on boundaries, and often the boundaries one establishes (for oneself ) are more stringent than they need to be. Having such stringent boundaries closes off creativity by limiting the play sphere. Appropriate boundaries are what allow for the child to be able to play, despite play’s connection to fright; they turn what might otherwise be an overwhelming situation into something enjoyable, and all the more enjoyable because it could be otherwise. The risk of play turning into a frightful reality also brings play into a relationship with existence. As Bollas explains when discussing the thought of psychoanalyst R. D. Laing, the questions of existence that plague someone in psychosis are indicative of an inability “to play with  “On Potential Space,” 235.  Philip M. Bromberg, “Hope No Hope,” 525. 53  Bersani and Phillips, intimacies, 90. This is often seen in children who lack rules and develop a strong superego in the service of maintaining safety. 51 52

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reality,”54 and playing with reality is crucial for dealing with it: fantasy is the support of reality, and play is how the imaginary works with the symbolic to produce meaning and bind the real. We see this phenomenon often in children when they recreate via play moments of an injury or illness. For example, my niece broke her collarbone when she was four. After it healed, we would play at being witches riding broomsticks, and she would direct me to fall off my broomstick and pretend that I had broken my collarbone. We played out the trips to the hospital and the wearing of a sling, until one day, it seemed she moved on, and her play no longer recreated her experience. What had been a frightening experience had been re-enacted in a playful way that contained it—she was able to work through the experience without attempting to undo it—and relegated it to the past. Nonetheless, play like this still contains the risk of fright because the original experience was frightful, and this tension between fright and pleasure is what allows the repetition of the play to contain the fear as one works through the original incident. Thus, space for play is potential space: it is the chance to learn to play, so that one can develop creativity, feminine jouissance, or the alternative approach to life that characterizes Joyce. One of the threats in psychosis is the loss of a sense of oneself. Laing writes, “under usual circumstances, the physical birth of a new organism into the world inaugurates rapidly ongoing processes whereby within an amazingly short time the infant feels real and alive and has a sense of being and entity, with a continuity in time and a location in space.”55 In psychosis, however, this sense of feeling alive fails to occur, and if the sinthome can help alleviate or repair the loss of reality, then it can only do so by creating those senses of continuity and location. Crucially, this is where my interpretation of the sinthome comes in. Whereas others read the sinthome as a creative act, I argue the sinthome is a possibility. It is the possibility of play, the possibility of metaphor, and the possibility for a creative act. If it is a creative act in its own right, then it is not a creative act in the sense we normally understand that term, with its relation to the symbolic wherein creativity “is seen as a symbolic 54 55

 Bollas, When the Sun Burst, 164.  The Divided Self (Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican, 1965), 41.

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re-­creation” as one’s inner experience is translated into the world of external objects and communicates a meaning.56 Rather, it is a necessary act borne of the real, with no meaning inherent within it. This insight into the importance of play for the sinthome is pivotal to Lacan’s work and my argument for dance as a sinthome because—as Bollas describes—the schizophrenic is “unsure of how to be receptive to the thingness of the world, or to play with reality.57 In other words, there are people who cannot play (e.g., those suffering from psychosis). If “psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together,”58 then for the psychotic the primary focus needs to be on teaching play.59

4.3.2 Dancing Play There are several ways to explore the connection between dance and play. Huizinga comments that “dancing is a particular and particularly perfect form of playing”;60 how might we understand this idea in terms of the elements of dance previously discussed? One way is to focus on dance’s relationship to space and time. This relationship is significant because dance only exists as it is danced: it is an “elusive presence, dance as the fleeting track of an always irretrievable, never fully translatable motion.”61 Dance plays with limits—limits that are not intrinsic to dance itself— and breaks away from “useful” action, thereby embracing play, and it permits this play because it binds the real in the space/time of dance. Playing in dance often relies on space and time. Karmen MacKendrick offers an example:

 Ronald Turco, “Psychoanalysis and Creativity: Beyond Freud and Waelder,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 29, no. 4 (2001): 547, https://doi.org/10.1521/ jaap.29.4.543.21550. 57  When the Sun Bursts, 164. 58  “Playing,” 591. 59  “Playing,” 591. 60  Homo Ludens, 165. 61  André Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance,” in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, ed. André Lepecki (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 127. 56

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Dance’s eternity, the return’s opposition to time introduced by the structure of time in dance, is the sense of dance as suspended time—that paradoxical combination of stillness and movement at once. The sense of suspension, both felt and willed, both gratified and desired … is the sense of a fermata, a sense of being taking outside of time, held there, which nonetheless can only occur in time, and which would lose its vitality and its affirmative quality if it were not part of a passage.62

Dance’s existence in time is a playful one. Dance is bound by time but strives for existence beyond time. A dance nevertheless must end, cementing its relation to the realities of time. At the same time, the dancer must be “in” time, not only rhythmically but also physically and mentally. If a dancer starts thinking about the next movement prior to finishing the current movement, then the dancer risks falling out of time. This duality is also true of space. The dance exists in physical space even as it depicts an imaginary space. Even though dance confuses space and time and tries to exist beyond time, it nonetheless exists only within its defined space and its defined time. Dance, then, in playing with space and time and binding sensations can help someone with psychosis who has to confront the confusion of space and time: dance can both help shift one’s relationship to the lack of the name-of-the-father wherein everything is one (a merged and concretized union of people, places, and things comparable to the hypothesized confusion of the mother-baby dyad as two in one) and develop a understanding of space and time (and the development through space and time). As dance also plays with movement, the real (as it accompanies rhythm, vibration, etc.), and the boundaries of the psyche, it stretches our imaginations and asks us to embrace the real. This means dance is using play in order to bind the real and, thereby, risks becoming a frightening experience as it constantly straddles the border of balance/disbalance, tension/ release, body/mirror image, and play/fright. Because the order it brings can never be “pure,” dance inevitably contains the possibility of becoming a frightening experience, just as creating a sinthome was frightening for Joyce (according to Lacan).  “Embodying Transgression,” in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, ed. André Lepecki (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004): 153. 62

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What’s more, however, is that beyond embodying this certain danger, dance first develops one’s ability to risk playing with it. This is a quality not found within the other arts, or at least not to the same degree. Although Phillips suggests, in general, “art helps us to be as mad as we need to be to feel fully alive,”63 I argue that unlike the other arts, dance teaches one how to play in order to hold the potential for fear and risk, and only then can one use dance more creatively. Dance teaches one how to play through creative engagement, and it is this engagement that is liable to become frightening. This juxtaposition of order and disorder or the potential to feel alive alongside the fright and risk of madness links us back to the importance of play. Although Huizinga notes that play is closely related to antagonistic concepts such as challenge and contest—he situates them all within “a single field of action where something is at stake”64—he later suggests dance “is … the purest and most perfect form of play that exists,” and the relationship between dance and play “is one of direct participation, almost of essential identity.”65 The deep connection of dance to play, therefore, not only means that dance is both pleasurable and frightening and that in dance something is at “stake,”66 but it also means that dance cannot avoid play, thus ensuring the dancer works through the processes of mirroring, binding and containing, and creating a potential space rather than having these elements merely exist or become rote repetitions. Bollas describes the “schizophrenic position” but also writes of how sometimes a person can restore the psychotic self to an everyday self that appears non-psychotic by “control[ling] their own mental processes.”67 If this restoration is achievable by the creation of limits within which the real is given free play or the space in which to exist but which then also quells the real’s insistence upon the psyche, then Joyce’s works exist in a “potential space”—a space that allows for play—and Bollas’s conjecture provides a reason to think this restoration is possible via dance because  Unforbidden Pleasures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 20.  Homo Ludens, 40. 65  Homo Ludens, 164–65. 66  That something is at stake, once again, returns to Lacan and the importance of the gap between the act and the doing. 67  When the Sun Bursts, 123. 63 64

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dance, too, plays with limits by binding the real aspects of the psyche as they are played out in the body. Yet at the same time, the mind (and unconscious) reacts to certain movements. Dance’s requirement for focus, however, allows one to experience those reactions in a contained and safe (enough) manner as they pass quickly. This process allows one to see oneself differently—not deceptively, just from a new angle, one in which the psyche is neither centred around a lack nor threatening to unravel completely, one in which the psyche of the pre-psychotic becomes centred around the knot-hole established by the sinthome. What Winnicott describes as the development of learning to play incorporates what dance offers: an experience of transitional phenomena facilitated by the containing power (of fleeting movements), a mirror that provides an image of oneself that is marked so as to reduce the impact of the real, and a potential space that opens onto creativity. In other words, it is conceivable that if you cannot play, dance can teach you how. Thus, what is singular to dance as an art, in my opinion, is that not only is it (a form of ) play, but it can also teach one to play if that ability has been lost or has never existed. In other words, not everyone suffers from defective dreaming (psychosis), but dance can help one to dream by creating limits and introducing play. Once one can play, then other work can happen, the work that embraces creativity. Even in doing someone else’s steps, the dancer must occupy a place of play because the choreographer had to be playful in developing the sequences of those steps. Being thrust into a position of someone else’s play introduces the idea of play for a dancer who may otherwise be unable to play. As the dancer continues dancing and, over the years, as the dancer repeats the process of confronting play and repeats the confrontation of the image in the mirror and the containing of bodily sensations, the dancer absorbs this play of the other, working through what it means to play and potentially learning to play, not just with the steps but also with the body sensations (the effects of the real and the drives) and her lack.

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4.4 Dance, Paradox, and Feminine Jouissance In Chap. 3, I explained how the sinthome results in paradox (defined as the acceptance of two seemingly-unrelated-but-in-reality-very interconnected elements) and the development of a feminine jouissance. Now I want to tie that idea to dance. In the forward to Gilbert J. Rose’s work on music and psychoanalysis, Jonathan D. Kramer writes that “musical calm … comes not from a maximum of order but from a balanced admixture of (mostly) order and (some) disorder, or regularity and irregularity, of predictability and surprise.”68 The need for a balance between order and disorder applies to dance as well. Dance brings together seeming paradoxes in many forms, brings them together without removing them. In addition to the obvious paradox of pleasure and fright, dance also combines tension and its release as it exist in rhythm69 or visuality and its silence.70 MacKendrick provides another example of a paradox dance holds: “surely some of the intensity of our pleasure in movement derives from the longing it creates in us, not only to move with it, but to hold it—to have it move before us yet remain,

 “A Musician Lists to a Psychoanalyst Listening to Music,” forward to Between Couch and Piano, by Gilbert J. Rose (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004), xvii. Rose writes of music, not dance or even the arts in general, but his argument is still relevant. He comments, “it is possible to consider that the most important fact about music—its basic ingredient—is not so much sound as movement. Between Couch and Piano, 102. This puts music into the realm of dance when one considers the only necessity for dance is movement: dance is still dance in silence, but not in (complete) stillness. In this sense, then, Rose’s entire argument can be applied to dance. His thesis is that is that music helps us to grow and develop because it encourages the psychic (re)integration of thought and feeling, using implicit motion and bypassing language. What I add, beyond the focus on dance, is the focus on the artist or dancer whereas Rose looks at music primarily from the perspective of the listener: he explores the mechanisms of music on the listener; I explore the mechanisms of dance on the dancer, the equivalent to the one playing a Mozart sonata or singing Handel’s Messiah, for example. Rose also foreshadows my conclusion regarding dance’s relationship to the real when he writes, “By enabling the person to recognize and feel what had been unformed and therefore inexpressible,” which in Lacanian terms would be the real, “as if by a responsive empathic presence, [the illusion provided by music] helps repair the loss or damage to a reflective inner ‘other.’” Ibid, 121. 69  “Rhythm, Laban defines as the ‘alternate of opposite happenings’—organized tension and relaxation of tension—each with its own effect.” Hodgson, Mastering Movement, 187. 70  Dance Pathologies, 38. This is where McCarren relates dance’s silence to the silence of the hysteric, which albeit an idea I disagree with, contains an important illustration of the paradox of dance. 68

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to have it remain still.”71 This longing is very different form a longing to be whole or the longing structured by the desire of the other. It is a longing based on a new relationship to and acceptance of the space of paradox. Thus, dance allows one to see contradictions and to see that both sides of these contradictions are not only simultaneously true but also rely on each other for existence. Paradox is permitted to exist and becomes a means for a creative (re)imagining of how to exist. In holding various paradoxes, dance embodies the existence of contradiction, not just in dance, but also in reality itself. Lombardi offers an illustration of how the simultaneous existence of pleasure and fright (the main paradox found in play) may have positive consequences if we can hold its dialectic: “only the toleration of the sense of powerlessness that comes from letting ourselves down into our bodily nature can give us a non-mechanistic sense to our thinking and become a decisive stimulus to live and to personal creativity.”72 If we can play with the body and its sensations, we can open to a type of thinking that does not rest on the logic or mechanisms of the symbolic, but rests on a Lacanian logic, which then us offers a reason or way to live and access to (personal) creativity. Thus, paradox also has a connection to the arts and creativity. Dance, I argue, necessarily uses paradox when crossing the threshold to a feminine jouissance because dance must embrace multiple paradoxes, a process that has echoes in the philosophy of pleasure. Phillips writes about “the pleasure of what Empson called ‘straddling the contradictions,’” a pleasure that does not consist of mastery.73 Dance, then, isn’t tied to the master’s discourse, but shares affinities with the analyst’s discourse, and Valéry offers one idea of how to tie the analyst’s discourse and the psychoanalytic act to dance in a way that does not rely on mastery when he offers the valuable insight into where dance fits among the arts: he argues the limits of dance are not intrinsic to it. That is, a dance ends not because of any inherent limitation, but because of the limits of the music, or of the human body. In this regard, dance breaks away from and  “Embodying Transgression,” 143.  Body-Mind Dissociation, 26. Lombardi is not writing of dance, only of the role of the body within optimal psychic functioning. 73  Unforbidden Pleasures, 186. 71 72

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“opposes ordinary useful action.”74 Claire Colebrook also identifies a related element that is unique to dance among the other aesthetic endeavours: dancing is dancing regardless of whether a dance is completed.75 These two ideas suggest dance is removed from the “science” that aims at the mastery of knowledge; rather, dance exists in the place of the subjective (truth). Dance connects to affect through the individual body; Foster argues the body “seems to maintain a closer connection to the unconscious feeling portion of the self than to the rational conscious self. … It expresses the passionate, ineffable, libidinal, and unconscious aspects of human experience in dialectical opposition to speech.”76 All of this is only possible because of the relationship of dance to the body (and the bodily experiences of the real that are necessary for subjectivity). If, as I mentioned, the name-of-the-father relies on the ordering of the (maternal) body and the chora, then developing a sinthome as a way to live without the phallic function or the name-of-the-father also requires the body and its association to the chora. Dances relies on the body, and through the chora experienced in the body, provides a link to feminine (jouissance); dance challenges one to accept the drives and their stasis that comprise the chora. Thereby it can position one to access the beyond of the symbolic order, and this beyond is what Joyce touches in his writing. Lear argues, “part of what it is to constitute oneself as a lover, subjectively understood, is to determine for oneself what it is to be a lover. And that, in turn, requires that one continually be able to notice, react to, and appropriate one’s own emerging impulses, thoughts, and feelings to a life so constituted.”77 Lacan contends that Joyce, unlike everyone else, did have  “Philosophy of the Dance,” 71–72.  “Dancer from the Dance?,” 7. 76  Reading Dancing, 50. This is in Lacanian thought, too: “’I speak with my body. And this without knowing it. I therefore always say more than I know.” Lacan, Seminar 20, 119. In other words, he relates the body to speech acts of parapraxis or aligns movement with those acts of speech that reveals the unconscious via “slips.” Despite the focus on language and the regular dismissal of the body in psychoanalysis (see Lombardi, Body-Mind Dissociation), Lombardi, who calls for a return to the body, suggests that the idea the body reveals what is inexpressible in speech has existed in psychoanalytic thought from Freud to the present day. For example, within current theories of analysis, it is accepted that the analysand may come to know more about the analyst than the analyst knows of herself, all because of what is revealed through an unconscious bodily “speech.” 77  Wisdom Won from Illness, 155. It is possible to make my subsequent substitution because of Lacan’s argument regarding Joyce. Joyce, via his relationship to feminine jouissance, has a sexual relationship with Nora, unlike those subject to phallic jouissance for whom the sexual relationship is forbidden. See Lacan, Seminar 23. 74 75

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a sexual relation (with Nora). Therefore, replace “as a lover, subjectively understood” with “within feminine jouissance,” and it becomes clear how necessary the body is. The unique spatio-temporal relationship in dance and for the dance is thus essential because it brings dance into a conversation with psychoanalysis and its “re-ordering” of time. Valéry and Merce Cunningham outline how dance exists only in space and time: “in dancing … space and time cannot be disconnected.”78 This, of course, leads to the notion that dance vanishes and is, therefore, an “ephemeral” art in which “something vital about dance … disappears as it is being performed”79 or the art that is fleeting. For some, especially those trying to pin down this elusive element, dance’s ephemerality is negative. Graham McFee, for example, argues any ephemeral aspect of dance is irrelevant for understanding the nature of dance and is purely a remnant of the current inability to preserve or recreate dances, an inability that makes studying dance difficult because it requires access to the constantly changing performance.80 Alternatively, Renee M. Conroy argues that many dancers view the fleeting nature of dance as something to value because it elevates the importance of live performance and, therefore, the importance of dance as an art: it implies that dancers, collectively, value flexibility as well as continual growth and development.81 Intuitively the notion of dance’s ephemerality seems logical: a dance itself is fleeting and, therefore, whatever elements exist in it would conceivably end when the dance does. I, however, suggest that dance is aethereal rather than ephemeral. Looking at dance does suggest there is something about it that makes it difficult to theorize, possibly because of its distance from the symbolic, but that something is not  Merce Cunningham, “Space, Time, and Dance,” in Trans/Formations 1, no. 3, (1952): 150–51, n.p., https://www.mercecunningham.org/the-work/writings/space-time-and-dance/. See also Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,” 65. 79  Aili Bresnahan, “The Philosophy of Dance,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford University, 1997–), article published January 12, 2015; last modified July 30, 2020, §1.2, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/dance/. 80  The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance and Understanding (Hampshire, UK: Dance Books, 2011), 97. 81  “Dance,” in The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Anna Christina Ribeiro (London: Continuum, 2012), 160. 78

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“fleeting,” even if the performance of a dance itself is fleeting. Pite, for example, notes that the dancer embodies both the dance and its disappearance, but the juxtaposition of dance and its disappearance brings with it a heightened sense of the present.82 This is, in case you missed it, also the juxtaposition of mortality—or the death drive—with the drive to live. Pite notes that dance does involve a transitory feature, yet when she creates, she wants to add something, something more permanent. In other words, steps themselves are fleeting (or dying), but dance contains an element that subsists across dances and dance forms and remains a part of the dancer even when not dancing. I contend the element that others see as ephemeral is a tenuous connection to the real, and that connection is simultaneously impossible to represent yet permanent. Although it cannot be adequately described via the language of the symbolic, it can nonetheless be felt and experienced by those who dance. Thus, the temporal aspects of dance are actually what contribute to what remains as much as to what disappears. There may be nothing concrete that remains (although that is debatable), but something remains and leaves a mark or a trace. Dance is not purely ephemeral and, thereby, is a powerful way to deal with the problem of the ephemeral for modernity because dance shows that the ephemeral isn’t destined merely to disappear. Dance’s ephemerality co-exists alongside something else. If the present affects the past and the logical evidence for any conclusion remains unfounded until that conclusion is acted upon (and if irrationality is therefore necessary for rationality, and any act—including the psychoanalytic act—requires a leap of faith that one’s albeit false certainty of action will be true), then dance is a way to change the past and affect the future. Part of what remains in the “fleeting” movement of dance is its effects, and thus, dance assimilates Lacan’s notions of retroaction and anticipation. Dance has a retroactive element built into it and has effects that, similar to the moment to conclude in Lacan’s discussion of logical time, can only be determined retroactively and relationally.83 When one  “How Reflected Light Inspired a Powerful Collaboration between Crystal Pite and the National Ballet,” interview with Tom Power, q with Tom Power, CBC radio, Nov. 10, 2021, 10:15. 83  See “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism,” Newsletter of the Freudian Field 2, no. 2 (1998): 4–22. 82

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dances, one can create change, which can—like psychoanalysis, “change” the past (i.e., change the analysand’s relationship to her experience and help her create a “past”), so what appears to be fleeting, in fact has lasting effect.84 Thus, the spatio-temporal relation to the body in dance gives rise to a jouissance that is not phallic by opening that potential space or creating a gap in the experience of merger. De Cuyper and Dulsster, too, seem to suggest dance creates this space. They write about a repetition in dance that circles around the empty space: “A dichotomy can thus be detected, on one side a meaningfulness and on the other side something that seems to escape language. However, these two forms appear to circle around a communal emptiness but represent two levels of what seem to be an attempt to master this void.”85 The choice of the word “master” is perhaps unfortunate, yet the sentiment De Cuyper and Dulsster express is relevant. The meaningfulness (produced through language) and the meaninglessness (of that which cannot be subsumed by language) can only co-exist, for without the symbolic’s tenuous connections between the signified and signifier (which produce meaning), there would be no way for us to see what escapes the symbolic. Hodgson, for instance, writes how the dancer, via rhythm, “expresses the invisible centre of the through-­ process,”86 suggesting dance doesn’t create a gap but makes a pre-existing gap visible. The corollary would be that for psychosis, dance may not only reveal the unravelling of the psyche, but dance can also go one step further, establishing a sinthome to retie the psychic structure and permitting the development of a new relationship to the real. To recap, the sinthome, as I see it, uses mirroring, binding, and containing to create a potential space of creativity and play that allows for the acceptance of paradox and the experience of a feminine jouissance, and dance employs these same processes, potentially to the same ends. Yet, Lacan’s example is Joyce, and for the most part, I’ve not looked specifically at Joyce. I will remedy that situation now and offer some tangible  The relationship to Lacan’s concepts of retroaction and anticipation is significant, and I do not development that relationship entirely here. There is also a connection to logical time that I will bring out later, but that too, I never fully develop and deserves more attention that I give to it. 85  “The Dancing Being.” 86  Mastering Movement, 31. 84

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examples to help you visualize the abstract theoretical depths I’ve been exploring.

4.5 Joyce and Fosse So how do these elements of the sinthome appear in Joyce and how might they look in dance itself rather than theory? I’ll answer those questions in this section, using Fosse as the dancing counterpoint to Joyce. Although I will use examples of Fosse’s choreography, I still intend for my argument to apply to the dancer for two reasons. First, Fosse was a dancer. He began by dancing, and more than anything, he wanted to dance. His choreography always started out as choreography on and for himself (except, maybe, when he choreographed Chicago for his wife, Gwen Verdon).87 Second, dance’s effects on the dancer are silent. Using Fosse offers a way to explore these ideas through dance without merely relying on conjecture. I will, however, end this chapter with an example more firmly seated in dance that illustrates what this might look like for the non-choreographer dancer. Fosse as comparable to Joyce makes sense for another reason as well: we can easily see the parallels between Joyce’s and Fosse’s experiences. Their fathers weren’t fathers. They devoted themselves to their work above all. They displayed frequent paranoia and a guileless need for reassurance. I’m not diagnosing Fosse (nor, for that matter, was Lacan diagnosing Joyce), but I am noting that Fosse’s history looks more like Joyce’s than one might expect. Both perform and exist successfully (at least to outsiders) in the world while fighting internal demons that continuously threaten to cause a break from reality.

 Fosse once said, “. . . for my kind of dancing there is no vocabulary. . . . The stuff I do has to be demonstrated, which means I have to get up and feel it in my body before I can teach it.” Gaby Rogers, quoting Bob Fosse in “Bob Fosse: ‘Choreography Is Writing with Your Body,’” Newsday, Oct. 1, 1978, quoted in Kevin Winkler, Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 260. 87

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4.5.1 Writing a Sinthome (Joyce) We can see Joyce’s sinthome as a process. Lacan himself suggests this when he recognizes the body threatening to leave in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a symptom that Joyce subsequently transforms in Finnegans Wake (into a sinthome). If we take seriously the idea Joyce was at risk of psychosis but developed a sinthome, then I need to show how Joyce used mirroring, binding/containing, and the potential space to accept and play with the real and maintain a hold on reality. To do this, I rely on Finnegans Wake (and Richard Ellman’s biography of Joyce88) because Finnegans Wake is the culmination of Joyce’s sinthome according to Lacan. In relation to Joyce, I see mirroring in his use of the letter and fragments of language and in the confusion that ensues when reading his works. His works reveals those aspects of himself not revealed elsewhere, and the fragmented language acts as a mirror to his internal fragmentation and distress—and those works increasingly become more fragmented until there is no central narrative to hang on to; there is nothing but the irruptions of language or the idiosyncratic use of language that characterizes psychosis (schizophrenia). Additionally, Carol Loeb Shloss suggests that Joyce writes to and for Lucia, his daughter.89 Thus, the book is not only a mirror for (or of ) Joyce but also for Lucia, whom others considered schizophrenic. That is to say, Finnegans Wake, in particular, may not just be a mirror of Joyce’s internal world but also of Lucia’s internal world. The book may be a shared mirror that permits a type of communication that only exists entangled in their particular (pre-psychotic relational) matrix. The most obvious way that Finnegans Wake illustrates containment is in its structure. The book begins: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to the Howth Castle and Environs.”90 This (part) sentence  James Joyce, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).  See Carol Loeb Shloss. Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. (New York: Picador, 2003). 90  Finnegans Wake (New York, Penguin Books, 1999), 3:1–3. Citations are to the Penguin Edition and give the page number followed by line number(s), as is customary within Joyce scholarship. 88 89

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is really the latter half of “A way a long a last a loved a long the,” the (half ) sentence that ends the novel.91 The book, then, is self-contained. Once in it, it circles back on itself, so there is no ending and no beginning, but an endless container. Furthermore, Joyce’s works, although they involve the symbolic, emphasize the lalangue of the symbolic and the play of language’s rhythm, tone, and resonance in the body, the elements of language that help expose the real. This lalangue is inherent in writing, even if not everyone can capture it like Joyce does: in all language there is an internal rhythm and movement that plays out in the body and captures something of the real. Joyce takes the elements of the real, elements that by their very nature are frightening because they are unformulated and not able to be symbolized, and he binds them in this lalangue, containing their ability to in-sist upon the symbolic. Joyce, in other words, binds the threatening-­ to-­fragment psyche and maintains a “normal” existence, and I suggest he does so by containing the real within the covers of a book. Finally, Joyce’s “psychosis” is also contained within Finnegans Wake because this work relates a dream, but a dream without a dreamer. By creating a dream space through this writing, he was, as Mary Adams suggests, creating the dreams of sleeping, a timeless world yet one that exists only “within a carefully boundaried structure.”92 When the psychotic aspects of a subject can be bound (between book covers, in dreams, in dance), then the subject has found a way to create a sense of order amid disorder. The result is that Joyce’s works, progressively, lose meaning, or any immediately meaning. They become spaces wherein there is no given meaning or even a determinable (beyond all doubt) meaning. They are spaces of and for developing creativity. Thus, they are potential spaces. If Joyce is mirroring his internal fragmentation and the imposition of the  Finnegans Wake, 628:15–16. Perhaps the novel is circling around an emptiness, like the moebius strip does or as De Cuyper and Dulsster suggest characterizes dance. 92  “The Beauty of Finnegans Wake. Remembering and Re-Imagining: A Return to the Father,” British Journal of Psychotherapy 34, no. 3 (2018): 467, https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12379. Adam’s article is also useful in thinking about psychosis in relation to mirroring and the sinthome’s potential connection to Julia Kristeva’s chora: Adams notes the recurrence of the mother image in Joyce’s works and his lack of acknowledgement of her (in reality) after her death. 91

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real, as I have argued, then he is simultaneously acknowledging and accepting the fragmentation that threatens him and playing with language. This play, however, is primarily a playing with the real via language. He is using the lalangue of language to expose the real and to create a space for fantasy and reality to co-exist. There is no denying that Joyce’s works become progressively less understandable as he fractures language as we regularly encounter it and deploys neologisms and forms that relies on homophony and tone to make any sort of sense. Even as his works are translated, Joyce’s concern remains with how they sound to the ear and the ambiguities that he wants to maintain within the language; he cares more for the auditory and sensuous qualities of the words than their meanings.93 Joyce plays with more than language as he plays with the real though; he also plays with time and space: Finnegans Wake, as I mentioned previously, starts mid-sentence, that is, it starts with the second half of the sentence that ends the novel, and Joyce himself plays with space and time to depict (and manipulate) what he sees as a certain repetitiveness in the world wherein the same events or objects occur or reappear again with slight variations in form: in Finnegans Wake this appears as a lack of time and the indistinguishability and ambiguity of people, events, and words94 within that timeless world of a dream. Time is, therefore, one example of where psychosis appears within Joyce’s works: the interweaving of time in Joyce is like the merger of objects and lack of linear time that we find in psychosis. Yet within this merger is sometime more, not just a sense of merger that obliterates distinction but also the recognition that there is

 Ellmann, Joyce, 632–33. In some ways, one might see Joyce’s process as breaking down the structure of language into its component elements—morpheme, phonemes, etc.—and using language’s sounds and forms to (re)create it anew or, in other words, using the materiality of language to create a sinthome. I want to suggest something more: while Joyce may be using language’s material, he is doing so because language bends around the real, and using the materiality of language allows him to create a new experience of this and, thereby, a new relationship to the real—and he’s doing this in very specific ways that do not require language (although, of course, those processes that culminate in a sinthome necessarily touch on the symbolic). 94  Ellman, Joyce, 551. 93

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something similar that runs through everyone, that connects humanity.95 If we accept that Joyce created a sinthome through his writing, then what I believe is that the binding of the real, the use of mirroring, and the creation of a potential space were essential, yet this is only possible because of Joyce’s ability to play. He played with the fact the symbolic reveals the real (in what is present in its absence), a real felt in the body (the imaginary). Joyce’s writing is an index of psychosis for Lacan, yet it is also a process that culminates in his sinthome; Joyce accepts the imposition of the real through his fracturing of the signs and symbols within his works. He accepts his divisions and finds enjoyment through the confusion of meaning and sense. The end of his only extant play, Exiles, focused as it is on doubt, leaves its audiences unsatisfied96 and foregrounds his preoccupation with non-sense: the relationship between Robert and Bertha is never clearly articulated and audiences are left with only possibilities.97 Furthermore, Shloss write of how the end of Finnegans Wake “reconfigures” desire and expresses contradiction within desire itself, both within Finnegans Wake and as it relates to Joyce’s life and career. This configuration that expresses contradiction (or a paradox) is really the acceptance of the paradox that leads to a radically different jouissance. That is, through his play (of the real), Joyce not only comes to accept but to embrace his lack of the name-of-the-father, which brings about his unique experience of jouissance, feminine jouissance. As I said previously, the sinthome makes feminine jouissance possible. In psychosis, the subject “cancels” his subscription the unconscious and recognizes no Other and, in so doing, cancels his subscription phallic jouissance. This makes the other jouissance, the impossible feminine jouissance, necessary. Joyce shows, however, a possible way for one who exists without the phallic function to find that other jouissance, the jouissance of the body or those “real pleasures” that Phillips avers we find through  Ellman, Joyce, 716. I’ll expand on this idea more later, but if you think back to Chap. 1 of this book, the unrestrained real that appears in Nijinsky’s dance when contrasted to Pite’s works that depicts “merger” as a human connectedness suggests that the “other side” of merger is the shared humanity that connects us all, something that can keep us grounded in reality. 96  Ellman, Joyce, 575. 97  See Joyce, Exiles (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002). 95

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art.98 The symbolic does not permit the sexual relation says Lacan, but Joyce, in playing within the symbolic, reaches or experiences feminine jouissance. Thus, Joyce shows the connection of feminine jouissance to play when he reaches a feminine jouissance only through his play. He stops the play of signifiers that characterize a phallic jouissance and inaugurates a playing with the real. The result is Joyce’s writing reveals the knowledge of an “unknown” knowledge and a jouissance that should not and does not exist. Rather than dwelling in his paranoia, Joyce maintains relationships with the meaningless real, ambiguity, and uncertainty and stays within reality.

4.5.2 Choreographing and Dancing a Sinthome (Fosse) Fosse, I suggest, uses dance as a support that allows him to experience feminine jouissance and come to terms with the real. The semi-­ autobiographical film All That Jazz99 forefronts the way Fosse uses dance to confront the real. As Joe Gideon (the main character who is the fictionalized Fosse) continues to pursue and sleep with numerous women and chase the highs of drugs and sex, he faces the effects of his hard lifestyle. Death increasingly pursues him, not only in the chest pains that worsens into heart attacks that require surgery but also in the guise of the angel of death whom he engages in conversation. As the real continues to force itself upon him, a series of dreams turns into hallucinations. What does Joe (or Fosse) do? He takes the intrusion of the real and contains it, turning it into a musical performance (in the film and, perhaps more poignantly, staging it in/as the film itself ). In other words, All That Jazz mirrors Fosse’s life, so like Joyce, Fosse uses his works to mirror himself; however, he also uses the mirror in his other works: in Pal Joey, Joey appears in front of the mirror, admiring himself, and in Dancin’, the beginning of “Cool Hand Luke” sees the dancers positioned as if in front of a mirror. Throughout his career, even  Unforbidden Pleasures, 4.  All That Jazz, directed by Bob Fosse (1979; Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Pictures, 1979). 98 99

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when he was choreographing, when dancers would arrive to rehearsals, Fosse would be there in front of the mirror, working on the steps and sequences of whatever piece he was working on, and he often cast dancers who resembled him, so his choreography became a way to see himself mirrored.100 Fosse mirrors himself in his choreography, he uses mirrors within his choreography (or the idea of the mirror), and he uses his choreography to mirror his experiences: the mirror for Fosse is always there. He even becomes the mirror for his dancers: as he teaches the steps of his dances and to work with and help his dancers improve, he learns the mirror images of his own dances, so that his dancers can look to him as a reflection. Fosse’s also uses containment of the real within his dances. While he does choreography a dream ballet—“Red Light Ballet” in New Girl In Town, which was ultimately cut from the show101—I want to focus more on how his mirroring of his own life is an attempt to contain the real. One example in is in his use of burlesque, both the imitations (and intimations) of the burlesque scene that pepper his dances and in the use of burlesque movements even when not depicting burlesque per se. His early (teenage) experiences as a dancer were in burlesques and vaudeville venues, and he was left alone and scared and forced to experience a world of naked women, sex, and innuendo, an experience he felt no parents should have condoned.102 It’s as if, in depicting these movements and scenes repeatedly throughout his choreography, he is trying to come to terms with his earlier traumatic experiences, putting them into dance in order to keep them from intruding into his life. Another aspect of Fosse’s dancing is how tightly controlled (or bound) it is: even though his dances draw on contemporary (popular) dance movements that are less structured and offer the impression of more free-­ flowing movement in dance, his choreography is so precise that it belies the image of freedom it creates:103 he would choreograph not only steps  Kevin Winkler, Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 263, 469; 176; Sam Wasson, Fosse (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2013), 16, 469. 101  Winkler, Big Deal, 65–66. 102  Wasson, Fosse, 48. 103  Winkler, Big Deal, 160. 100

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but also the tiniest movements, from the minute gesture of the pinky finger to the turnout (or turn-in) of the knees and hips. To return to the idea of binding in All That Jazz for a moment, I want to suggest that that the film itself is the binding of the real using the imaginary. The idea for the film derives (loosely) from a documentary that Fosse had intended to direct based on Hilma Wolitzer’s book Endings, a book about dying that he ended up adjusting to accommodate his vision for a “dreamlike maneuver” into cinematic images of the stages of grief.104 Sam Wasson writes that for Fosse, the only way to show dying “was to imagine it, to dance it. … To be truthful about the unknowable, one had to invent” in order to create an emotional resonance with the audience.105 Imagining the real of death, then, helps Fosse create that potential space wherein the real isn’t in-sisting upon him only; the real, by being contained, becomes something he can play with. All That Jazz is, in my opinion, the best example of this (and the most accessible), but Fosse’s playing with the real in a potential space is evident throughout much of his work. Although he often choreographs narrative shows, he also choreographs dances that use only sounds or rhythms (his “Percussion” series in Dancin’ or the pops and hisses of “Steam Heat” from Pajama Game, for example). He uses dance to showcase the real, using sounds and rhythm; dance, for Fosse, is a place for containing the real. And it’s here we see Fosse’s play as well. Fosse’s playing with time, space, movement, rhythm, and sounds in All That Jazz changes how we view film. As Fosse “edits for motif . . . for theme and variation, for rhythm, and for point and counterpoint,”106 he shatters the expectation of linear time, a technique that “has been much imitated by other filmmakers.”107 He works with the real and imaginary not to cover over the real as confronted with it, but to “dance” with it in a new way: to

 Wasson, Fosse, 430.  Wasson, Fosse, 430–31. 106  Dennis Bingham, “Escape from Escapism: Bob Fosse and the Hollywood Renaissance,” in The Other Hollywood Renaissance, ed. Dominic Lennard, R. Barton Palmer, and Murray Pomerance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). 128. 107  Winkler, Big Deal, 5–6. 104 105

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creates something new, to see things in a new way, and to show us how dance has effects. For Fosse, one of those effects is a different orientation to the other, which is found in the acceptance of contradictions and the development of a feminine jouissance. In one films, he uses cameras angels to show the different (and conflicting) parts of dancers while in pirouette, a suggestion given to him by his wife (at the time) Joan McCracken who suggested this technique could show “‘one dancer expressing the conflict of two driving energies, and dancing them both at the same time.’”108 Yet, Fosse’s process is effortful for him: while he strives to show how two opposing forces exist simultaneously, he continues to see things—and people—in black and white; those he worked with were either on his side or fighting against him, there was no middle ground.109 Furthermore, he himself was a paradox, full of fear and incredibly honest (always offering full disclosure about both his sexual escapades and his thoughts), yet harsh and cruel at times.110 Like the focus on death in All That Jazz that takes (the real of ) death and turns it into a show, Fosse uses the ending of Pippin to present death, via suicide (self-immolation), as attractive; his directions to the cast were to make suicide “exciting and extremely sexual … a sexual—fulfilling— religious experience.”111 And while Fosse’s original ending showcased the purposeless or meaninglessness of life, Stephen Schwartz removed this ambiguity of the ending, so the show ultimately ended on the hopeful note that audiences desired.112 Fosse wants to confuse our understanding of life and death in Pippin, in All the Jazz, and throughout many of his other works; he presents paradoxes, or seeming paradoxes, in order to show how within them there are  Joan McCracken, “Thoughts while Dancing,” Dance Magazine, April 1946, 41 quoted in Winkler, Big Deal, 132. 109  Winkler, Big Deal, 146. 110  Wasson, Fosse, 285. 111  Letter from Bob Fosse to the cast of Pippin, June 13, 1974, box 25A, Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, quoted in Winkler, Big Deal, 178. 112  Winkler, Big Deal, 180–81. Schwartz’s removal of Fosse’s ending also reveals how uncomfortable we are with ambiguity and the idea of the real: too much of the real would affect ticket sales, so like the neurotic personality, Schwartz covers the real over (by removing it) with a (fantastic) meaning. 108

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no clear demarcations, but each element relies on the other, feeding each other.113 He choreographs without thought to gender,114 and subverts our expectations. This is characteristic of feminine jouissance. When I originally developed my ideas for this book, I believed Fosse was firmly neurotic—he was womanizing and trying to fill a lack—yet then it occurred to me that, on the surface, so was Joyce. Joyce may have been “with” Nora only, but there are suggestions of dalliances elsewhere and his eye roved as much as Fosse’s. I have come to realize that Fosse is much more like Joyce that I thought, and the parallels between Joyce’s and Fosse’s lives helped me understand that feminine jouissance isn’t beyond sex, just beyond the phallus. Wasson writes, “sex was a medium for Fosse. It was as much a physical act as it was an opportunity to learn about and merge with his female collaborators, a way of giving to them so they could give back more and better.”115 Sex, for Fosse, is, therefore, also an indication of a psyche obsessed with merger and with giving to the other rather than using the other to fill a lack. His history reveals a different relationship to the other, one that also appears in Joyce. Fosse is a great counterpoint to Joyce: he’s a dancer who has qualities that suggest pre-psychosis, but who maintains a connection to reality. Nonetheless, using Fosse against Joyce like I have is not a straightforward parallel between writing and dance. Fosse’s choreography is, in his words, “writing on your feet.”116 Maybe writing does matter for the sinthome, but then again, maybe it only matters if we consider writing as the Joycean style of writing: the writing of the real. Both Fosse and Joyce know how to play; we see this in Fosse’s playing with rhythm and sound in his choreography and his playing with time in his films, and we see this is Joyce’s playing with the rhythm, tone, and the other elements of language that convey a sense of the real. What does a sinthome look like for someone who does not or cannot already play? I turn towards the answer to that question now.  Wasson, Fosse, 474.  Winkler, Big Deal, 214. 115  Wasson, Fosse, 192. 116  “Bob Fosse Talks about Dancin’,” New York Theatre Review, March 1978, 9, quoted in Winkler, Big Deal, 212. 113 114

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4.6 Sergei Polunin I used Fosse as a counterpoint to Joyce, and you might (legitimately) claim that Fosse is more a choreographer than a dancer. I used Fosse deliberately, for the reasons I mentioned previously, but also because he gives us a way to understand dance. This is a book, which relies on the written word, and it’s impossible for me to give you a sense of what I’m explaining without using words. Yet, what I am arguing relies not on words but on felt experiences of things that have no symbolic representation. So, if I step outside of the world(s) of writing for a moment, what might my analysis of the sinthome look like in dance when focusing on the dancer? Sergei Polunin offers a good example of how dance can work individually to help someone maintain a grip on reality when the real threatens too much. Polunin is a Ukrainian dancer, who moved first (as a child) with his mother across Ukraine for dance, then to England to attend the Royal Ballet School.117 Dance was (initially) thrust upon him by his mother (to offer him opportunity beyond poverty), and he suggests dance is ambivalent for him: he “hated the fact that [he] had to dance” and has described “feeling like a prisoner to your body, to the urge to dance,” yet he has also described dance as “who I am.”118 Polunin is known as the “bad boy” of ballet—or at least was known as that.119 His time at the Royal Ballet—wherein he became the youngest ever principal dancer—is filled with unravelling. He parties too hard, dances high on drugs, and is known for being unpredictable and missing rehearsals. He  His move to the ballet school in Kiev (from Kherson) at age nine broke apart his family: to afford the school, his mother moved with him while his father (who drew the short straw) moved to Portugal to work for tuition money. As Polunin notes in his documentary, “I didn’t see him for six years.” Dancer, directed by Steve Cantor (London: Sundance Selects, BBC Films, and Magnolia Mae Films, 2016), DVD, 00:19:55. 118  Dancer, 00:46:20, 00:47:20, 00:10:04. 119  See, as a brief sampling, Annabel Sampson, “Ballet’s Baddest Boy Sergei Polunin on Why He Feels ‘Free’ at Last,” Tatler, May 27, 2021, https://www.tatler.com/article/sergei-polunin-dancer-­ interview-autobiography-free-a-life-in-images-and-words; Elizabeth Zimmer, “Dancer Ogles and Celebrates Sergei Polunin, the Bad Boy of Ballet,” The Village Voice, September 15, 2016, https:// www.villagevoice.com/2016/09/15/dancer-ogles-and-celebrates-sergei-polunin-the-bad-boy-ofballet/; Roslyn Sulcas, “Sergei Polunin, Ballet’s Bad Boy, Has a Change of Heart,” The New York Times, September 1, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/arts/dance/sergei-polunin-­ ballets-­bad-boy-has-a-change-of-heart.html. 117

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also internally suffers. He knows he needs help,120 and his friends comment, “he’s always suffered silently,” noting that when he realized his dancing would not bring his parents together, “things started to slowly crumble in his head.”121 At the same time, those around him see his dancing, and the attention it gives him, as “a kind of substitute for what he couldn’t get because he was away from home,”122 which is one way of saying the audience becomes his mirror. He quits the Royal Ballet at twenty-two, and ends up in Russia, where he has to start all over again. He again suffers and fights with himself every time he goes on stage, eventually deciding to quite dance altogether, with the 2015 filming of him dancing to “Take Me to Church” intended to be the end of his dancing.123 Yet, two months later he dances again, and appears to grow progressively more psychotic: he tattoos an image of Vladimir Putin on his chest and offers wildly outrageous tweets about drugs and sex or that proclaim his support for Putin and Donald Trump; in short, he appears to unravel more and more. Why, then, do I think dancing acts as his sinthome if he enacts a mental breakdown in the public eye? Because in 2020 he seems comes back: despite the real threatening to overwhelm him and the moments when he shows how overwhelmed he is, he finds a way to capture and bind the real. Dance, for him, functions the way the interpersonal or intrapersonal dyad does to produce Bion’s alpha function. He stops the tweets and begins the process of having his Putin tattoo removed; he becomes a father himself; and he finds that place where he can exist with the real. But, then again, after Russia invades Ukraine in 2022, Polunin appears with two new Putin tattoos. Like with Nijinsky, talk once again centres on his mental state.

 Dancer, 00:26:55, 00:35:16.  Dancer, 00:26:55, 00:35:00. 122  Dancer, 00:35:34. 123  See David LaChapelle, dir., “Sergei Polunin, ‘Take Me to Church,’ by Hozier,” chor. Jade Hale-­ Christofi, February 9, 2015, video, 04:07, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=c-tW0CkvdDI. Significantly for my argument, the choreography of “Take Me to Church,” done by his friend, is intended to capture what Polunin has been through and his torment, thereby being another mirror for him (of his experience). 01:02:36. 120 121

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Although his recent behaviour suggests dance has failed Polunin (as a sinthome), and I suspect many would suggest his behaviour disproves my argument, I’m not sure that’s true. Polunin may be a controversial figure, but he’s not entirely lost in hallucinations and paranoia. Furthermore, the sinthomic process as I’ve described it is, like analysis, “interminable”; maybe Nijinsky really did dance a sinthome but saw dance as an object not a process. I don’t know. I can’t know. I do know that if I’m correct about the role of dance in Polunin’s life, then Polunin also shows us that the sinthomic process is neither easy nor straightforward. We can easily read Polunin as akin to Joyce. Polunin himself talks about dancing as an attempt to bring his family back together, and he hides his lack of a family from his fellow dancers.124 He is tormented in ways that he can recognize—explicitly stating “I want some help”125— but cannot (initially) manage. Additionally, as quoted previously, he feels a prisoner to dance and his body, which reminds us of Fosse, who, too, felt compelled to dance. When Polunin realizes that ballet “has been his mother’s choice, not his,”126 he suffers a setback. Yet despite the torment and suffering, he cannot let dance go. He walks away only to be drawn back to it.127 The entire experience threatens to overwhelm him, yet he is driven to continue. He comes to see the divisions in himself (including his Ukrainian and Russian identities) in new ways that allows him to play with the real—showcasing that real through his art—and, thereby, containing it. The other correlation to Joyce and Fosse is that Polunin shows just how difficult it is to contain the real and establish a sinthome. To be psychotic is to have (and receive) information and sensation without meaning; this intrusion of the real threatens to overwhelm one, but to make meaning is a fraught endeavour as well: once something has meaning, there is the possibility of the loss of that meaning, which can likewise

 Dancer, 00:22:45, 00:27:13.  Dancer, 00:35:16. 126  Julie Kavanagh, “Sergei Polunin’s Dance Mom: What Happened when Galina Polunina Finally Saw Her Son Dance,” The New Yorker, September 29, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/ culture-desk/sergei-polunins-dance-mom. 127  Polunin thinks in leaving, he can “get a normal life”: “I thought I could just walk away . . . it would be easy.” Dancer, 01:04:46, 01:11:29. 124 125

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be overwhelming.128 Joyce, Fosse, and Polunin each depict the inherent terror of this duality, and through their different arts, show how to stand in the space between meaning and loss of meaning. The sinthome created through their efforts helps them to mitigate the bind of all or none: their art offers the possibility of meaning, without ascribing a meaning. The “carefully boundaried structure”129 that Joyce creates through writing, the space, that is, to escape and bind his psychosis, arises for Polunin in his dance. The decision to give up dance and the dancing of his madness in “Take Me to Church” set in motion his own sinthomic process, which, ultimately, has no end.

 Ogden identifies this as the central conflict of schizophrenia: “schizophrenic conflict involves a tension between wishes to maintain a psychological state in which meaning can exist versus actual attacks on the capacities to create and maintain meaning.” Projective Identification and Therapeutic Technique (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1982), 143. 129  “The Beauty of Finnegans Wake, 467. 128

5 Reinterpreting Joyce’s Sinthome

So far, I have outlined the Lacanian concepts related to the sinthome and explained how I understand Joyce’s sinthome to work, which combines processes Lacan hints at, but never fully explicates. Now, I want to consider how focusing on this new understanding allows for a reinterpretation of the sinthome while maintaining that Joyce’s solution was sinthomic. Rather than seeing language as the main element of the sinthome, I see the sinthome as a creative process of play that contains and mirrors the (unspeakable) elements of the real: it’s the development of a potential space wherein creative arises. Thus, creativity requires one to play (Winnicott) or dream (Bromberg, Ogden) in order to relate to an object in a new way, and Joyce’s sinthome is his process of taming the real (via language) as it arises within the body, so as to live with (and embrace) the real. That is, Joyce’s sinthome relies on how he uses the real in the body, a use that helps him develop a new relationship to the real.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Sherritt, Dancing an Embodied Sinthome, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7_5

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5.1 Rewriting the Standard The standard interpretation of Lacan’s twenty-third seminar is that Joyce used writing to break down language, creating a sinthome in which “metaphor no longer functions” and is, instead, replaced by “forms of nomination that create language capable of detaching itself from conventional sense”;1 in other words, Joyce “‘makes a (N)ame (of the Father) for himself ’ through his endless writing.”2 Essentially, the idea is that the real intrudes on Joyce’s, which causes the breakdown of the psyche; as the knot of the psyche frays, the body (the imaginary) starts to “take its leave.”3 The reality of his body becomes foreign to Joyce, and he creates a new reality through his writing.4 Throughout Seminar 23, Lacan walks his students through the process of his own thought, showing that Joyce’s works first appear to express the “symptom” (of psychosis) via language— in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example—then become the vehicle for transforming that symptom into a sinthome, as evidenced by Joyce’s connected psyche in reality as opposed to his “psychosis” and the fragmentation of language in his works (particularly Finnegans Wake). For Lacan the sinthome has a relation to the real because “the thing that causes the problems is also the condition of possibility.”5 In his understanding psychosis results from a split caused by the intrusion of the real,  Sheldon Brivic, review of How James Joyce Made His Name, by Roberto Harari, James Joyce Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2003): 854–55, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25478003. Brivic is reviewing Harari’s argument, not making his own. See also Roberto Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2002). 2  Geoff Boucher, “Joyce: Lacan’s Sphinx,” in The Literary Lacan: From Literature to Lituraterre and Beyond, ed. Santanu Biswas (Calcutta, India: Seagull Books, 2012), 148. 3  Seminar 23, 129. 4  Joyce, however, is “non-triggered”—see Leader and Groves, Lacan for Beginners, 167—so while in psychosis, reality is foreclosed, for Joyce reality is only absent within his writing. The worlds that he depicts in his writing and through his characters reveal what his psychosis would look like if he, himself, were psychotic. After all, it is Stephen’s body that peels away in Portrait, not Joyce’s. Lacan is aware of this (at least on some level): the section wherein he discusses Joyce leaving his body is, in fact, about the book. 5  Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan, “The Real,” in Why Theory, August 22, 2020, podcast, 1:07:37. Engley and McGowan are discussing the concept of the third for Lacan, which I address later, and they are suggesting that the real is the sine qua non of sense, that you can only deriving meaning with the “stumbling block” of sense (i.e., the real). 1

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which affects possibility, so Joyce’s sinthome uses the real, employing the elements of the real to invent a way to live within the symbolic. The focus on language makes sense given Lacan’s prior seminar on psychosis. In Seminar 3, Lacan proclaims that the psychotic’s contribution to understanding psychosis is that psychoanalysis approaches the subject in psychosis through speech, “the same register in which the phenomenon [of psychosis] appears to us” and “creates all the richness of the phenomenology of psychosis.”6 This speech also implies a message or communicative aspect—even if a failed communicative aspect—and, for Lacan, makes the Other (the big O other) speak.7 Speech, Lacan posits, does not just “speak to” but also “speaks of ” the other as an object.8 Yet, the sinthome differs from the symptom that materializes between the symbolic and the real because in Joyce there is a “fault [in the knot], which conscience turns into a sin.”9 This “fault” differs from the “slip” that (usually) results in the universal symptom mentioned previously as submission to the phallic function,10 which is a symptom acquired when entering the symbolic and one to which  everyone is to some extent subject. What Joyce’s work reveals is what happens when this fault continues to grow and impinge on the real and the body (the imaginary). This fault never results solely in coded messages that an analyst can interpret through the subject’s use of lalangue; rather this fault also produces a relationship to the “vie de langage”11 that involves the drives. The interpretation cannot be of someone’s words, but of the effects of the word in the body.  Seminar 3, 36.  Seminar 3, 37. 8  Seminar 3, 38. This is important because the symbolic order is associated with language and laws, or rules that confine inter-subjective relations and interactions. I stress this here because it becomes important to my argument subsequently: Joyce steps outside this (or exists “beyond” it) because his intersubjective relations—those between him and his daughter Lucia—are not subject to the laws of the name-of-the-father but operate according to a logic that is unique to him and Lucia. 9  Seminar 23, 80. 10  Lacan asks if the fault relates to the slip, stating his query is valid because of the “equivocation of the word.” Seminar 23, 80. He does not directly answer this and, initially, refers to psychosis (particularly telepathy) as Joyce’s “own symptom.” Ibid., 79. I argue they are different. 11  Seminar 23, 128. 6 7

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Thus, to Lacan, Joyce is accepting the fault and revelling in the confusion in meaning and sense. The real exists whether one believes it exists or not; as a result, it is necessary to accept it if one is to find a way to find a way to live despite the threat of the psyche’s disintegration.

5.2 An Embodied Sinthome Although Lacan describes Joyce as using language (writing) to create his sinthome, I argue that Lacan conceptualizes the sinthome as connecting the modes of the psyche; therefore, his conceptualization does not eliminate the body; rather, the sinthomic link cannot occur without the body (in the form of the imaginary aspect of our psyches). Thus, although Joyce employs language, Joyce plays with the real aspects of language— or, rather, the aspects of language that expose a real, such as its tone and rhythm and meter, etc.—that work on the body,12 ultimately creating the sinthome Lacan describes as a personalized symptom, or the “idiosyncratic jouissance of a particular subject.”13 The result is, however, that Joyce is still ultimately a little different. Rather than living as a neurotic who continues to try to complete the self by filling the hole in the psyche with the objet a, Joyce—as Lacan contends—subscribes to a different jouissance: feminine jouissance. This feminine jouissance is embodied. I’ll explain this further when I discuss Black Swan, but Lacan makes this clear when he refers to the statue of Saint Theresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini—he refers to how one can “immediately understand that she’s coming.”14 Yet this jouissance is not something that can be subsumed by the symbolic or envisioned as part of the imaginary. Nothing can be known about it; it can only be  Gilbert J. Rose writes of how, “in poetry, as many poets testify, the physical experience comes first in both making poetry and enjoying it.” “Implicit ‘Motion’ in Non-Verbal Art: Transmission and Transformation of Affect,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 9, no. 4 (2012): 290, https://doi.org/10.1002/aps.311. Rose is writing of an implicit motion inherent in music and art; I am linking this to Joyce as his writing becomes progressively more like poetry over time. 13  Paul Verhaeghe and Frédéric Declercq, “Lacan’s Analytic Goal: Le Sinthome or the Feminine Way,” Psychoanalytische Perspectieven 34, no. 4 (2016): 13. https://www.psychoanalytischeperspectieven.be/vol-34-4-2016/lacans-analytic-goal-le-sinthome-or-the-feminine-way. 14  Seminar 20, 76. 12

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experienced: “There is a jouissance that is hers about which she herself perhaps knows nothing if not that she experience it  – that much she knows.”15 This jouissance has nothing to do with the phallus or the pleasure of the organ—both men and women may experience feminine jouissance—it is a pleasure beyond the phallus, beyond signification: a pleasure associated with the real playing out in the body.16 Furthermore, if writing is seen as “playing” with presence and absence, and the “delight-in-motion of dance” is like the “play-of-words” in literature,17 then Joyce only weaves a sinthome through the embodied movement in his texts (via the felt rhythm and tone of his words and the constant back-and-forth or circling in on itself apparent in his use of language). Therefore, Joyce is not writing, but dancing with elements of language that reveal the real. If psychosis is the experience of the real impinging into the reality to the point where it overwhelms the subject and causes hallucinations, delusions, and a break with reality, then Joyce’s playing with the real reveals that despite this threat, he develops a new relationship to the real (and by extension, to the symbolic or to language). He takes the elements of the real and accepts them—embraces them even—and showcases them in his works. While the triggered psychotic will not be able to live easily in the world structured by a primordial metaphor, Joyce finds a way to do just that without accepting the metaphor of the name-of-the-father. In other words, by employing the letter and relying on, yet binding, the real through its relationship to homophony, sound, rhythm, and the (object) voice—the elements of speech that have no meaning on their own or the “drive-invested fragments” of language18—Joyce develops a new relationship to language and plays with what is ineffable within language itself: those elements that play out in the body.  Seminar 20, 74.  Lorenzo Chiesa notes that “if feminine jouissance lies ‘beyond the phallus,’ it inevitably follows that it must be seen as somehow nonsexual, i.e., as not subjected to the jouissance of the organ.” The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 10. Being beyond the phallus, beyond the organ, however, does not mean it is beyond the body entirely. 17  MacKendrick, “Embodying Transgression,” 143. 18  Sara Beardsworth, “The Early View of Psychoanalysis and Art,” in Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity (Albany: State University of New York, 2004), 47. 15 16

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If the psyche isn’t structured by the name-of-the-father and the response (in full psychosis) is merger and concretization, what Lacan is saying is that Joyce had a “choice” (a non-conscious choice and one which he couldn’t actively choose): he succumbs to psychosis or he accepts his “fate” and turns it into something he can “enjoy.” Thus, when Lacan writes about something being “at stake,” what he means is that for Joyce and anyone at risk of a psychotic break, what’s at stake this “choice”: succumb to merger and be stuck in a pre-Oedipal developmental phase or embrace that idea of merger and use it to develop a new relationship to the real that permits a (tenuous) connection to reality. The body sliding away in psychosis is then, in a sense, the loss of the body as a “possession” (there is no I in psychosis, so the body is just another element engulfed in everything that is and isn’t me simultaneously), and feminine jouissance of the sinthome is different from phallic jouissance: it’s a jouissance of merger and the answer to how one can “enjoy” (enjoyment being a need rather than a desire) without an Oedipal phase to govern that pleasure and when one is always in fear of losing touch with reality. Thus, Joyce does not deny the body or the real in his use of the language of the symbolic. If he did, then that would be psychosis. He’s, rather, accepting the threat of the real in the body and “enjoying” it.

5.3 Driven to Dance Joyce’s sinthome is not a process for aspire to; contacting feminine jouissance is frightening because in turning to the jouissance of the body, we risk losing ourselves completely while potentially releasing ourselves from the constraints of phallic jouissance that (should) structure the psyche: we threaten to subvert the integrity of the psychic structure. Subverting the integrity of the psyche, however, relies on the nameof-­the-father, for to subvert the psychic structure, there must be an intact psyche. For Joyce, phallic jouissance is closed. Thus, for him—or anyone on whom the real impinges—play is even riskier: it may inaugurate feminine jouissance, but it may also leave nothing save for the splinters of a psyche torn apart by the intrusions of the real. In other words,

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play is riskier and more consequential for someone without the nameof-­the-father, yet it’s also crucial if one is to survive. Thus, something really is “at stake,” just as in the psychoanalytic act, and this explains the driven nature of the sinthomic process, a process that grapples with both the life and death drives and that illuminates the necessary dual nature of the contradiction as explained by Zupančič: Contradiction is not simply something that we have to accept and “make do with”; it can become, and be “used” as, the source of emancipation from the very logic dictated by this contradiction. This is what analysis ideally leads to: contradiction does not simply disappear, but the way it functions in the discourse structuring our reality changes radically. And this happens as a result of our fully and actively engaging in the contradiction, taking our place in it.19

In psychoanalysis with most people, this entails accepting the contradiction that is the fragmentation of the self and occupying the lack at the centre of the psyche so as to accept (the emptiness of ) our desire as our own. The contradiction that operates for Joyce, however, as a “non-­ triggered” psychotic is that the real is both a threat to his existence and necessary for it; additionally, his sinthome allows him to live in a world structured by the symbolic even though his psyche is not governed by the same rules and laws of that symbolic as are most people’s psyches. These contradictions (or paradoxes) don’t disappear, but they become less black and white. In contrast to Zupancˇicˇ, I would suggest they don’t even change in function; rather, our relationship to them changes, and we come to see them less as contradictions and more as necessary elements for life, even if they contribute to suffering amidst pleasure. Thus, the sinthome is not a prescription for psychoanalysts to “write” generally. The sinthome and its attendant feminine jouissance do not function as the ideal alternative to the phallic function as others espouse;20  What is Sex? (Cambridge: MA, MIT Press, 2017), 72.  For example, see Verhaeghe and Declercq, “Lacan’s Analytic Goal” or Paul Verhaeghe, “Lacan’s Answer to Alienation: Separation,” Crisis & Critique 6, no. 1 (2019): 365–88, http://crisiscritique. org/april2019/paul.pdf. Feminine jouissance is attendant to phallic jouissance; it should not be conceived in opposition to phallic jouissance since it cannot exist without it. 19 20

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the concept of the sinthome is only an indication of the necessity of jouissance and how that may have to take a different form when phallic jouissance is an impossibility. The weakness with interpretations of Lacan’s theory that idealize the sinthome is that feminine jouissance becomes a goal in itself: these interpretations take the idea that we are all living too much in the imaginary if we are trying to fill the hole within ourselves and posit that we should all be aiming for the personal experience inherent in feminine jouissance that accompanies the sinthome. While the premise is correct,21 the conclusion about the sinthome is erroneous. The sinthome that connects his psyche and makes living possible for Joyce is not the ideal, and making it into one only perpetuates the belief in mastery. The sinthome is not only a lot of work, but it is the product of a mind that, according to Lacan, would otherwise have succumbed to the hallucinations, paranoias, and imposed speech of psychosis. Furthermore, not everyone needs a sinthome. Lacan knows that the aspects of the psyche need to operate together if one is to live ethically in the world. He does not intend for his study of Joyce to be prescriptive; he is simply interested in understanding the psyche better, and Joyce offers him a way to illustrate his thoughts. To desire a sinthome is to merely return to the master’s discourse,22 and to believe dance can be a prescription is to discredit the elements of dance that make it an art. Joyce has the “choice” only in that there are two options open to him: being stuck in state of merger where one is always in fear of losing touch with reality or embracing and playing with the real to find a way to “enjoy” his fate. In this respect, Joyce does write his sinthome, insofar as his process for maintaining a connection to his body uses ink, pen, and the written word. But as I’ve shown, he doesn’t just “write”; he writes in a very particular way. He uses the form he knows best. So yes, maybe all arts (or all processes) can be sinthomic but not all arts deliberately use the real and the body by design and not all inherently contain the qualities that facilitate play. One final word: Joyce felt driven to write. Fosse was driven to dance. To emphasize how the creation of a sinthome is not a conscious  In reality, it is not the imaginary as based on the mirror (in the mirror stage) that is the enemy, but the concomitant anticipation of a belief in mastery. 22  As Zupančič writes: “phallocentrism can work splendidly, and much better, if the phallus is not directly named, but reserved for Mysteries.” The Odd One In, 208. 21

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choice, I offer a final note on Fosse: in the last few years of his life, he began to research why some people (himself, I suggest) must dance because he wanted to comprehend the “darker fathom of the performer’s consciousness.”23

23

 Wasson, Fosse, 499.

6 Interlude

There is one more reason that I see Joyce’s works as important for my argument regarding dance’s potential as a sinthome: because of their deep relational aspects that attest to a connection between him and dance. To justify this statement, I need to take up an undervalued area in Lacan’s seminar on Joyce: Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s daughter.1 Lacan does allude to Lucia and notes she was schizophrenic.2 Lucia was also a dancer. Might this be why Lacan believes dance cannot work in the same way as Joyce’s writing does? Joyce writes a sinthome, keeping him squarely within reality despite the real’s imposition and the threat of psychosis. Lucia, however, does not write a sinthome, and dance proves unable to help her. Or at least that might be how Lacan sees it. There are, however, reasons to challenge that conclusion. Lucia Joyce may not have had schizophrenia as Lacan claims, and her dancing not only may have helped her to exist in a symbolic in which the real continued to

 The argument in this chapter relies heavily on Shloss’s work on Lucia Joyce in Lucia Joyce.  Lacan, Seminar 23, 78. Her diagnosis is somewhat disputed. It is well-documented that Lucia’s health was a concern of the family, that she was first institutionalized in 1932, and that after Joyce’s death, she remained in an asylum until her own death in 1982, but throughout her life she received several diagnoses and non-diagnoses. 1 2

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insist—her illness developing fully only after she gave up dancing3—but it may also have helped her father to maintain his own connection to reality. Lacan does not see this but only because he could not see it: Lucia was a footnote in the scholarship on Joyce until the 1980s—after Lacan had given his seminar on Joyce. What I will argue in this section is that Joyce danced with words and Lucia wrote with her body, and that Joyce’s writing relied on Lucia’s dancing, which became a tool for connection and relationship between Lucia and her father: it allowed them to reflect each other, and it contributed to Joyce’s (and maybe Lucia’s) ability to cope with the intrusions of the real.

6.1 Joyce Dancing with His Daughter That Lucia was diagnosed as schizophrenic fits with Lacan’s statement about Joyce’s father not being a father to him as the precondition for a pre-psychotic personality of Joyce: Lucia father was not father to her either. For Joyce, his father was a drunken lout who often turned violent. For Lucia, her father’s number one priority was his writing. She was often left out of school; she never experienced a stable housing situation as her family moved constantly (either for Joyce’s work or because her family had been evicted); and until she went “mad,” Joyce never considered Lucia’s future. Yet there is more to Joyce and Lucia’s relationship than a self-absorbed father neglecting his daughter. Joyce was also the only person in Lucia’s life who could fully communicate with her and who strove to attune to her. In fact, Joyce was the only one who could “read” her gestures. And, it may be, that as writing offers a mirror and binds the real, creating a potential space for play for Joyce, so dancing does for Lucia, and Joyce, seeing this, then uses it in his works. His works, in other words, cannot be disentangled from the complicated relational matrix of James and Lucia Joyce.  Shloss, in Lucia Joyce, suggests her mother discouraged her dancing, forcing her to give it up. Genevieve Sartor suggests it was her father. “Genetic Connections in Finnegans Wake: Lucia Joyce and Issy Earwicker,” Journal of Modern Literature 41, no. 4 (2018), 21, https://doi.org/10.2979/ jmodelite.41.4.02. What is not in dispute is that she was training and performing as a dancer but stopped dancing prior to her first breakdown. 3

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Joyce and Lucia’s relationship, according to Shloss, influences Finnegans Wake, not only in its content4 but also in its style: Lucia was instrumental to Joyce’s imaginative ability to depict language’s performative nature.5 For example, Joyce spoke of his novel as a performance and as a dance; he claimed it was not about anything other than what it was: words that move and disappear. Shloss also notes how the language Joyce uses to discuss Finnegans Wake mimics the way Lucia describes dance in its attempt to capture flux and change.6 This, of course, recalls the ephemerality of dance, but it also recalls my earlier discussion about language and the instability between the signifier and signified. The flux and change Joyce weaves into his work often appear in his use of language that defies our attempts to apply a meaning to it. Andrew J. Ball suggests that language in Finnegans Wake continually produces new meanings and is often self-referential, which means as the language shifts, it consistently obviates our attempts to understand it.7 Furthermore, if Joyce uses this technique to invoke the feeling of a dance, then he’s asking his readers to create a new relationship to language, one in which meaning isn’t the intended purpose of words. What this relationship between Lucia and Joyce creates is, according to Shloss, this: a novel that uses language as performance while portraying everyday fictions,8 a novel that simultaneously uses Lucia’s experience and attempts to atone for that use,9 and characters that exist separately yet turn into each other. In other words, Finnegans Wake is, paradoxically, “clearobscure.”10 Further, Joyce may speak of flux and the constant shifting (of words, of meanings), but Shloss suggests that this movement co-exists at the end

 Shloss writes of how in the footnote in Joyce that is Issy’s Letter, Joyce is “subsuming” Lucia. He fictionalizes, thus exploits, her experiences of mental illness. Lucia Joyce, 433. 5  Shloss, Lucia Joyce, 7. 6  Lucia Joyce, 426; 152. 7  “The Dance of the Semantic Phoenix: Autopoietic Systems of Meaning in Finnegans Wake,” Philosophy and Literature 45, no. 1 (2021): 173–74. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2021.0011. 8  Lucia Joyce, 7. 9  Lucia Joyce, 391. 10  Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 247:34. 4

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of Finnegans Wake with paralysis.11 Not only does the novel circle back on itself, but as it does, it reflects Joyce’s life circling back on itself. Yet, I want to add that if we take seriously the claim that Joyce exploited Lucia, using her life and her dancing to help inform his work, then the processes I’ve discuss as operating within his work—the mirroring, containment and potential space, and play—aren’t just how just Joyce comes to grips with the intrusions of the real into his own reality, but how he tries to enter her world and understand her experiences and, therefore, how these same processes are at work in her dance. The new relationship to the real he achieves via his sinthome is not only a new relation to his reality but also to his daughter and her reality.

6.2 Parallel Play Joyce never considered Lucia “mad” as others did; rather, she offered him access to mysteries not able to be spoken of (i.e., those things that science cannot grasp and to which one can only obliquely refer). In some ways, it makes sense for Lacan to dismiss dance. If Lacan see that Joyce writes himself a sinthome and leads a “normal” existence, then he also sees that Joyce’s daughter fails to write a sinthome. Yet Shloss’s argument must give us pause; she suggests, “we might consider Lucia Joyce to have been a kind of living writing, enacting in her life a circumstance that Joyce eventually recognized and recreated in his fiction, and that his fiction can, at least in part, make intelligible.”12 Here, Shloss writes of Lucia’s dancing as writing; elsewhere in her work she writes of Joyce dancing with words. This is also the paradox of the relationship between Lucia Joyce and Finnegans Wake. Lucia dances the intrusion of the real, and (to Shloss) Joyce makes that intrusion partially intelligible: her dance turns into his writing. There is no distinguishing the two from each other clearly or accurately. Joyce’s writing and Lucia’s dancing can only co-exist. Yet I have an additional point: if Joyce makes Lucia’s dance partially intelligible, he also relegates it to something we can “know” (or want to know,  Lucia Joyce, 450.  Lucia Joyce, 440.

11 12

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i.e., because I understand part, I believe I must be able to understand the whole) whereas dancing leaves the paradox unspoken and uninterpreted (because it can’t be interpreted) yet, in a way, expressed nonetheless. Thus, my argument for dance’s position as better suited to a sinthome: it is enough removed from the symbolic to release us from the demand for meaning. Joyce’s writing and Lucia’s dancing offer all the same elements for a sinthome, but Joyce’s writing leads one (us as his readers, not him) to the desire to interpret it—because we automatically assume words have meaning—whereas Lucia’s dance permits uncertainty. Compared to writing, dance offers an experience in which we’re more content to sit in the experience and the sensations of dance without ascribing meaning.

7 Playing and Dancing with Différance

Dance, thus, through its concurrent connections to play and the dancer (subject), can permit the development of feminine jouissance as an alternative to phallic jouissance when phallic jouissance is impossible (because one lacks the name-of-the-father). This connection to jouissance allows us to read extant theories of dance and their emphasis on phallic jouissance differently. André Lepecki, for example, writes that when Jacques Derrida writes of dance, he suggests (women’s) dance “is outside any economy of exchange and within the play of eternal deferral, eternal distance, and detour that is the play of différance, the play of the trace.”1 The “play of différance” is thereby a playing that enables a feminine jouissance because it is a playing with the real of the drive. By playing with the repetition of drive, whether that of phallic jouissance (for the non-psychotic) or the drive that continues to operate even in the absence of the name-of-thefather, one may discover a different repetition, one that creates a surplus jouissance. Zupančič identifies this phenomenon as “a repetition of the inherent gap or interval between its terms,” and through this repetition comes the element of surprise—or the “safe surprise” on which I will later

 Lepecki, “Inscribing Dance,” 135.

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elaborate.2 When Lacan claims that the unary trait supports the mirror stage,3 he refers to that very trait that is “an operation”4 that creates the “one of repetition,” or how one comes to see oneself as a subject with a “like or . . . type.”5 The unary trait is a underlying trait, however, of other signifiers; it is what unites all into the Other. It is the différance.6 Lorenzo Chiesa states that “what is being counted by the unary trait is the possibility of the real.”7 Therefore, when dance plays with différance, it plays with the real creating the possibility of a new relationship to phallic jouissance or opening access to the (impossible) feminine jouissance.8 To put that another way and tie it back to Derrida’s différance, dance as play can reveal the contradistinction between the two versions of jouissance.

7.1 Dancing an Ethical Act I want to offer one more example of the embodied sinthome, an example that will also help set up the idea of the sinthome’s relationship to the psychoanalytic act (although I use Zupančič’s term “ethical act”9 here because I think that despite many affinities, there is a significant difference to the psychoanalytic act when the psychic structure includes the sinthome, a difference I will elaborate on later). Earlier in this book I  The Odd One In, 167.  Seminar 19, 147. 4  Lorenzo Chiesa, “Count-as-One, Forming-into-One, Unary Trait, S1,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 2, no. 1/2 (2006): 75, https://cosmosandhistory.org/index. php/journal/article/view/29/57. 5  Seminar 19, 147. 6  Différance—marked by a silence “a”—is a “playing” itself, one that marks off and incorporates ambiguity and limitation. Différance is also linked to Winnicott’s potential space in that it “is located . . . between speech and writing, and beyond the tranquil familiarity which links us to one and the other.” Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5. It is a “not” or a presence that makes possible nominal effect yet cannot itself be named: it produces difference without being a part of that difference. 7  “Count-as-One,” 82. 8  This mean that dance also has effects on (and implications for) neurosis, which I will discuss subsequently. The “surplus” jouissance in non-psychosis allows a reorientation to the phallic function; in psychosis it allows for the development of the other jouissance. Thus, in all those instances wherein dance is related to phallic jouissance (or the repetition of seeking to be whole), its possible the end point isn’t submission to the phallic function, but the repetition of the phallic function to subvert it and develop a different relationship to it. 9  See Ethics of the Real. 2 3

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referenced the link between dance and psychosis in the popular imagination, suggesting that Black Swan seems to suggest dance causes psychosis but that the film in fact has an alternative reading that breaks both the bond of dance and psychosis and the belief that dance is the ultimate experience that will make one “whole”—or cause madness. The ending of Black Swan, specifically, engenders controversy, and as I will explain, readings of the film suggest a strong connection between the main character and the phallic function. I, however, propose there is enough evidence for a Lacanian reading of Black Swan to suggest that for the main character, Nina Sayers, dance is what allows her to develop a sinthome, with the film ending in an ethical act. I argue that Black Swan depicts dance alongside pathology yet uses this connection to advance an alternative to the phallic function when that phallic function is not available.

7.1.1 The Swan’s Sinthome Black Swan is a psychological drama set in the world of ballet. The protagonist, Nina, is a technically brilliant dancer who aspires to star in the ballet the company is preparing for: Swan Lake; she, however, clearly embodies the quality of the White Swan but lacks the passion or emotion required for the sister role of the Black Swan. The director encourages Nina to get in touch with her dark side, and she ultimate wins the role of Swan Queen (which requires her to dance both parts). She still struggles, however, to realize the darkness of the Black Swan. As Nina works to get more in touch with her dark side, she begins to hallucinate, and she becomes paranoid that her fellow dancer—and main rival/friend—wants to take over the role. As the film progresses, fantasy and reality blur for both the characters and the viewer. During the performance of the ballet (as depicted within the film), after Nina rushes off stage to her dressing room to prepare to dance as the Black Swan, she fights with her friend/rival Lily—who threatens to take her place in the ballet—and her dressing room mirror breaks. Nina then stabs Lily with a shard of the mirror. Yet—in a powerful example of the blurring of time within psychosis—this newly broken mirror is the same mirror the previous principal dancer broke after being told her career was over, an event that vaulted Nina into the starring role of Swan Lake.

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Ultimately, Nina only hallucinates the fight with Lily; thus, in reality, Nina does not stab Lily, but herself. As Nina runs back to finish the performance (and the film), she dances unlike she has ever danced before: beyond the technical prowess she previously displayed, she now also embodies a relationship to her body as sexual and powerful, one that is visually depicted in the film as Nina grows wings and physically becomes the Black Swan. The ballet ends with the Nina as the White Swan falling to her death; as the others rush to Nina to congratulate her on her performance, they notice a blood stain growing on Nina’s costume. The camera closes in on Nina’s face to capture her enigmatic words: “It was perfect.”10 Alastair Macaulay notes in his review of the film that “its nightmarish view of both ballet and women is not one I’m keen to see again” with Nina as “too much a victim,”11 and Roger Ebert writes of how the film details “singleminded professionalism in the pursuit of a career, leading to the destruction of personal lives.”12 Furthermore, the film engenders discussion about the ambiguity of its ending: Did she or didn’t she kill herself? Is Nina’s death just another hallucination? Those who look at Black Swan psychoanalytically most often regard Nina’s death as either submitting to the phallic function or unsuccessfully trying to escape it.13 Nonetheless, there is another way to read the ending, and the ambiguity  Black Swan, 01:42:40.  “The Many Faces of ‘Black Swan.’” 12  “She Became Perfect in Every Area except Life,” review of Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, RogerEbert.com, December 01, 2010, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ black-swan-2010. 13  Charlotte Gough suggests Nina (and Vicky from The Red Shoes) are “ultimately transformed int the patriarchally conditioned personas they strive to perfect and perform.” “The Ballerina Body-­ Horror: Spectatorship, Female Subjectivity and the Abject in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977),” Irish Gothic Journal; Dublin  17 (Autumn 2018): 64–65, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-­ journals/ballerina-body-horror-spectatorship-female/docview/2138048991/se-2. Although Julie Sexeny and Ben Tyrer suggest Black Swan could have a relation to the sinthome, in the end both deny this as well. Sexeny laments the “persistence of the male fantasy” and questions, “why is it that we need to be reminded every ten years or so that women can’t be allowed to express and survive their destructiveness?” “Identification and Mutual Recognition in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan,” in “Embodied Encounters: New Approaches to Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. Agnieszka Piotrowska (New York: Routledge, 2015), 58. Tyrer offers a reading that suggests the Black Swan (role) is Nina’s sinthome, yet then adds that, “she is denied this feminine logic – and with that her sinthome – and her insistence on transcendence pushes her back towards the White Swan: towards the beyond and into death.” “An Atheist’s Guide to Feminine Jouissance: On Black Swan and the Other Satisfaction,” in ibid., 144. 10 11

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of the ending is part of the film’s genius. The ending frustrates viewers by refusing what they want (which is really the ending they think will occur right up until it doesn’t appear: the one they can pan as chauvinistic or the fairy-tale ending),14 yet the ambiguity of the ending creates the possibility for alternative readings. It does not matter what the “truth” is; what matters is that the film permits the possibility that Nina commits the ultimate ethical with dance operating as the sinthome that occasions this act. How might this work? In the same way it did for Joyce: I suggest that Nina, throughout the threat of an outright descent into psychosis, manages, through dance, to develop a sinthome by binding her experience as its revealed in the mirror and opening a potential space in which she learns to play. The image (in the mirror) plays a role as images and hallucinations threaten to overtake her. Images, via the mirrors in the film, ultimately take on lives of their own, threatening a break within Nina’s psyche. At one point, she sees (hallucinates) the word “whore” written on a bathroom mirror. One hallucination also reveals an image of her (Nina) as the Black Swan—the uncontrolled, uncontrollable subject of deception and sexuality—in opposition to the innocence and purity of the White Swan (of Swan Lake). The film thus incorporates the hallucination, fragmentation, and metasexuation, that I’ve previously noted accompany the psychotic’s return to the body.15 Yet, the (psychotic) images also reveal what is. At one point, Nina enters her mother’s room and is confronted by images of her (Nina) as a dancer; she then sees how her dancing has always been her mother’s desire (just as Polunin saw prior to his attempt to quit ballet). Thus, Nina is confronted with a real that is too much.  What the desire for a different ending fails to account for it the idea of what that might look like, especially when the desired ending is the fairy tale ending. Does Nina go on dancing, but just with a newfound passion (and therefore cede her subject to what others want of her)? 15  See Psychosis (in Chap. 3) and Bollas, When the Sun Bursts, 103–10. That the film circles around the ballet Swan Lake is highly relevant: if the psychotic is characterized by an internalized division that structures the psyche (When the Sun Bursts, 99–100), then the plot of Swan Lake parallels this externally as the Black Swan betrays the White Swan, and there is a battle of good versus evil. The suicide of the White Swan (rather than the death of Nina) can also be read as an ethical act, a reading that I am not pursuing here but that furthers the parallels of the ballet portrayed in the film to the structure of the film itself. 14

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Dance becomes enmeshed with a traumatic real while allowing Nina to see how her desire to dance stems from her relationship with her mother. Yet dance helps her bind this traumatic real. As the hallucinations and images in the mirror threaten to overwhelm her, she also incorporates them into her dance. She binds the real via her dancing, and by channelling her newfound sexuality into her dance, she becomes a more passionate dancer. Her technical ability is also what allows this, so that as she becomes more passionate, there is something solid to support what might otherwise result in a dramatic descent into unrestrained (psychotic) movement. The juxtaposition of the mirror showing things as they are while also contributing to psychosis alongside the attempts of Nina to bind the intrusions of the real then establish a potential space—one in which the real is neither overwhelming nor covered over by the symbolic/imaginary—and this space then allows her to play with the real. We see the culmination of this in Nina’s transformation into the Black Swan. As her skin splits to reveal the  feathers, scales, and wings of the Black Swan, Nina takes the intrusions of the real, embraces them, and capitulates to her own desire: she takes what had been the desire of the (m)other and turns it back on itself so that she, with her entire being as it were, accepts it as her own. Black Swan stands out because of this connection to a successful (ethical) act. Unlike the films that show dance as engendering subjects who remain with the phallic fantasy, Black Swan depicts the pain, work, and ultimate impossibility inherent in becoming a subject not subject to the phallic function. Nina does not create a sinthome easily (nor, for that matter, did Joyce). Not only do we see the physical toll her dancing takes on her with her battered feet, bruised body, and self-mutilation (scratching), but the film also depicts the moments wherein she starts to create a sinthome (as she starts to get in touch with the qualities of the Black Swan through her play—whether that be playing with dance as more than a technical exercise or through her sexual awaking with Lily) but is consistently thwarted in her efforts as she is continuously interpolated into the symbolic. Her (m)other’s desire is simultaneous why Nina needs a sinthome and what contributes to the agony of creating one. (You might note, there is no father in the film.) McGowan perceives this

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dichotomy: Nina’s “self-wounding” is how she separates from her mother and refuses her role as fulfilling her mother’s desire and instead “insists upon her own enjoyment.”16 Insisting on her own enjoyment allows Nina to create a sinthome and, thus, partake in the ultimate (ethical) act. Nina is not pursued to her death by her desire for perfection. She does not die as a sacrifice intended to remove the (inner) pathological.17 Her death is an instance of non-agency that ultimately results in becoming a subject; Nina—to use Zupančič’s words—“annihilate[s] that which  – in the Other, in the symbolic order – gave [her] being identity, status, support and meaning.”18 There is no agent of the ethical act, just as there is no agent of the psychoanalytic act. It is an “impossible” act: it has no subject. Nina, in the end, apprehends her own desire, which McGowan notes is only possible through the destruction of the “self,”19 placing herself in the position to commit the impossible act. The ambiguity of the ending foregrounds this aspect of the act. Audiences are often stuck in the binary of does she or doesn’t she (stab herself, die), but really, at the point of the act, there is no “she.” The ending depicts the “death” of the self as composed by the Other as a visual death that plays out the ultimate ethical act of becoming a real subject. Early in the film, Nina states, “I just want to be perfect”; in the final scene, she repeats this before ultimately turning the “I” into “it”: “it was perfect.”20 This change draws out the link to the ethical act that has no subject. The change also makes Nina’s death “impossible” in Zupančič’s understanding. Therefore, like Joyce’s  In her self-mutilation, Nina “breaks this imaginary bond. She is no longer within the complementary relation with her mother because she has destroyed the imaginary wholeness of her own body.” Todd McGowan, “The Desert of the Real,” in Blackwell Companion to Literary Studies and Psychoanalysis, ed. Laura Markus and Ankhi Murkherjee (New York: Blackwell, 2014), 284. 17  Zupančič differentiates two types of suicide, with the second type being a part of the ethical act I associate with Nina and Vicky’s deaths. The first she explains “obeys the logic of sacrifice” and is that of “infinite ‘purification,’” or the death of the pathological within the self as part of the effort “to preserve the consistency of the big Other.” See Ethics of the Real, 83–84. 18  Ethics of the Real, 84. 19  McGowan, “The Desert of the Real,” 284. 20  Potentially at least. There is a ton of disagreement about what the last line is, with some (mostly amateur) film critics suggesting the film portrays the problems of dance’s demand for perfection. They suggest the film ends with “I was perfect.” The contrast between Nina’s earlier desire to be perfect and the phrase “it was perfect” makes more sense though. Nina wanted to be perfect but could never live up to that desire of the Other; she achieves “perfection” only by surrendering to the drive of her own desire and undergoing the impossible act. 16

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feminine jouissance, Nina’s death is the impossible that happens and an instance of the real in which Nina comes to “act in conformity to what threw [her] ‘out of joint.’”21 Overall, I propose that dance, as her entire psychic structure threatens collapse, becomes Nina’s sinthome, and we see this in the depiction of the ethical act. It is because dance offers her a sinthomic process that she can accept the real as it intrudes and that the “act” can occur in the end. She is not only overwhelmed by hallucinations and body sensations, but she also plays with them: we see her almost orgasmic pleasure as she (bodily) “transforms” into the Black Swan; we witness the development of her ability to play as she evolves from a technically brilliant dancer into one who is not afraid to go beyond the steps. Through all these moments that suggest a sinthome, we also see how psychosis threatens at every turn, yet in the end, Nina becomes the object of the ethical act. I hope my explanation of this “ethical act” helps you to understand how the sinthome is a process, a painful, driven process that one cannot consciously choose. Someone at risk of psychosis needs to know the real is manageable and will not overturn or destroy the symbolic, yet at any moment one risks feeling overwhelmed and losing all sense of self. What I mean is the real “surprises us” (as per Zupančič), and without the name-­ of-­the-father to permit its covering over (with the symbolic and imaginary), we either descend into psychosis or (if we’re driven to live) find a way to “reformulate what has hitherto been the foundation of [our] existence.”22 In Black Swan, the real—in the form of hallucinations and disturbing bodily sensations—threatens Nina, and her “act” of “reformulating” her existence is the embodiment of / turning into the Black Swan (not her death as the White Swan). As she physically metamorphoses into and embodies the Black Swan, you (as viewer) can see her embrace the real and touch upon its associated jouissance. But this act occurs outside of any choice. It is the drive to live when one’s reality is at risk of shattering. That the ethical act is the embodiment of the Black Swan (somewhat) reconciles the ambiguous ending. Nina’s stabbing of Lily (herself ) occurs before the ethical act; therefore, Nina’s reformulates her foundation only to lose  Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, 235.  Ethics of the Real, 268.

21 22

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her life (or, rather, she accepts the ethics of the drive—the death drive— allowing her to “die differently,” depicted in the film as a real death).

7.2  Pas (de) deux The result of the processes I’ve mentioned (mirroring, containment and the development of a potential space, and play)—beyond the sinthome— is that is that one comes to accept the real and, consequently, also comes to accept a paradox, by which I mean one can see how two seemingly incongruous ideas are simultaneously true. If we return to play, this idea is inherent in the fact that play is both pleasurable and frightening, for example, or, more specifically, that the pleasure in play derives from the fact it is frightening, and that the fright adheres in the pleasure. Thus, the real pleasure is accessed once the dancer learns to play, thereby learning to live the paradox23 and gaining access to the other jouissance, so one can live within the symbolic while maintaining a connection to the imaginary and the real. But access to feminine jouissance is only possible if one recognizes both how the real is necessary, for it forces a symbolic and imaginary (as we try to come to terms with the real), and how the real cannot exist without the symbolic and imaginary (as they create the limits through which we cognize the world). Sparshott contends that dance is the art that threatens the core of what art is; in all the other arts, art and artist are separate, but one cannot separate the dancer from the dance so easily.24 Thus, the dancer is necessary for the dance, and vice versa. If we keep this insight in mind, the paradox of play being both enjoyable and frightening has greater weight in dance because if through play the dancer may learn to find that other jouissance, the jouissance of the body, then she must confront and experience a complete reorientation of her life and her psyche. Dance, as an art, has the possibility of establishing this connection to that real pleasure (i.e., a  To live the paradox, I suggest, is to think the paradox as per Zupančič. Thinking a paradox, she writes, is not to think about it or “stare at it with fascination,” but to think it, which is also to think the real. What is Sex?, 123. 24  “The Philosophy of Dance,” 280. 23

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pleasure associated with the real), the pleasure that is also associated with feminine jouissance. With the necessity within dance of the body and with dancer and dance so entwined, however, the risks of play within dance are, therefore, greater than in any of the other arts.25 Joyce’s writing is separate from his body, even if it acts on his body, but the dancer is the dance (and vice versa), making the potential failure of dance as a sinthome a much greater risk. But then greater, too, are dance’s (possible) effects, which is precisely why I suggest dance has the potential to facilitate one’s ability to live with the symbolic while maintaining imaginary capabilities and enduring the real. What dance does is what psychoanalysis does: it allows the index person (the dancer or analysand) not just to see contradictions but also to see that both sides of those contradictions are simultaneously true and necessary; the paradox is not just accepted, but embraced and permitted to exist in a way that recognizes it and uses it, but uses it without reducing it to something that is purely utilitarian. If we think of a dance as a physical interaction within a given space and time, an interaction in which the dancer both influences and is influenced by the different processes of the sinthome, processes that have effects in other spaces and different times, then dance can be seen as a paradox that becomes the means for a creative imagining regarding how the dancer can relate to the specific structure of his psyche, whether that is the psyche subject to the laws of the name-of-­ the-father or the psyche that lacks that primordial metaphor and threatens to unravel. Dance, thereby, permits health according to Bromberg’s definition that I previously cited: “the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them.”26

 Vocal music is the art that comes the closest. It, too, uses the real as it is played out in the body via the vibrations of its vocalizations. Whether vocal music contains the possibilities of the sinthome is something that I do not explore here but that nonetheless deserves some thought. Mladen Dolar might suggest vocal music differs because this is the voice as “the core of a fantasy that the singing voice might cure the wound inflicted by culture, restore the loss that we suffered by the assumption of the symbolic order.” A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 31. He elaborates on this in a footnote: music “takes the object of the drive as the object of immediate enjoyment. … Its aesthetic pleasure reinserts enjoyment into the boundaries of the pleasure principle.” Ibid., 197n12. 26  “Shadow and Substance,” 166. 25

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I am, therefore, reiterating that paradoxes are structured like the moebius strip. Accepting the paradox, therefore, is recognizing that the things we think are fundamentally in opposition, rely on each other for their existence. Then, what I am suggesting about the similarities between dance and psychoanalysis is that both dance and psychoanalysis both get at something: for the pre-psychotic in particular, both processes help someone connect with the non-understandable elements that exist in life and accept the paradox that despite the overwhelming nature of the real, it is necessary to experience it if one is to live effectively within reality—just as Joyce connected with and made use of the real in his writing. Thus, when psychoanalysts like Danielle Knafo suggest psychoanalysis is a dance between analyst and patient, they are not just using some trite metaphor.27 Rather, dance and psychoanalysis are processes that employ similar mechanisms, and what occurs between the analyst and patient or within dance relies on specific subprocesses. The real, whether through dance or psychoanalysis (or Joyce’s writing), is revealed, reflected, and bound; its paradoxes accepted. As one comes to play with the real,28 one also inhabits the potential space, or a space of enormous creativity, and learns a new way to exist in the world. Thus, writing, dance, and psychoanalysis are not “things”; they are relational and embodied processes that permit the safety in which to experience the overturning of one’s foundation in order to develop a new relationship to it. Dance, like Joyce’s writing and psychoanalysis, can support someone while she develops the courage to approach, touch, and bind the real or the courage to play with the real. 29 In touching the real and binding it, then, dance can help  See Dancing with the Unconscious.  I am writing as if there is an order to the sinthomic process—that one’s experience is reflected, allowing it to be bound, which creates a potential space for play—but it’s not even a question of time; these processes need to co-exist as a sinthome because they rely on each other. The only caveat is that play is not always possible, and in that instance, the other processes set up the possibility for play, but even then, timing is irrelevant because although the analysand (or dancer) may not be able to play, play still occurs within the relationships (as the analyst or instructor models play, for example). 29  Rose offers a version of this argument, suggesting the “arts may act as a prosthetic device and support where deficiencies exist.” Between Couch and Piano, 119. I, however, offer a different idea of how this works from Rose, arguing that the arts act neither as prosthetic devices nor as methods for eliminating deficiencies or restoring a wholeness; rather, the arts provide, using Bersani’s words, an “impersonal relationality.” Bersani and Phillips, intimacies, 123. 27 28

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redefine the subject in relation to her fate, giving access to the other pleasure and allowing for contradiction. That is, in dancing, one touches and binds the real, situating dance as a possible sinthome that can reinvent the relationship between oneself and the world so that rather than being stuck in a state of (psychotic, pre-Oedipal) merger, one can accept and embrace merger and develop the other jouissance. In order to touch the real, one must make use of the body, for the real plays out within the body. Dance, by necessity, incorporates the body. Lacan, although critical of phenomenology at times, identifies the contribution phenomenology offers for understanding how we exist in the world. He uses Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of how the we experience perception though the body, and how that experience influences (or contributes to) what we perceive, for example.30 Merleau-Ponty thus offers Lacan support for the concept of the real, or for something that cannot now or ever be understood or “known” by science in that Merleau-Ponty’s work captures the element that accounts for the fact that “a painting has an effect on the subject which goes far beyond the production of ocular images.”31 In Seminar 11 Lacan speaks of something new (and valuable) in Merleau-Ponty’s work: the division between the eye and the gaze, that is, the invisible. Thus, the gaze coming from the Other, the gaze that is the means of the annihilation of the subject, is also the gaze that allows us to “die differently,”32 to die in such a way that allows the subject to re-­ emerge reconstituted. Dance offers a different way of being through a method that parallels the psychoanalytic process. Dance is hard—like analysis. Yet, there is always a risk that one avoids the hard work. Rather than stepping into the  See Stijn Vanheule, “A Lacanian Perspective on Psychotic Hallucinations,” Theory & Psychology 21, no. 1 (2011): 90, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354310369275. Vanheule’s article is contrasting Lacan’s ideas of hallucination to the psychiatric approach, and he discusses the influences on Lacanian thought. 31  Cormac Gallagher, “‘Despair, Despair, despair … spare!’: Affect in Lacanian Theory and Practice,” (paper presented to the 4th annual conference of Universities Association for Psychoanalytic Studies Canterbury, May 17–18, 1997), http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/ uploads/2010/06/Aut_1997-DESPAIR.SPARE-AFFECT-IN-LACANIAN-THEORY-ANDPRACTICE-Cormac-Gallagher.pdf. This is relevant to my point about how Joyce is in fact playing with the real, not with language: he’s playing with the real via language (lalangue); it’s through the effects of Joyce’s particular use of language that one experiences (the existence of ) the real. 32  Zupančič, What is Sex?, 106. 30

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space and learning one’s own body, one may focus on emulating the other or aiming for technical perfection, or one may obsess about how one looks in the mirror. Yet, the fact that dance and accepting one’s own body within dance is arduous has value: “the difficulty of digging is an important constraint.”33 Difficulty is a necessary part of the sinthome or the analytic process more generally: those who think they can actively pursue the sinthome are looking for easy solutions, solutions that will inevitably turn to attempts at mastery. The sinthome is borne of necessity and is painful, even as the result may be beautiful. Additionally, because the sinthome is hard work, it supplements the constraints of dance in binding the real. The result is that the beauty in dance derives from the hard work that allows one to take dance’s relationship to the real, the real that threatens to overwhelm, and transform that relationship into an art. My argument is not merely a suggestion that dance and psychoanalysis offer parallel experiences, but that if we focus the processes that underlie them, we can understand something about the psyche that we might not be able to see otherwise. Nonetheless, the parallelism between analysis and dance is why my argument is dance specific. Other arts create a product—they produce objects that can more easily be co-opted into the dominant discourse of society—whereas dance (and analysis) creates a new relationship to what is, or it creates a content (as opposed to a product). Dance is not a piece of music or an artwork with a defined end; psychoanalysis is both terminable and interminable. And both, intrinsically, offer the possibility for the ultimate (ethical/psychoanalytic) act.

33  Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and The Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 179. Kimmerer is referencing an entirely different constraint that nonetheless dovetails nicely with my argument. She is referring to harvesting, here specifically to harvesting leeks, and how although a sharp knife rather than her trowel would speed up the process, it would also facilitate taking too much, thereby increasing the chance of extinction of the leek population. The “difficulty of digging” is what permits a continued healthy crop.

8 Reverberations of the Embodied Sinthome

Dance as a process for the bodily instantiation of the sinthome has significant practical and theoretical implications. Some of these ideas are modified or extant in theory, but by using dance, they become more accessible to new audiences. Looking at Lacan’s ideas via dance also changes our relationship to what we (think we) know, providing new or more nuanced insights. Not only does dance emerge from the shadows of the other arts and find a place of its own, but dance also then provides a new way to think about psychoanalysis and how it can be enriched and diversified: how it can expand its participant population without losing its core elements or insights. In this chapter I probe how my arguments may revolutionize our understandings of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, psychoanalytic practice (in general), and dance.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Sherritt, Dancing an Embodied Sinthome, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7_8

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8.1 Implications for (Lacanian) Psychoanalytic Theory Dance as seen via Lacan’s three elements of the psyche plus the sinthome produces an alternative way to explore Lacan’s arguments. I begin this section with how my argument can give us a new understanding of Lacan’s more general theory of psychoanalysis. I then shift to propose that his discussion of the sinthome necessitates a new Lacanian discourse.

8.1.1 Symptoms and/or Sinthome When Lacan writes that dance does not work on the body, he seems to imply dance cannot match Joyce’s works when it comes to creating a sinthome, but what if Lacan means dance contrasts writing because dance cannot speak of the symptom? Dance’s “ciphers” do not reveal a (psychotic) symptom, only help create a sinthome. Lacan in his seminar on the sinthome first employs the term “symptom” when he speaks of Joyce. Later, he introduces the sinthome. Not all critics comment on the change of the term, and those who do often suggest Lacan is speaking of the same phenomenon both times, merely refining his language.1 Yet Lacan, I believe, uses two terms intentionally because he is explaining two different concepts and processes. Roberto Harari links the sinthome to Joyce’s “making a name” for himself with this (self ) nomination distinct from the naming subsumed under the name-of-the-father.2 Language (or speech) is necessary for revealing the symptom (of the name-of-the-­ father) because only metaphor can reveal the symptom as it imposes a meaning on the metonymic chain, and metaphor requires language. Joyce’s Portrait reveals for Lacan how Joyce forecloses on the name-of-­ the-father, but it is Finnegans Wake that Lacan sees as emblematic of the  See, for example, Oren Gozlan, “Transsexual Surgery: A Novel Reminder and a Navel Remainder,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 20, no. 1 (2011): 45–52, https://doi.org/10.108 0/0803706X.2010.537695 or Prieto, “Writing the Subject’s Knot.” Gozlan posits the difference between the symptom and sinthome is merely our relationship to a behaviour; Prieto argues the definition of symptom changes with the introduction of the term sinthome. 2  How James Joyce Made His Name, 50–54. 1

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sinthome, that is, Joyce’s works first reveal the (psychotic) “symptom,” then Joyce transforms this symptom into a sinthome using the real within the symbolic. Essential to understanding the symptom is an understanding of the real as opposed to reality because the symptom supports reality. Lacan emphasizes this distinction in Seminar 20 when he talks about jouissance and reality, and he references Freud’s comment that there is a Lust-Ich before a Real-Ich, which one could misunderstand as a jouissance that exists prior to reality. Although Lacan emphasizes that one can only approach reality through jouissance (and believes at this time that as speaking beings, we can only approach jouissance through language), this only means that jouissance (or the Lust-Ich) may be primary, but not first: once we begin to think, jouissance is what occupies us. The apparatus of jouissance (language) that permits thought, however, makes the real impossible: it fails to symbolize the real and leads to repression.3 As a result, “reality itself can function as an escape from encountering the Real.”4 We rely on the fantasy that supports our reality to hide from the real rather than face the real embedded within reality. The imaginary and symbolic work together to produce meaning, keeping the real repressed. Nonetheless, the real (and its associated jouissance) exists whether it is seen in the ecstatic pleasure of Nina’s becoming the Black Swan or Bernini’s sculpture of Saint Theresa or Fosse’s merger with his various lovers. The symbolic, however, obscures this type of jouissance. The development of language produces a belief in the ability to master reality and cover the real; “due to speaking, everything succeeds” Lacan posits, yet Lacan also tells us that what this success ultimately equates to is making sure the sexual relationship fails “in the male manner.”5 Lacan refers to the Oedipus complex as the symptom that holds the three elements of the psyche together: “the Oedipus complex is, as such, a symptom. Everything is sustained in so far as the Name-of-the-Father  Turkle further suggests this “impossible” is what Lacan believes that “both [analysts and poets] are trying to grab hold of ” in their use of language, but this “can lead to a kind of delirium.” Psychoanalytic Politics, 236. 4  Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 57. 5  Seminar 20, 56. 3

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is also the Father of the Name.”6 This gives this idea of the symptom as grounded in reality and the phallic function more clarity because it suggests the name-of-the-father forbids jouissance, creating both the recognition of a lack and the (impossible) desire to fill that lack. Although Lacan suggests the Oedipus complex could be a sinthome when he mentions “the father is a symptom, or a sinthome, as you wish,”7 as he develops his ideas it becomes clearer that the Oedipus complex, in its relation to the name-of-the-father, does not fit the definition of a sinthome. Rather, it is a symptom that supports the signifier so that one can be perceived as a subject, and thus, it establishes a division of the subject “between the symbolic and the symptom”8 and produces the master’s discourse. The sinthome, alternatively, works to connect the elements of the psyche in absence of the name-of-the-father and acts as a support for the radically de-centred subject. Although this sounds like the symptom that supports the symbolic, the sinthome has a very different function. Contrary to the symptom that reinforces the master’s discourse, the sinthome establishes something akin to the analyst’s discourse, producing, as I’ve outlined, an ethical subject. The symptom emerges from an identification with the lack in the subject—the repression of our knowledge of this lack causes the desire (for objects) to fill the lack. The sinthome, on the other hand, relates to an identification with the lack in the other. As a buckle, the sinthome allows the subject, as Lacan illustrates via Joyce, to come to a kind of truth that he can live with by permitting questions of meaning and truth without the phallic signifier. Lacan, in a lecture delivered at the Joyce symposium, states that the sinthome “is what is singular to each individual,”9 and it is through the creation of the sinthome that “[Joyce] is one who has earned the privilege of having reached the extreme point of embodying the symptom in himself, by which he eludes any possible death, on account of being reduced to a structure that is the very structure of LOM,”10 for “it is only as a concrete self that the universal  Seminar 23, 13.  Seminar 23, 11. 8  Seminar 23, 14. 9  “Joyce the Symptom,” 147. 10  “Joyce the Symptom,” 147. LOM should be read as “l’homme.” 6 7

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comes to its own truth [as ultimately empty] via the gap of self-­ consciousness.”11 This is to say, in the concrete instance of Joyce, the subject comes to the truth of the lack of a universal “out there”; Joyce shows that rather than something that exists outside and lives beyond us, “something of our life lives on its own as we speak”; that is, there is a real.12 Joyce’s sinthome, then, differs from a symptom in that Joyce, in his works, “target[s] what presents itself in the first instance as a symptom”13 and turns it into a sinthome. The symptom is tied to the unconscious that Lacan argues is “structured like a language” and is, therefore, reliant on the other; the unconscious is based upon the desire of the other. The sinthome, however, is not a symptom because not only did Joyce cancel his subscription to the unconscious, but also the sinthome itself reflects the individual unconscious Lacan does not believe exists and relates, likewise, to feminine jouissance that “shouldn’t be.”14 Therefore, more than just ensuring the psyche remains intact, the sinthome also regulates the subject in such a way that identification with feminine jouissance becomes possible. Dance offers a clearer understanding of the importance of the drives in the creation of the sinthome over the method of writing in which those drives appear in Joyce. Accepting dance can form a sinthome, therefore, challenges the indispensability of writing for the sinthome and clarifies the difference between the symptom and sinthome. Dance as a symptom is dancing to please the other or to fulfill the “self.” Dance as a sinthome is far more nuanced and complex; it draws out the connection to a “beyond” of language. Specifically, dance as a sinthome exposes the role of the real (and, therefore, of the drives) in the sinthome. Applying this back to Lacan, one can see how the drives need to be bound using play,  Zupančič, The Odd One In, 38.  Zupančič, The Odd One In, 218. 13  Seminar 23, 14. A symptom, however, only in that it reveals the foreclosure of the name-of-the-­ father, not in that it acts as a defence against the repressed name-of-the-father. 14  Seminar 20, 59. Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan explain how Lacan castigates Carl Jung for his idea of the “collective unconscious” because there is no duality within the unconscious, and assuming a collective unconscious implies the existence of a private unconscious, yet the unconscious—at least until Joyce—is merely an effect of a discourse with the other. “Unconscious (Aphorism 5),” in Why Theory, March 10, 2020, podcast, 33:20. 11 12

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specifically the playing with the real. It is, after all, the irruption of the real that causes the psyche’s knot to begin to fray in the first place. Zupančič outlines how in Lacanian thought, the death drive “refers to an excess of life itself,”15 or a surplus. Death does not (only) exist in opposition to life but is (also) in life as its “inherent negativity and internal presupposition.”16 Thus, the death drive is the life drive, for there is no way to consistently distinguish the two. The “aim” of this drive “is the repetition of the lack of being in the very midst of being.”17 This repetition, however, also has a split: for repetition not only binds the excess of life but also produces that excess.18 The search for the objet a is a desire to limit the satisfaction and fill the gap, to become a whole, yet the repetition of this search paradoxically encourages further repetition of the lack because although one never attains the objet a, one attains a sort of satisfaction nonetheless: the satisfaction of the repetition of the lack, which is the satisfaction of the drive, not the satisfaction of desire. I suggest this means we get what we need—satisfaction of the drive—not what we desire. Until we come to create a new relationship to the signifier—via the ethical act, for example—and “die differently,” we repeat the “fatigue of life” through the repetition of desire and the search for wholeness.19 Only by playing with the repetition of the lack and coming to see the lack as one that cannot be filled by another does one limit the effect of the real (of the drive) and identify with the other jouissance. This drive exists (and ex-ists) regardless of one’s psychic structure. When one lacks the name-­of-­the-father (and, therefore, the desire to fill a central lack), the drive nonetheless persists, and the psychotic, therefore, needs a different jouissance. The sinthome becomes the means for the possibility of accepting and inhabiting the lack both by ensuring one exists (i.e., by keeping the psyche tied) and by moving the centre of the psyche away from the knot-­hole of the three-element psyche, as the sinthome reconnects the psyche around the location of feminine jouissance. Thus, this sinthome is  Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions (Gothenburg, SE: Nordic Summer University Press, 2008), 55. 16  Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 101. 17  Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 104. 18  Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 112. 19  Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 106. 15

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like a symptom only in that it supports a symbolic; although the sinthome may allow the (non-triggered) psychotic to exist effectively in reality, the symbolic it supports is a different, individual symbolic—a radically shifted symbolic characterized (or identified) by a feminine jouissance. The sinthome offers a drive-infested identification with a jouissance in which one is or does rather than acts: one lets go of the other. That is, as the sinthome ties itself to the imaginary and the real, it embodies a shift that permits identification not with the not-whole, but with the knot-hole.

8.1.2 Lacan’s Place in Contemporary Theory Although Lacan is often positioned as outside of contemporary analytic theory,20 there are many ways that his theory contributes to today’s psychoanalytic thinking. In fact, Lacan can be seen as codifying was what known or inherent in the arts and leading the way (offering the spaces to step into) for others. For example, Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan, while discussing the real, propose that for Lacan (in Seminar 22), the real begins with the number three because every duality always makes present a third.21 This third is easily analogous to potential space, or the space that (in theory) appears between the duality of mother-baby. This space only opens when one (mother-baby) becomes two (mother and baby). As previously discussed, Ogden takes up this idea to suggest the dream space is a potential space. Subsequently, Benjamin, likewise, takes up the concept of the third as a “quality of mental space.”22 Benjamin, however, intentionally contrasts her concept of thirdness from Lacan’s concept that she

 However, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black describe Lacanian psychoanalysis as one of the “contemporary revisionist Freudian approaches,” categorizing Lacan into contemporary psychoanalytic thought: although he keeps many of Freud’s concepts (in words), he radically reconceptualizes them. Freud and Beyond, xx. See also Chap. 2 in this work, Changement, especially Sect. 2.5, A New Relationship to the Real. 21  “The Real,” 1:05:00. Engley and McGowan’s discussion rests on McGowan’s unpublished and unavailable translation of Seminar 22. For Gallagher’s translation see Lacan, Seminar 22, X. 22  “Intersubjectivity, Thirdness, and Mutual Recognition,” paper presented at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, 2007, 1. 20

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characterizes as “recognition through speech,”23 yet the manner in which she describes this thirdness echoes Lacan’s ideas about the sinthome. In her view, thirdness is “a deep structure of accommodation to otherness,” and it “begins with the early non-verbal experience of sharing a pattern, a dance, with another person.”24 This is to say that for Benjamin, thirdness is a space that accommodates otherness and is a primordial nascent pre-symbolic thirdness (a primoradial non-signifier in my understanding, in contrast to Lacan’s primordial signifier of the name-of-the-father), which Benjamin’s theory suggests would only arise based on rhythmicity inherent in the one (of mother and baby); this is made manifest by how if the mother adjusts herself to accommodate the baby’s needs, the baby adjusts to match the mother’s needs.25 Therefore, one could potentially see in dance a primordial (non-)signifier related to the nascent thirdness that arises when someone is teaching dance, and student and instructor each accommodate to the limits of the other’s body in order to create a shared dance. Scholars may often see Lacan’s (recognized) contribution to thirdness as related to the symbolic (i.e., the-name-of-the-father), but in relation to the sinthome and psychoanalysis with the (pre-)psychotic, I think Lacan shows that he, too, offers an alternative concept of the third that relates to the possibility for the name-of-the-father. Benjamin’s primoradial (non-signifier) is the necessary precondition for the thirdness she writes about as being a moral “law” that respects difference; dance’s primordial (non-)signifier would then be the (necessary) precondition for possibility, which I explore further in Chap. 9. Furthermore, Winnicott may be the analyst best known for using and exploring play, but Lacan’s theory has a place for play too, one that is underacknowledged. Lacan and Winnicott worked at the same time, and Lacan’s sinthome hints at the importance of play. Whereas Winnicott forefronts on the possibilities of play explicitly, Lacan’s discussion of the  “Intersubjectivity,” 3. This is also, I note, accepting the third is the symbolic, which directly contradicts Engley and McGowan (and Lacan’s) explicit argument that the third appears with the real. Benjamin, however, does explicitly state elsewhere that the concept of the third in psychoanalysis is indebted to Lacan. Jessica Benjamin, “Two-Way Streets: Recognition of Difference and the Intersubjective Third,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 17, no. 1 (2006): 125, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2005-006. 24  “Intersubjectivity,” 16, 7. 25  Benjamin, “Intersubjectivity,” 7–8. 23

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sinthome merely reveals Joyce’s play, thus raising the importance of learning to play. The inability to play has become an important theoretical concept with Mary Target and Peter Fonagy’s ideas about the pretend mode. They, like Lacan—and perhaps only thanks to Lacan—identify the importance of play. For them, play is a developmental construct that later contributes to an ability to mentalize the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of oneself and others.26 Lacan does not receive the same amount or quality of attention in psychoanalytic history, nor within most psychoanalytic circles today, as other prominent psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic theorists do. Additionally, there exists a split, one that explicitly distinguishes (at least in theory) between contemporary psychoanalysis and Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan resigned from the Paris Psychoanalytic Association in 1953 and, after forming the French Psychoanalytic Association, Lacan’s own devotees abandoned him and formed yet another organization.27 Today, many see Lacan as esoteric or eccentric, and his works are more often read, or read more in depth, in theory classes than in clinical training classes. Psychoanalysts often malign him as hard to understand and irrelevant. Yet, many of the elements I see in Lacanian theory are elements that are central in contemporary psychoanalysis.28

 Peter Fonagy and Mary Target introduce  the “pretend mode” in a series of papers. See Peter Fonagy and Mary Target, “Playing with Reality: I. Theory of Mind and the Normal Development of Psychic Reality,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 77 (1996): 217–33; Mary Target and Peter Fonagy, “Playing with Reality: II. The Development of Psychic Reality from a Theoretical Perspective,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 77 (1996): 459–79; Peter Fonagy and Mary Target, “Playing with Reality,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 88 (2007): 928–29, https:// doi.org/10.1516/4774-6173-241T-7225. Play for Fonagy and Target links directly to mentalization. I’m not sure I agree. Mentalization may result from play, but I don’t think it is play. Sometimes learning to play isn’t playing at being someone else (or seeing things how others might); sometimes play is a repetition in which things might (surprisingly) change. Think of my niece as a witch. She wasn’t becoming a witch but putting distance between the scary event and its re-enactment. 27  Monique David-Menard, “Lacanians Against Lacan,” trans. Brian Massumi, Social Text 6 (Autumn 1982): 86–87, https://doi.org/10.2307/466618. 28  Accusations of Lacan as irrelevant or obscure also disregard what I see as the genius of Lacan: you have to work to make sense of his seminars, and that “sense” is often an individual sense, which—to my mind—shows that when he presents his seminars, he is also offering (or attempting to offer) the (embodied) experience of being in psychoanalysis. 26

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Furthermore, Lacan proved himself to be ahead of neuroscience. The minimal knowledge that exists regarding, for example, schizophrenia’s causes suggests that even if schizophrenia involves excess dopamine,29 we are still in need of an explanation for why dopamine exists in excess: if only ten percent of people with a first degree relative with schizophrenia also develop schizophrenia,30 then the reasons it develops are more complex than mere biology or genetics suggests. Furthermore, although hypotheses exist regarding the origins of the psychoses, knowledge of precise causes continues to elude us, and treatments can, so far, only “increase adaptive functioning.”31 Most researchers suggest a confluence of biological and environmental factors, with genetics potentially playing a role. Regardless of whether or not biologically influenced environmental maladaptation or genetic influences contribute to the development of schizophrenia, the primary treatments employ medications that manage symptoms yet also cause significant side effects, including some that may be long-lasting and non-reversible, even if medication is ever discontinued  Eugenia Tomasella et al., “Deletion of Dopamine D2 Receptors from Parvalbumin Interneurons in Mouse Causes Schizophrenia-like Phenotypes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 13 (2018): 3476–81, https://doi.org/10.1073/ PNAS.1719897115. The current hypotheses regarding schizophrenia are further along than those for psychosis in general, although there is still no definitive cause: almost all hypotheses involve excess of the neurotransmitter dopamine. The dopaminergic hypothesis suggests the genesis is a dopamine imbalance among the regions of the brain. The glutamate hypothesis suggests that glutamatergic dysfunction causes the imbalances in dopamine. The serotonin hypothesis suggests that serotonin hyperactivity causes glutamatergic dysfunction, which in turn causes dopamine imbalances. For more, see ibid.; Stephen M. Stahl, “Beyond the Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia to Three Neural Networks of Psychosis: Dopamine, Serotonin, and Glutamate,” CNS Spectrums 23 (2018): 187–89, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1092852918001013; and Shahid Rasool et  al., “Schizophrenia: An Overview,” Clinical Practice 15, no. 5 (2018): 847–51, https://www.openaccessjournals.com/articles/schizophrenia-an-overview.pdf. Yet, the geneses of these processes are unknown: even if a dopamine imbalance or serotonin hyperactivity exists, for example, what is the cause of that imbalance or excess activity in the absence of any specific genetic link? There is a recent theory that suggests a developmental malfunction, due to an immune response combined with genetic factors, affects the ability of glial progenitor cells to differentiate into full mature oligodendrocytes and astrocytes, which in turn cause dysfunctions in gluamateric (and other) homoeostasis as well as synaptic transmission disruptions. But this only alters the question to one earlier in a process; it doesn’t answer it. See Andrea G. Dietz, Steven A. Goldman, and Maiken Nedergaard, “Glial Cells in Schizophrenia: A Unified Hypothesis,” Lancet Psychiatry 7, no. 3 (2020): 272–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(19)30302-5. 30  Rasool et al., cite that schizophrenia occurs only in one percent of the general populations but that increases to ten percent among people who have a first degree relative with schizophrenia. “Schizophrenia,” 848. 31  Rasool et al., “Schizophrenia,” 850. 29

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(such as tardive dyskinesia, which is the uncontrollable movement of the mouth area), and three-quarters of patients stop taking drugs due to the various side effects.32 Lacan may not have had the biological information now available regarding psychosis, but his understanding of psychosis does not contradict the medical model. Additionally, contemporary psychoanalysts have postulated that play and psychosis are intricately linked.33 Specifically, the idea is that psychosis is correlated with an inability to mentalize (or think about other people’s and one’s own states of mind), and this inability arises due to poor attachment or caregiver neglect.34 I’m not suggesting psychosis arises purely due to caregiver neglect (even despite Lacan’s statement about Joyce’s [non] father). I am, however, suggesting, that in someone without a predisposition to psychosis, the secure attachment between caregiver and infant permits the development of mentalization by providing an environment in which one can play with self-experience, whereas in someone predisposed to psychosis, secure attachment is often missing, not due to neglect necessarily, but often due to a mismatch between the caregiver and child, and, thus, the child never learns to play.35 What is not acknowledged in this literature about the value of play is Lacan’s contribution. Lacan’s concept of the sinthome, I suggest, is intimately connected to the ability to play (as are his ideas of the unconscious). 32  Jeffrey J. Magnavita et al., “Personality Disorders,” in Psychopathology: From Science to Clinical Practice, ed. Louis G. Castonguay and Thomas F. Oltmanns (New York: Guilford, 2016), 283–84. 33  Fonagy and Target use their concept of pretend mode to understand psychosis. They note that in psychosis the child is unable to recognize that he or she can only “know” the inner states of one’s own body. Being able to recognize this association is a developmental achievement linked to the ability to operate in “pretend mode,” suggesting that play is a developmental milestone that if not reached, can have the consequence of an overwhelming feeling of “impingement by other minds.” Fonagy and Target, “Playing with Reality,” 928–29. 34  Benjamin K. Brent et al., “Mentalization-Based Treatment for Psychosis: Linking an Attachment-­ Based Model to the Psychotherapy for Impaired Mental State Understanding in People with Psychosis,” Israel Journal of Psychiatry, 51, no. 1 (2014): 18–19, https://doctorsonly.co.il/wp-­ content/uploads/2014/04/04_Mentalization-based.pdf. 35  Martin Debbané is who suggests a connection between secure attachment and learning to play with self-experience. “Attachment, Neurobiology, and Mentalizing along the Psychosis Continuum,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10 (2016): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00406. It is my argument that due to her neurobiology the child who is predisposed to psychosis understands the world differently from those who aren’t predisposed to psychosis, and if those who aren’t predisposed to psychosis are the caregivers for a child who (unknowingly) is, then secure attachment is much more difficult because of the gap between the different ways of experiencing the world.

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8.1.3 Sinthomic Discourse Lacan also has a place in contemporary psychoanalysis if we recognize his study of Joyce as the uncovering of a new discourse, which I propose to term the sinthomic discourse.36 Paul  Verhaeghe and Frédéric  Declercq argue the sinthome is the goal of analysis, but that makes the sinthome into the psychoanalytic act, and my concern with this reading is that Lacan’s seminar on the sinthome is a case study of someone who would otherwise become schizophrenic. I think there is an intimate relation between the sinthome and the process of analysis that leads to the psychoanalytic act—the sinthome may even allow someone who is at risk of psychosis to participate in the psychoanalytic act—but I don’t think it works the other way: the neurotic has the psychoanalytic act open to her, but she cannot create a sinthome. Therefore, I have been writing about the sinthome in relation to Zupančič’s coinages of the ethical subject and ethical act. I have deliberately used those terms because they are broad enough to encompass the psychoanalytic process in both neurosis and psychosis. When we consider the psychotic’s psyche does not operate in the same manner as the neurotic’s (due to the non-existence of the Other), then the sinthome cannot occasion the psychoanalytic act per se, but it can lead to an act analogous to it (the sinthomic act). The psychoanalytic act proper requires an analysand with an intact psyche (in terms of the connection of its three elements) because for the analyst to occupy the  As far as I can tell, Daniel Bristow coined the term sinthomic discourse, using it once to describe a part of what makes up Lacan’s style in leading his seminars: Bristow suggests Lacan’s style “combines the work of (his, i.e., Lacan’s) psychological practice and the play of his sinthomic discourse. Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis (London, Routledge, 2017), 29. I am using the term differently, to describe not Lacan’s style but a discourse that functions within the analytic clinic (albeit I do suggest Lacan’s style is meant to simulate the clinic). My hypothesis, furthermore, is not that the sinthomic discourse is a discourse in addition to the Lacan’s four discourses. It changes the terms embedded in Lacan’s discourses, as I explain subsequently. Rather, it is either a sub-discourse of the analyst’s discourse—one that needs to pre-exist the analyst’s discourse for the psychotic analysand to reach the point of the end of analysis—or a discourse specific to the structure of the psychotic psyche, and therefore, one that exists “beyond” Lacan’s four discourses. Also, the psychoanalytic act does not form a sinthome, yet both the psychoanalytic act and the sinthomic act as I envision it result in an acceptance of uncertainty and non-knowledge, establishing a very different way to exist in the world. 36

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lack as I discussed earlier, the one that sits at the centre of the knot, the knot must be tied. If the knot is unravelling, if the psyche is threatening to fracture, the analyst cannot take the place of any lack; rather the analyst must take the place of the fourth term that ultimately—or at least hopefully—comes to hold the psyche together. In other words, for the psychotic, the analyst as sinthome is a necessary precondition for any ethical act. The uninterpretable and unknowable elements that are threatening to overwhelm any analysand must be bound first, before they can be embraced. The psychoanalytic act and the sinthomic act are both ethical acts that are impossible acts without subjects of those acts, and both entail the creation of re-constituted subjects.37 Additionally, both acts require a “moment of concluding” and leap of faith in which the analysand finds himself in an act for which its logical conclusion depends on factors that remain undetermined until the act itself.38 They are acts that require the false certainty that the subsequent action will be “true” or an action that is entirely a being/doing. One, however, relies on a confrontation with the non-existent objet a (the psychoanalytic act), whereas the other act (the sinthomic act) relies on the binding of the too-present objet a as real and the embracing of its attendant affects in the body. An ethical act isn’t something to desire or to strive for; that’s what makes it ethical. It’s something that “happens,” and this is also why psychoanalysis is terminable and interminable. Psychoanalysis ends, but the process of it does not. In the psychoanalytic act proper, as the analysand becomes the psychoanalyst (literally or metaphorically), the formal analysis can end, but the “new” analyst will continue the process within herself. The process doesn’t lead to the renunciation of desire; rather one accepts it: one’s fate may be determined, but the psychoanalytic act permits one to accept that fate, rather than continuously fight against it, by 37  Both (may) also provide access to an “other” jouissance (or a different relationship to jouissance) in that they leave the subject enduring her own jouissance. In the psychoanalytic act, one must make his own something that was of the other, and in the ethical act, one comes to not be overwhelmed with or enmeshed in the real but to accept it and its associated jouissance. 38  For an understanding of this concept, and its importance to Lacan, see Lacan, “Logical Time.”

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introducing a new relationship to it. In other words, one’s desire is born of one’s past and limited by the symbolic; the psychoanalytic act is merely the moment one can “embrace one’s destiny as one’s own.”39 Thus, the importance of the sinthomic act (and its attendant sinthomic discourse) is the recognition of a drive (to live) when the phallic function doesn’t exist and how that can be harnessed within psychoanalysis. Lacan’s four discourses of the master, university, hysteric, and analyst help him articulate the subject’s relationship to desire when structured by the symbolic and under the name-of-the-father. If the psychotic does not recognize or “know” there is a hole or constitutive lack but only experiences it, that is, if the psychotic does not cover over the hole caused by the real because the real has in-sisted too much, then the analyst cannot be the objet a for the (psychotic) analysand. If the analyst were to take up the position of the objet a, she would risk causing (or worsening) a psychotic break. Instead, the analyst needs a new position: the analyst has to take the place of the non-existent sinthome until such a time that the analysand can “act” and become his own sinthome through objectification, not as the objet a but through the embodiment of feminine jouissance or that of (the universal/impossible) Woman, which allows the (psychotic) analysand to stop fearing the object (as opposed to wanting the object) but nonetheless to be the object in a way that avoids the object consuming him or him merging with it. To put that more clearly, for the pre-psychotic, the analyst is not the equivalent of the objet a, nor can she take the place of what appears in the gap (in the case of the sinthomic discourse this would be between the imaginary and the real, feminine jouissance); rather, the analyst takes the place of the structure that exist around this gap: the sinthome. The analyst cannot take the place of feminine jouissance because, of course, it does not exist; rather, the analyst takes the place of the sinthome40 to bind the real and permit the identification with the impossible jouissance. Nonetheless, in performing as a sinthome, the psychoanalyst is the support for the subject just as the

 Mitchell and Black, Freud and Beyond, 202.  Lacan, Seminar 23, 166.

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analyst is when occupying the position of the objet a for the analysand within the analytic discourse.

8.2 Implications for Psychoanalytic Practice My argument then is important for psychoanalysis more generally because it declares that there is a place for psychoanalysis in contemporary society. As governments and people turn to quick fixes, what is often lost is the development of the safe space in which to experience the real. Intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP), for example, negates the necessity of both a safe space and a potential space. By regulating therapist behaviour (and removing any chance for spontaneous behaviour), ISTDP does not allow for ambiguity or play.41 Furthermore, the theory behind the technique is that effective treatment relies on addressing unprocessed rage or guilt, and treatment aims to have patients re-­ experience those feelings in the clinic. Although short-term therapies may offer immediate relief of a symptom, they ignore individuality and often focus on returning people to functioning within a symbolic that operates according to the master signifier. Instead, what is needed (especially in the treatment of psychosis) is a process that recognizes and values the diversity of experience, a process in which one seeks to attune to those experiences and help one bear them.

8.2.1 The Return of the Real (Dancing) Body One of the significant implications for psychoanalysis in general, one that relates to a change that other theorists and analysts often press for, is the return of the body to psychoanalysis.42 However, the call, given what 41  For more on ISTDP see Allan Abbass, Reaching Through Resistance: Advanced Psychotherapy Techniques (Kansas City, MO: Seven Leaves, 2015), 247. 42  Lombardi, for example, advocates for bringing the body into psychoanalysis because it is the resonances in the body that the analyst can (interpret and) mirror back to the analysand when speech fails. Lombardi, Body-Mind Dissociation.

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dance and the sinthome show, should be for bringing in the real, the real as it plays out within the body, allowing for  a therapeutic experience without having to rely (solely) on words. Lacan focuses on language because that is how we make sense of the world.43 When you come across something there is no language for, it can be confusing and overwhelming. We use language to create meaning and to make sense of things. Language provides context and, therefore, creates a boundary. Joyce found language wanting, so he created his own. Dance is not language, yet it, too, can help contain the real, a real that is also revealed outside of language and a real that the analyst may only recognize by attuning to the pulsations of the moving body, or De Cuyper and Dulsster’s dansêtre. We do not have to know the real (and in fact cannot know the real), but we need to know it is tolerable, that it will not completely overturn or destroy the symbolic. Being an analysand requires an ability (or abilities) not everyone has at the best of times, let alone when the real is impinging and in-sisting upon her: the analysand must delve in, understand, and integrate new information. If dance shows it is possible to provide a “safe” and contained access to the real, then psychoanalysis can learn from dance how to bring the real into the analytic clinic. In psychosis, a general differentiation/integration ability is missing. Dance provides the support for integrating the real yet avoiding merger with it, and an attunement to the real can help one comes to terms with that real as it manifests in the body. Rose ties the idea of integration to aesthetics and wonders if aesthetic experiences are

 Lacan also focuses on language because Joyce dealt with the intrusion of imposed speech through the “intermediary of writing.” Seminar 23, 79. It is not that Lacan does not recognize the real within Joyce’s works; it is merely, at least in my understanding, that Joyce used writing to reach this real, and Lacan’s concern in his seminar is what Joyce’s experience can tell us. This is also, in my view, Lacan’s fascination with Joyce: Joyce was somehow able to offer readers an idea of psychosis— allowing Lacan to use Joyce as a case study for articulating his theory. 43

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silent ways to integrate the disparate parts of a subject.44 Dance shows this is possible, not, however, by “integrating” disparate elements of a subject to create a “whole” and thereby merely repeating the master’s discourse and reinforcing phallic jouissance, but by integrating the excess real into a one’s subject and permitting the acknowledgement of a space that permits differentiation. The movement and rhythm (and their attendant affects), for example, of dance not only provide access to the real but also provide escape, through containment and the offering of alternative affective responses. It is this “escape” (into fantasy, by which I mean through the play of experiencing something in a new and unexpected way or in the way someone else might experience it) that potentially allows the sinthome to mediate within the imaginary in order to connect the psyche.45 By mediating within the imaginary, the sinthome avoids the concurrent belief in mastery that often accompanies the imaginary (as in the mirror stage) because this flight into fantasy (via dance, for example) also uses the real of the body without repressing that real and without that real becoming overwhelming. Thus, dance can provide a “supported  Between Couch and Piano, 130. Rose mentions responding to art, not just creating or participating in it. Although outside the scope of this book, there is a question related to dance about what it offers not just to the dancer but to the audience. One possibility is that the dance audience is a witness to the experience of the real. This is an idea that needs to be developed further; however, there is scant research into dance audiences. One of the few existing studies posits watching dance connects audiences to their “inner dancer[s].” Dee Reynolds, “‘Glitz and Glamour’ or Atomic Arrangement: What Do Dance Audiences Want?,” Dance Research 28, no. 1 (2010): 30, https:// doi.org/10.3366/drs.2010.0003. Another suggestion posits a relationship between audience engagement and “underlying neurophysiological events.” Corinne Jola, Shantel Ehrenberg, and Dee Reynolds, “The Experience of Watching Dance: Phenomenological-Neuroscience Duets.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (2012): 18, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11097-010-9191-x. Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds suggest that audiences have kinesthetic responses to watching dance: they imagine oneself dancing and engaging with the effort; alternatively, they may see dance as escape and have sensory and embodied responses to it. In other words, when we watch dance, we have individual responses as if we were dancing, we come to experience our own bodies in space, and these experiences “can be described as an affect.” Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds, “Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasure: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance,” Dance Research 42, no. 2 (2010): 72, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23266898. What is missing is research into the relationship between the dancer and the audience. Pite, for one, deliberately uses our non-elegant movements (trips, falls, falters) and turns them into dance; she suggests this creates a visceral response in audiences because “we see ourselves reflected there.” “Reflected Light,” 7:52. 45  This, then, is the escape from the overwhelming aspects of the real that parallels how reality acts as an escape from the real for the neurotic as Žižek describes. See How to Read Lacan, 57. 44

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psyche.” When you dance, all attention must be directed to the dance. Dance provides a focus that limits the mind’s ability to dissociate or take unbounded flight into the imaginary. Furthermore, dance creates via play. Kimerer L.  LaMothe hypothesizes, “to dance is not only to invite movement impulses, it is to play with the movements”; this then links dance  to creativity, a creativity that is first and foremost a creativity that affects each person individually as we learn how to manage, incorporate, and play with the sensations in the body, which shifts how we imagine ourselves to be.46 This aligns with Lacan’s understanding of the impossibility of wholeness. Van Haute writes of how the mere existence of the drives ensures that there can never be an internal harmony with the subject, and suffering is, therefore, not an issue of insufficient adaption to one’s environment because a subject cannot, by definition, ever adapt; therefore, psychoanalysis does not— cannot—“cure” by creating a whole self.47 Rather, the sense of “cure” in analysis is accepting and occupying a lack, not identifying with it; in other words, the “cure” is in accepting the lack of harmony and adaptation, recognizing there will always be a split between the subject and the drives.48 Inherent in dance is the acceptance of competing or conflicting motions (simultaneously), or a split within movements. To plié, for example, one needs to pull the body upwards while concurrently descending. Dance, by teaching the subject how to co-exist with the real (of the drives), can make other experiences of the real less unbearable. In this way, dance teaches resilience, resilience as understood by Lear, which requires hope in the face of loss.49 Dance teaches us how to hold the real, and because a  See LaMothe, Why We Dance, 6, 5. She also adds, “the movements we make make us.” Ibid., 4; italics in the original. 47  Against Adaptation, 287–88. 48  The use of “cure” here does not suggest Lacan believes psychoanalysis can eliminate people’s problems. Lacan never endorsed the idea of a psychoanalytic cure. Rather, as Turkle writes, “According to Lacan’s way of looking at things, if anything that a medically oriented person would call a cure comes at all in psychoanalysis, it comes par surcroît, as a kind of bonus or secondary gain.” Psychoanalytic Politics, 115. To put that another way: “For Lacan, the goal of psychoanalysis is the bringing to awareness of underlying contradictions (what Lacan calls ‘the truth of the subject’), which can never be confused with the acceptance of social norms.” Ibid., 145. 49  See Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Resilience here is not just being able to endure suffering while it lasts but also maintaining an ability (or the courage) to envision new possibilities beyond the suffering.

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dance always ends, it comes with an acknowledgment that things will not always be this way: the real can be experienced and lived with because it exists within a defined space and time, even as it confuses space and time. The dance ends; thereby, the experience of the real ends. If this experience ends in dance, maybe it will not always intrude into life either. This permits the cultivation of resilience: both the tolerance to endure the in-­ sistance of the real (momentarily) and the hope that the in-sistance will pass, as well as the ability to flourish when the threat is no longer there. Thus, dance has something to teach us about how to accept that the contradictory and paradoxical parts of the self all belong to the same psyche: this is the integration of the acceptance of, rather than the identification with, a lack. Bringing in the real and the acceptance of fragmentation therefore requires a different technique than what Lacan exercised when he kept patients waiting indefinitely or abruptly ended their sessions.50 The “bracketing” or “binding” or “containing” elements of psychoanalysis are not just a function of the other (the analyst) but of the environment: thus, the frame of psychoanalysis matters. Psychoanalysis for psychosis often “works” not just because of the consistency of the analyst and the binding of the analysand’s “real” but also because of the consistency of the situation that reduces the force of said real. It also means Lacan is only capturing part of the situation when he states the psychoanalyst not psychoanalysis is the sinthome. The two necessarily co-exist. The analyst must act to contain the real of the analysand by holding the analysand’s unfelt and unspoken affects, sensations, and thoughts, but the environment of psychoanalysis, with its regular meetings and consistent frame, also provides support by creating a dedicated time and place in which it is safe to feel those sensations and affects. Bollas writes, regarding the non-psychotic who experiences disappointment, that it is as if time is confused and the past, present, and future all meld together; he also describes how “something in the psychotic spatio-temporal calibration of

 Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics, 98. I am not, here, castigating Lacan for his technique. There is (good) justification for his technique, and for some (the high-functioning neurotics that comprised many of his patients) his technique may have been useful (and necessary).

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the self ’s requirements for functioning is derailed.”51 Thus, space-time becomes ever more important: the psychotic needs “a restoration of human temporality.”52 Lacan, however, did not always offer the environmental aspect of containment. He notoriously ended sessions whenever he wanted so as to prompt an analysand to recognize something of importance had just occurred, and he would keep analysands waiting for hours—if he saw them at all—so that they would not get too comfortable.53 Bollas suggests that different analytic schools correspond to techniques that work best for different types of patients, with Lacanian psychoanalysis best suited to the obsessional54 not the psychotic, despite Lacan’s attempt to understand psychosis theoretically.55 It may be that it is with regards to psychosis that psychoanalysis can learn most from dance. Dance allows one to experience affect, and “affect … represents an extremely deranging eruption of the real within

 When the Sun Bursts, 178–79. Engley describes the real as what “curves signification around it” without being a part of that signification, and McGowan elaborates on this, positing that for Lacan the “change in space and time [when near a black hole] is the real.” Engley and McGowan, “The Real,” 00:50:21, 00:52:00. In other words, the in-sistence of the real is fundamental for the forms of our (i.e., the human) pure intuition required for experience. Immanuel Kant argues that a pure intuition, consisting of space and time, exists and comprises what is left of an object if we remove our cognitions and our sensibilities of it. This can be accessed a priori and, in principle, makes a priori knowledge possible. This intuition (in addition to the understanding) is necessary for us to have experience. Transcendental Aesthetic (as in the second edition), in Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W.  Wood, (Cambridge: University Press, 1998), 172–92; Appendix on the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection through the Confusion of the Empirical Use of the Understanding with the Transcendental, in ibid., 366–83. The psychotic, however, gives us insight into this real, and how, in “possible worlds,” other pure intuitions could exist; however, given our restrictions of space and time, we cannot image what this experience would be like just as we cannot imagine the square root of negative one. 52  Bollas, When the Sun Bursts, 179. 53  Again, Lacan was not working only with psychotics; his variable sessions had an underlying theoretical foundation: “Lacan saw patients for varying amounts of time and sometimes for as little as ten minutes. His belief is strong that in analysis, nothing should be routine or predictable, and this includes the duration of a session.” Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics, 98. He ended sessions so to compel the analysand to consider what had just arisen. Nonetheless, these “unorthodox practices” also precipitated his resignation from the International Psychoanalytic Association. David-Menard, “Lacanians Against Lacan,” 86. 54  Catch Them Before They Fall (New York: Routledge, 2013), 110. 55  This is not to say that Lacan nor current Lacanian analysts do not treat psychosis; I only intend to point out that Lacanian theory (especially prior to Seminar 23) predominantly applies to neuroses. 51

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the symbolic,”56 suggesting that affect and the in-sistance of the real within psychosis are closely linked. Although some theorists argue Lacan does not have a fully development theory of affects,57 I would argue he does, one deeply embedded in this theory of the structure of the psyche, particularly in his understanding of the real: affects are irruptions of the real that we attempt to express via the symbolic. Thus, affects have an important role in the psyche, and as affects are essential to the arts, psychoanalysis can gain by incorporating elements of the arts into its practice. Slochower supports the idea of psychoanalytic technique needing to incorporate learnings from the arts when he names the task of psychoanalysis as “to approximate that affect which art produces, [to] ‘imitate’ … the vibrations and oscillation it sets in motion by the springs of the artist’s creativity.”58 It is through creation—inherent in dance, and in art—that an analyst can work with someone who cannot articulate a symptom, when not everything has been repressed (as opposed to foreclosed) or can be ameliorated by “remembering, repeating, and working through.”59

8.2.2 Silencing the Voice Additionally, we can now see Lacan’s concept of the sinthome as outside the function of writing and language; therefore, the voice isn’t the only element one needs to pay attention to in the clinic. Joyce’s use of words differs from the dialectical speech of everyday; it is a writing that relies on the voice, which Mladen Dolar explains belong neither to language nor  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 6: Desire and Its Interpretation, trans. Cormac Gallagher, 97, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-06-Desire-and-itsinterpretation.pdf. 57  For example, Jean Laplanche argues that Lacan rejects affect as it is subsumed by representation. The Unconscious and the Id (London: Rebus, 1999), 18. 58  “Psychoanalysis and Art: Their Body Language,” 3. 59  Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 12, (1911–1913): Case History of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, ed. and trans. by James Strachey and Anna Freud, 145–56 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1950). 56

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to the body yet is common to both.60 The voice, however, includes silence because between the voice and sound, there is the voice that is “isolated from any particular sensory modality and semantic field.”61 Although this is an early version of the voice for Lacan, prior to its connection to objet a, it is still relevant for my argument because this understanding of the voice is the voice as Lacan initially spoke of it: the voice in psychosis, the voice that reveals a presence via absence, the voice that reveals a real because of what is present in its absence. Joyce, in breaking down language, was not using speech and the semantic field, but the silence between words and the metonymic properties of speech to create a language to give voice to the unspeakable.62 This suggests that language specifically is not a requirement of the sinthome; rather, the sinthome requires some aspect of (or way to tie to) the symbolic; what is the missing component in psychosis is the containment and limiting ability of the symbolic as it bears on the real (i.e., the imaginary’s leave-taking, leaves the real pouring forth into the symbolic and impinging upon the subject subject). Furthermore, and to tie silence and the voice to the sinthome and feminine jouissance, I want to note that Lacan associates the voice (and, therefore, silence) with objet a, making it “an area of analytic impossibility.”63 But, I might add, an area of analytic impossibility that is essential for possibility. Dance is speechless. It is silent; therefore, it is related to the voice that is divorced from any acoustic element or linguistic structure. McCarren compares the silence in dance to that of the hysteric,64 yet the comparison  A Voice, 73.  Darian Leader, “Psychoanalysis and the Voice,” The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research Web Journal 16 (2005): 6, https://cfar.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/voice.pdf. 62  Bollas writes that in schizophrenia, “the past is a dream, and the self does not want to remember it or speak it because this turns the dream into a nightmare.” Catch Them, 78. Speech is imposed on the psychotic, it is not used by the psychotic; rather, the voice becomes the way to “make language possible.” Boucher, “Joyce: Lacan’s Sphinx,” 140. For an idea of how Joyce’s uses silence, see, for example, Laurent Milesi, “In the Beginning Was the Nil: The ‘Eloquence of Silence’ in Finnegans Wake,” in James Joyce’s Silences, ed. Jolanta Wawrzycka and Serenella Zanotti, 61–78 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). 63  Alice Lagaay, “Between Sound and Silence: Voice in the History of Psychoanalysis,” e‑pisteme 1, no. 1 (2008): 60, https://research.ncl.ac.uk/e-pisteme/issues/issue01/contents/e-pisteme%20 Vol.%201(1)%20-%20Alice%20Lagaay%20(Full%20Text).pdf. 64  Dance Pathologies, 38. 60 61

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tends to undermine dance as a topic of philosophical and psychological concern despite McCarren’s penetrating observation that this silence is a chosen silence and can, therefore, “validat[e] the mute expressiveness of the body.”65 Yet, it is this chosen silence that provides an important connection to Lacan because he, in a way, sees Joyce as having chosen a silence in that he chose not to speak (Irish) Gaelic.66 Thus, if Joyce relies on the real of speech that includes silence, then silence is not always pathological (although it is an element of the real that can lead to psychopathology if not bound). Although Joyce’s non-speech is not silence, it does bear a relationship to silence. Jacques-Alain Miller notes how resonance is a metonymic element of speech for Lacan and poetry relies on resonance; thus, poetry is related to silence because resonance is not speech yet “it makes heard.”67 The silence of poetry, thus, is related to the silence of both the dancer and the hysteric in that it’s a silence that has physical effect: it is a type of silence connected to the body.68 For Lacan, Joyce’s writing is efficacious for him because of its reliance on the phonation of the voice that manifests in the body and touches on the real. The sinthomic connection Joyce makes between the elements of the psyche illustrates that silence is not destined to be pathological; it is purely a recognition that something exists beyond the symbolic. In relation to dance this may explain why there are so many contradictory interpretations of dance as an art: each adds meanings where none exists because sitting in the space of a silence (or the space of uncertainty) is too difficult for some. Dance offers us the idea of a non-linguistic, non-speaking version of Joyce’s sinthome, bolstered by the added element of teaching: dance teaches one to play (whereas Joyce shows he can play with the real—as his works rely upon the real effects of the material elements embedded in words, speech, and the symbolic—without guidance). Dance does not require speech, nor even sound, yet is intimately connected to the real,  Dance Pathologies, 17.  Seminar 23, 114; Lacan is pointing out that despite being Irish, Joyce spoke English, not Irish, and did not understand Irish. 67  “The Written in Speech,” Courtil Papers 12 (2003): 14. 68  Mladen Dolar’s conceptualization of silence as “uncanny” and “like death” is relevant here: silence resonates in the body yet contrasts the voice as “the first sign of life.” A Voice, 14. 65 66

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for example, in its reliance on rhythm. If we think of Aristotle’s definition of dance as what “imitates character, emotion, and action by rhythmical movement,”69 we see the prominence of rhythm within dance rather than elements that would fit more naturally within the symbolic. Lacanian theory conveys the non-essential nature of speech (as an act) when Lacan asserts, “I speak with my body.”70 Although the parlêtre is associated with phallic jouissance, the concept of the parlêtre encompasses both the symbolic words that permit the creation of meaning (alongside the resulting belief in an ability to develop a mastery over the body) and the elements of the real that exist outside of meaning and have effects on/ in the body. In other words, Lacan’s coins the term parlêtre to indicate how speech and the body—whether the body as spoken or speech as embodied—rely on each other. Dance, then, is speech in the sense that it, too, contains a real and, therefore, aligns with the voice that resides in a gap itself 71 and reveals an unknown knowledge. The movement in dance aligns with the movement of suspension and retreat of the voice. It showcases the gaps in the symbolic, gaps that support the symbolic.72 Speech—at least verbalized speech—is not always possible for someone who is psychotic nor, even, for others who due to trauma, for example, are confronted with the limits of the symbolic; however, if “I speak with my body,”73 then the speech Lacan deems necessary for psychoanalysis does not necessarily need to be verbal. I have previously argued that silence has benefits and may even provide an indirect access to a thing-in-­ itself, or for the purposes of my argument here, an individual not preoccupied with the ideal ego.74 Although verbal speech has its  Poetics, translated by S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang: 1961), 50.  Seminar 19, 119. 71  “Voice deserves to be inscribed as a third term between the function of speech and the field of language.” Jacques-Alain Miller, “Jacques Lacan and the Voice,” in The Later Lacan: An Introduction, ed. Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), 140. 72  Todd McGowen argues that it is the imaginary that forces us to see what is present in the symbolic rather than to see the gaps that hold the symbolic together; he encourages us to consider the “role absence plays in forming the symbolic structure.” Ryan Engley and Todd McGowen, “Symbolic Order,” in Why Theory, September 6, 2020, podcast, 00:17:01. This then ties to the real being what is present in its absence. 73  Seminar 19, 119. 74  “Silent Spaces: Allowing Objects to Talk,” Open Philosophy 2, no. 1 (2019): 347–56. https://doi. org/10.1515/opphil-2019-0028. 69 70

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place—psychoanalysis is the “talking cure” after all—the senses of safety, of trust, and of being seen are what the psychotic needs first.75 The psychotic fears annihilation. The real that intrudes not only disrupts the symbolic and imaginary but also threatens to cause a permanent rift among them. The treatment of psychosis thus requires addressing this loss of the imaginary (body) and the “defences employed … against the fantasy of annihilation.”76 In psychosis, there is a consistent fear the analyst (or other) will take over or enter the analysand. Thus, the necessary maintenance or creation of boundaries: the “the schizophrenic has to be known without being destroyed.”77 The sense of safety and the sense of being seen are, however, primarily felt senses. An analyst may say, “I understand” or “I see you,”78 but unless and until an analysand feels this, the words are useless. In trying to express our inner lives, each of us learns how sometimes language is a hindrance: people use words to rationalize their repetitious behaviours even though these ways of being are causing pain or problems in their lives. People also use words to divert attention from what is really important. An analysand may speak of something in an attempt to avoid speaking of feelings, choosing to philosophize instead, or an analysand may speak purely to fill the space of an uncomfortable (uncanny) silence.79  This is my understanding after having read the work of multiple analysts who work with patients experiencing psychosis. Bollas writes of how in order to avert a psychotic break, the patient needs a sense of trust in the analyst. Catch Them, 33. Nancy McWilliams emphasis the role of safety. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioners Guide (New York: Guilford, 2004), 76. Being seen and validated are inherent in all psychanalytic treatments, but Bollas is the one who best emphasizes (for me) how this is true for the psychotic too; see, for example, his brief reminiscence of a patient, Mark. When the Sun Bursts, 175. 76  Bollas, When the Sun Bursts, 172. 77  R. D. Laing, The Divided Self, 34. 78  These are common phrases of validation in various psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic “schools,” although Lacan likely would not endorse anything so direct. Additionally, the felt sense is important, and that felt sense only occurs within relationship. Mitchell writes of the “problem” of self-analysis (which has a relationship to ego-psychology, a model Lacan takes issue with), which is distinct from psychoanalysis with another person: the felt sense of another’s participation is missing. Hope and Dread, 113. That participation, I want to stress, must be of attunement and curiosity, not rote statements or specific instructions. This, I suspect, is why there is a difference between dance practised as an art in the company of others and social dancing. 79  Ed Pluth and Cindy Zeiher suggest the uncanny quality of silence is the silence used within analysis and corresponds to the silence of the silence analyst. On Silence: Holding the Voice Hostage (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 42. 75

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Words are resistances, and we use them to deny, to defend, and to deflect; words can be obfuscatory. Accepting and employing silence, the silence of the (real in the) body, allows the analyst to circumvent speech, which can thereby enhance the recognition of the analysand’s inner word and contribute to the necessary safe environment. Dance shows us a way to provide “safe” and contained access to the real by working with the body and the real outside of speech. Despite this requirement of and  respect for silence, my argument nonetheless challenges one of the basic notions of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the silent analyst.80 If the analyst is to be the sinthome,81 even if the analyst, as I argue, is only part of the sinthome, then the analyst must actively be that sinthome. This is especially true in any attempts to prevent psychosis: the analyst must mirror the (pre)psychotic and in the process, teach him to be his own sinthome. The analyst must teach play and model containment and the holding of paradox, not just listen to the analysand. Only once the analysand has learned to take on some of these tasks himself can the analyst then remain more silent. At the same time, however, they analyst can use silence to attune to the psychotic’s inner world if that is its explicit purpose, especially because if the pre-psychotic fears merger, then talking too much risk precipitating the psychotic break. The analyst must be confident that what she says won’t be taken as another intrusion. Bollas, in treating one of his analysands, spent the better part of the first year in silence developing “shared emotional experiences” (albeit “nascent”).82 He posits his analysand, when she spoke, did not realize she was speaking aloud. The time spent in silence with her allowed her to come to understand he would not intrude on her (as the real, to use Lacan’s word, had); it provided her with the safety to see that she could hear without hearing voices and see

 Lacanian psychoanalysis is characterized (or stereotyped) by this, but it is important to note that Lacan, himself, was not always silent. 81  Seminar 23, 116. 82  When the Sun Bursts, 66–70. 80

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­ ithout hallucinating. The silence here, however, belongs to the (psyw chotic) analysand, not to the analyst, just as the silence belongs to the dancer.83 Silence, in its different forms and uses in the clinic, then illustrates a paradox itself in that it is both necessary and dangerous. It is one example of how the analyst can teach the analysand how to accept seeming incongruencies as simultaneously true and nestled within each other. With the psychotic, this process is merely an extension of what Jessica Benjamin describes as the process of “recognition and destruction” that occurs within psychoanalysis all the time. She writes of how this paradoxical process of intersubjectivity alongside the intrapsychic entails “the effort to share the productions of fantasy” and how this sharing “changes the status of fantasy itself, moving from inner reality to intersubjective communication.”84 Although she does not write of silence, her argument shows that silence (at times) is necessary for this process: it may be that for someone at risk of psychosis, the process of a shared communication is essential, as Benjamin states; however, the methods of psychoanalysis need to acknowledge and foreground the real and how this focus on the real may change the function of silence. I want to emphasize that I am not being dictatorial here; I’m not telling psychoanalysts what they must do; rather I am raising questions and encouraging us to re-evaluate what we think we know, so that we never remain complacent or assume all analysands/others are the same—when we become too comfortable, we risk missing out on what might arise unexpectedly. The relevance to Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular—although this can also apply to general psychoanalytic practice—is that psychoanalysis is not entirely dependent on speech or working through for its efficacy. Not everyone believes a sinthome can occur without the “working through” of the symptom. Judith Herman, for example, writes of how  This silence is a silence that is very different from the silence Pluth and Zeiher see within the Lacanian perspective on the apophatic discourse, the silence that aims to find the point of silence that is supposed to exist beyond discourse, beyond language, the silence that is envisioned to overcome castration. On Silence, 6–29. That silence demands something—it is a silence “available only within language.” Ibid., 21. Silence in that realm would be akin to desiring a sinthome. The silence I refer to here is a silence that must exist in order to let the analysand “speak.” 84  “Recognition and Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity,” in Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition, ed. Stephen A.  Mitchell and Lewis Aron (New York: Routledge, 1999), 198. 83

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recovery from trauma always requires the deliberate re-experience of traumatic memories.85 Yet, for the psychotic, any “symptom” is only revealing a foreclosure; thus, that symptom may not be available for working through. Dance however, stiches together the psyche without having to gain knowledge of the attendant aspects of a symptom or even of the aspects of the real that are threatening to overwhelm someone. Whereas Lacanian psychoanalysis as it is commonly understood cannot help those who cannot articulate the symptom, dance offers ideas of how a sinthome can develop even in absence of words. Spending the time to attune to what arises in the consulting room as it is articulated, not in words, but in the pulsations, vibrations, and resonances of the (often) silent analysand, can create a shared and safe space for other work.

8.2.3 Mirroring/Divisions Being the mirror, I have argued, is a significant part of attuning to the analysand’s non-verbal communications.86 Freud and (to a degree) Lacan believe the analyst to be a blank screen, in essence, the “empty” mirror; however, the mirror does not have to be empty, and one can form a relationship with the image in the mirror, one that is not as antagonistic as in the mirror stage. Both the mirror in the dance and the mirror of the analyst and can offer a new experience of the mirror and a new medium for creating a space for play. If attuned to the analysand, the analyst becomes a mirror, presenting back (reflecting) to the analysand an image of himself. This idea’s not new: often an analyst will use the same words as the analysand or call attention to a slip or comment an analysand makes unconsciously, believing the words an analysand uses contain pathways to the unconscious. There is, however, an implication of this that is not always recognized: the analyst will see the analysand as they are, “good, “bad,” etc., and by bringing these elements to consciousness,  Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 25. 86  Similar to the problems I comment on about the silent Lacanian, there is a concurrent issue of the mirror in Lacanian analysis. Lacan (and Freud) often used their patients to assess their ideas as worthy—they used the patients as the mirrors for themselves rather than becoming the mirror for their patients as is needed when working with psychosis. 85

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the analyst can help the analysand see her internal fragmentation. For example, if an analysand only recognizes herself as “bad” and accepts the negative projections of others, the analyst has a broader view and can see the “good” parts of the analysand as well—those parts that the analyst cannot mirror linguistically because the analysand does not speak of these parts, or even realize they exist—by taking the time to attune to the inner world of the analysand and accepting the sensations of the analysand as they occur within the analyst. Perhaps, then, the radical reformulation of love that Leo Bersani writes we need (via psychoanalysis), the one grounded in “impersonal narcissism,” is to see someone as they are, period.87 So that “love” means (to the person “loved”) that someone truly sees me. Most people see others as they imagine others to be—this is the self as seen in Lacan’s mirror stage: the self as I imagine myself to be. Truly seeing someone requires a disinterested reflection. Truly seeing someone is akin to the reflection of the mirror in dance, the reflection that shows the bodily position without commenting on it. Thus, Bersani’s “impersonal narcissism” is “impersonal” because it is not an image of the self that is anything more than seen. It is not judged, it is not appreciated, it is not fantasized about: the analyst has no motive, but just “sees” the (pre-­ psychotic) analysand as she is, fragmented, chaotic, and worthy of attention. Analysis cannot change anything,88 but what it can do is reveal what is, thereby shifting the relationship to our symptoms. Like the mirror in dance, analysis cannot change the past or who someone is; it can, however, lay bare what we cannot see and, therefore, cannot acknowledge about ourselves. And, paradoxically, laying that bare, changes not just the analysand, but also the analyst. 87  Bersani and Phillips, intimacies, 56. I suspect Bersani would disagree. His project is to argue for bringing narcissism back into love, so that we can acknowledge the love of the other (as a “potential self ”) is self-love. Ibid., 124. I, however, think to see someone as a “potential self ” requires that I see the person at that person is in his similarities to me, the similarities that are not incidentals but indicative of our humanness. 88  This may be a surprising comment to some who enter therapy expecting to be “cured,” but Lacan and Freud specifically focus on uncovering the unconscious and how that informs the present, how we respond to events in the present based on unconscious motivations informed by the past. Therefore, analysis cannot change anything—the past cannot be changed—analysis can, however, help someone see these unconscious motivations, and thereby an analysand can see things differently (or act differently) in the present by developing a new relationship to the past (or by relegating the past to the past).

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This process of mirroring the unseen aspects of the analysand is not easy and requires the analyst to accept division within himself so that the feelings that arise in analysis can be contained: Lombardi writes, “Similarly”—and here he is referencing the film Alien—“the analyst who is not prepared to cognize as her own the new feeling that is being activated by the analytic relationship is in danger of being the object of an alienating laceration on the part of her sensations.”89 In other words, when fully attuned to the analysand, an analyst will experience the analysand’s sensations, the same sensations that threaten to overwhelm the analysand. The analyst must recognize the sensations felt within him are not just the analysand’s but also belong to the analyst. The analyst must own them in the sense that these sensations—these remnants of the real—can only be felt by him if those sensations, too, are a part of him and are not located only in the analysand.90 Lombardi details how “these sensations and reactions will arise even outside of the clinic, so the analyst must consciously and continuously work through them.91 In other words, this must be an active process for the analyst. The analyst must actively support the creation of a sinthome just as a dancer is actively supported while learning to dance. Thus, the relationship with the psychoanalyst—and that psychoanalysis occurs in relationship—matters. Lacan declares, “For a circle to be thinkable, we have to flesh it out, that is, we have to give it consistency. We have to imagine that it is supported by something physical. Moreover, this is where we meet the following—only the body can be pondered.”92 Thus, the analyst supports the formation of the sinthome by offering the physical support, or the apparatus, for the formation of the sinthome.  Mind-Body Dissociation, 175. Zupančič also comments on Alien; writing specifically on Alien 3, she argues the suicide depicted in that film is a sacrifice that only strengthens the big Other and is thereby distinct from the “death” of the ethical act. Ethics of the Real, 83–85. 90  Because the analyst must feel (and own) these sensations, the analyst cannot just know theory but must be attuned to his own experience of the real; therefore, attuning to the countertransference involves more than just attending to thoughts and words. Additionally, the need to be able to attune to experiences of the real also provides justification for the requirement of being an analysand before an analyst, a requirement that remains in psychoanalytic training establishments despite its erasure from psychoanalytic psychotherapy training programs. 91  Mind-Body Dissociation, 36–37. 92  Seminar 23, 68. 89

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The analysand’s transferences to the analyst are not just feelings; they also include bodily sensations: the analyst must contain and hold these sensations until such time as the analysand is ready to reclaim them. Laing writes of how for the (potential) psychotic “external events no longer affect him in the same way as they do others: it is not that they affect him less; on the contrary, frequently they affect him more. It is frequently not the case that he is becoming ‘indifferent’ and ‘withdrawn.’ It may, however, be that the world of his experience comes to be one he can no longer share with other people.”93 Attuning, then, to that experience and approaching it with curiosity as if it were shareable with the psychotic becomes important for the creation of the sinthome. Jacques-Alain Miller explains how “all that analysis can do is to accord to the pulsation of the speaking body in order to insinuate itself into the symptom. When one analyses the unconscious, the meaning of interpretation is the truth. When one analyses the speaking body, the meaning of interpretation is jouissance.”94 Then, when one analyses the dansêtre,95 one analyses the real of that speaking body, and the (non)meaning of interpretation is the other jouissance, feminine jouissance.96 The analyst must allow the analysand to understand or accept the real of her drives as jouissance, even if, as Chiesa writes, that means accepting the “pleasure in pain”97 as the drives include the death drive. And that involves accepting the real as it arises, or in the case of the psychotic, as it in-sists in reality, even as it threatens annihilation.

 The Divided Self, 43.  “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body,” trans. A. R. Price, paper presented at the 9th Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis Congress, Paris, France, April 2014, para. 34, https:// wapol.org/en/articulos/Template.asp?intTipoPagina=4&intPublicacion=13&intEdicion=9&intId iomaPublicacion=2&intArticulo=2742&intIdiomaArticulo=2. 95  De Cuyper and Dulsster, “The Dancing Being.” 96  If the parlêtre is tied to phallic jouissance, the dansêtre permits feminine jouissance. 97  Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007), 184. This pleasure in pain also incorporates the fact that the sinthome requires one to remain true to one’s desire but that desire risks annihilation; for the neurotic it incorporates the fact that with objet a at the centre of the knot, trying to fill the lack that is desire, one can only remain true to desire if one incorporates the full force of the real, which is also the pain of the analysand in the analyst’s discourse. 93 94

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8.2.4 Drawing on Tradition One can also see psychoanalysis, if we focus on play from Winnicott through Lacan to the present day, as a more formal way to bring to people what most cultures have always known: the value of play for learning and existing within a culture subsumed under a primordial signifier. Psychoanalysis may formulize and formalize these traditional ideas, but the element of play found in dance and other cultural traditions, has always been valued as an important part of one’s development. Therefore, psychoanalysis is not esoteric or “unreal,” but an ontological practice that is deeply connected to the real. In the world wherein we’re often told we can be anyone we want or become anything we want, we lose boundaries. Dance, culturally, has provided people with a like-minded group and taught people their place in society. For example, communities of Indigenous people98 often have traditional dances that split along gendered lines. Although the exact nature of these dances, like other gender norms, is changing, the split served a purpose. In one example, girls or boys would learn specific dances that they performed as they reached adulthood: dance was part of a ritual “initiation” to welcome one to the group. Today, in many cultures and communities of Indigenous people, dance is still an essential part of ceremonies that mark transitions; these dances are not always split along gender lines, but they still offer welcome and connection. When society now tells us to find our own place, we can end up unmoored. Dance as a sinthome, although not the same, can help one who has lost the sense of connection the world and reality to see that she belongs (in the world, as a part of humanity) and that she is not alone as her experience is reflected in others and held within the group.

 By Indigenous people, I’m referring to the extant groups that pre-existed colonialism and that continue to live together or participate in shared cultural traditions. In a beautiful example of how we fail to shift the symbolic (see Chap. 9, specifically Sect. 9.2, “Shifting” the Symbolic), choosing a term with which to refer to these groups is difficult because different people use different language, and we change the accepted language often. “Indigenous peoples” is meant to cover those people that others refer to as First Peoples, Natives, Aboriginals, etc. I’m using “Indigenous peoples” because it broadly encompasses the many different communities from across the globe, and the communities in which dance plays this role are not confined to a single geographic location. 98

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Furthermore, although dance has historically  also been used for the other, for example, when slaves were forced to dance for their owners’ entertainment on the planation or to increase their value on the auction block, that same (forced) dance often led to new relationships to dance that strengthened the community and by extension those within it. Dance as oppression was transformed into or reclaimed as a means of resistance.99 In other words, the forced relationship to dance was reconfigured in the same way the ethical subject’s relation to the real is reconfigured through the sinthome. Dance’s connection to play and distance from the language of the symbolic is what allowed for this reclamation of dance. Slave owners may have desired for a slave to dance and show off his strength and virility (in order to increase the owner’s position in society or wealth), but you can’t control dance that way because when you dance, you learn to make the movements your own. Although dancing (in this example) may have started with one purpose in mind, dancers played with the dance, (and, therefore, its purposes), mirroring their (real) experiences and containing within the dance their histories, thereby creating something new (new styles, new relationships to one’s situation, etc.). Consequently, this example isn’t an example of how dance can be co-opted into the master’s discourse but of how dance is a powerful way to change our relationships, and it (maybe) encapsulates why it is dance is well-situated to help one develop a sinthome. In this connection to the psychoanalytic processes of the sinthome, then, this example of dance can help us see how psychoanalysis is not only built on the past but also has embedded within it processes that can reconfigure our relationships and help us find that connection to humanity that reminds us we have a place in the world.

 See, for example, Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), among other works of his, for an idea of how within the “object” (of oppression) there is a surplus that permits objection/objectification, which can thereby transform it into an object of resistance.

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8.3 Implications for Dance Looking at dance using Lacanian concepts and Lacan’s idea of the sinthome—and using dance studies to explore Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—does not just offer new insights for psychoanalysis but also for dance. Dance, seen as a sinthomic process that creates connections between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, encourages a reconceptualization of dance, of where it fits among the arts, and of its aesthetic value.

8.3.1 Dance as an Art The biggest implication may be for dance theory. The view of dance as “ineffable”100 is no longer tenable on my argument, although its distance from language is a necessary part of its art. By seeing dance and its relation to the Lacanian structural components of the psyche, there is now a language for talking about dance (as a concept not only as regards a specific performance), even if that language is not as precise as one might like. This does not mean dance is communication; dance is still (silent) movement bound within space and time, yet dance does express something, something that changes with each dancer, but something everyone can relate to and therefore something one can communication about: it expresses elements of the real in a manageable way, limiting those elements and playing with them to reduce their effects by bringing all elements of the psyche (and the paradoxes those engenders), but particularly the real, to the fore. In dance’s necessary connection the real there will always be something within dance that escape language, yet the real and dance can both be talked about within the symbolic; nonetheless the symbolic will always fail to fully account for both. Dance, therefore, rightfully belongs within the arts and can—and should—receive the same attention the other arts receive. Dance can move beyond its marginal status because while all the arts may have the

 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance (London: Dance Books, 1996), 50.

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same possibilities for being used as a sinthome,101 none of the other arts inherently contain the elements that exist within dance purely by definition: the intertwining of the imaginary, symbolic, and real through a process that mirrors one’s experience, limiting the real while teaching one to play with that real. This intertwining of the elements of the psyche that uses the body to contact the real thereby allows one at risk of psychosis to inhabit the potential (middle) space between the imaginary and real that holds the paradox of pleasure and fear.

8.3.2 Dance and Aesthetics If we think more broadly, then we see dance takes the place of the missing element of the psyche within the arts. Most arts operate aesthetically by employing the symbolic or the imaginary. They aim to reach their audiences through the ways that we come to make meaning in the world. Yet, if aesthetics is perception by the senses, then dance fits within aesthetics because dance relies on the real (often alongside the symbolic and imaginary). Dance doesn’t challenge the traditional (or philosophical) ideas of aesthetics but does add to them by introducing the concept of the real as a part of art: dance fits with the other arts by supplying the final component of the psyche, the component we (mostly) ignore. At the same time, however, dance does challenge our ideas of aesthetics: if aesthetics as a field generally looks at how one fixes temporal experience in spatial form, then dance operates differently from other art forms to a degree: it doesn’t “fix” anything (in either the psychoanalytic or temporal/spatial sense). Furthermore, since dance incorporates all elements of the psyche (even if unconsciously), dance therefore also encompasses humanity or what it means to be not just the subject of an analytic discourse that Lacan  Jacques-Alain Miller, for example, asks readers to consider “whether music, painting, the fine arts, have their Joyce.” “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body,” para. 29. It maybe that anything can be a sinthome. I’m sure we all know (of ) someone who works tirelessly in order to avoid any feelings whatsoever. This person, too, would seem to be “coping” in reality. The question then becomes, why the arts? Further discussion is needed, but I suspect it has to do with the imaginative capabilities of the arts. Those coping via work, for example, turn their bodies into possessions (or erase their bodies) and focus on their minds. This is the distinction I made earlier between merely existing rather than effectively living. 101

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characterizes as the being that “speaks without knowing it,”102 but also an individual subject. Dance is not more “animal” than the other arts or merely communication via metaphor, for example;103 its value is that it takes who we are and elevates it to an art—strengthening those bonds that keep us human. It is something beautiful that at its core reflects who we are—all of who we are, including our internal paradoxes and conflicts—and its reflection of the entirety of the subject (and the psyche) forces a confrontation with this real in a marked way that demonstrates and reveals dance can operate as a sinthome. The beauty of dance then, and its aesthetic value, can be found not in its lines or visual appeal (those elements that we use to privilege the white dancing body, for example) but in dance’s connection to the real: the dancer, while dancing, experiences that which scares us, which threatens to overwhelm us, and for which we have no words. When watching dance, we therefore see in this “other”— the dancer—this encounter with the real as it is turned into something manageable (and beautiful).

8.3.3 Dancing an Embodied Sinthome Dance cannot be a symptom for the psychotic because that would mean it relates to the name-of-the-father or the primordial metaphor, yet the psychotic has foreclosed on that metaphor. Dance can nonetheless help knit a sinthome. A sinthome “is what is singular to each individual,”104 and therefore, the sinthome does not rely on metaphor. Dance, likewise, does not rely on a primordial metaphor that structures the symbolic, yet it can work to connect the psyche and bring about a new relationship between reality and the subject. The subject of the dance, then, can learn to exist in reality, the world, without the expectation of an attendant mastery; this is not an adaptation to the world, but an acceptance—and embracing—of the real within reality.  Seminar 19, 119.  Rohman, Choreographies of the Living; Trevor Whittock, “The Role of Metaphor in Dance,” British Journal of Aesthetics 32, no. 3 (July 1992): 242–49, https://doi.org/10.1093/ bjaesthetics/32.3.242. 104  Lacan, “Joyce the Symptom,” 147. 102 103

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What my look at dance adds to Lacan’s seminar on the sinthome is a detailed view of the sinthome’s processes. By eschewing the concept of subject-supposed-to-know (by circumventing the demand for understanding or communication that accompanies language), dance shows more clearly how the sinthome operates within the body to establish an intertwined relationship among the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. In other words, dance embodies the sinthome or shows how the sinthome is an embodied sinthome. My argument also suggests not just that dance can help someone create a sinthome, but that dance is that sinthome: it is the process—terminable and interminable—of confronting the real. Joyce’s couldn’t write one book and quit. (Finnegans Wake took over a decade to complete and followed a substantial number of earlier publications.) Fosse didn’t just dance once and decide all was well. One does not create a sinthome then go on living unperturbed by the real. One consistently works at this sinthomic connection. Analysis has been said to be terminable and interminable. Although others offer different understandings of this, my gloss on this idea is related to my arguments about the psychoanalytic act. The process of analysis ends when the analysand stops attending analysis. Yet the process never ends because the end is also when the analysand becomes the analyst. Outside of the obviously connections (i.e., when Lacan’s analysands were given the go-ahead to practise as analysts), what this means is that the physical aspects of analysis end—the consistent meetings, etc.—but the psychic processes never end. Rather than having an analyst to “interpret” one’s actions, one comes to be her own analyst as she consistently comes to recognize on her own the moments wherein she repeats a past behaviour or the moments she returns to her characteristic defences. Thus, if one is forever experiencing the real as it in-sists upon the psyche, threatening to untie its knot, then the sinthomic processes cannot end. While a dance may end, the dancer will dance again, and as she dances, she will begin to absorb that which is in dance but exists beyond it. The relationship to play is thus of the utmost importance. John Joseph Martin writes of dance both as play and performance and suggests play is not wasteful: “in play, aside from its immediate satisfactions, the child learns skills and adaptations, both physical and emotional, which develop

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enormously his capacity for meeting the problems of practical life.”105 In other words, play is helpful and healing. The idea of dance as healing, therefore, is not new. But the idea of dance as a sinthome is a different concept. Dance does not heal or create a wholeness wherein something was lacking (nor do we learn to adapt to something external); dance, rather, through its play with the real, allows one to exist with the fatherless psyche, de-centring the psyche, so that one has a different relationship to all its contradictions and complexities. Neither the sinthome nor dance heals in the sense of filling, undoing, or covering over a psychic hole any more than either can heal a physical malady. Rather, dance and the sinthome permit existence despite those holes and allow one to come to terms with them, so one is not constantly overwhelmed by reality (or those things we can’t assimilate into reality).

8.3.4 Dance’s Humanity There are a multitude of theories regarding what dance is, as I’ve mentioned, but if we see dance as a sinthome, then what dance is, is a way to express elements of the real in a manageable way, limiting them and playing with them to reduce their potentially overwhelming effects and helping us to create a new relationship to our experience and a new understanding of our ontology. If dance can act as a process to keep the psyche connected, then it is possible theory often avoids looking to dance because looking at dance reveals a “wound”;106 dance forefronts something—the real—that we recognize but cannot adequately articulate, acting “as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation.”107 In other words, any attempts to think about, theorize about, speak about, and write about  The Dance in Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Co., 1989), 11.  Ryan Engley and Todd McGowen, “Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics,” in Why Theory, podcast, January 7, 2020, podcast, 00:39:29. Engley and McGowan are referring to audience reactions to James Cameron’s Titanic and how the “aesthetic quibbles” (39:08) refuse the “fundamental confrontation that the film is asking us to have” (00:39:20) and are “a way of rejecting the wound of art” (00:39:28); they are not linking this to dance. 107  This disturbance is the disturbance of the object voice that Dolar seeks and that returns to us in psychoanalysis as “the inverted form of our message … which was created from a pure voice, ex nihilio.” A Voice, 4, 161. 105 106

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dance forces us, just as it forces the dancer and the audience, into a confrontation with the real. Given this scenario, the lack of consistency or the fragmentation within dance studies reveals itself as a defence against the encounter with the real.108 But dance itself is a powerful way to confront the real and accept the unknown. Lacan says the site of the sinthome matters, that it must be at the site of the rupture. As seen in Joyce’s works or even in Schreber’s case, the real, rather than being restrained by the symbolic law (the-name-of-the-father) erupts and pours forth into the symbolic, breaking down the logic of the symbolic and, thereby, evincing its existence through fragmented sentences, neologisms, etc. The focus on the symbolic effects, however, discounts that psychosis is also characterized by depersonalization and the absence of feeling one is or has a body—in other words, the real infringes on the imaginary as well. As I have argued, Joyce’s sinthome relied on the real and its effects in the body; therefore, in knotting his sinthome, he maintained the connections among the elements of his psyche by tying the real to the imaginary that threatened to slip away, only thereby keeping the symbolic intact or, as Lacan describes it, by weaving a text with knots.109 Dancers, like Joyce, weave their own imaginary worlds;110 therefore, the dancer who weaves his own world may have a possibility of fashioning a sinthome and of existing within the symbolic outside of the phallic function. Dance takes us beyond phallic jouissance in that in dance “we are always exceeded by that work, that it is always in excess of our comprehension, and this is its joy and its terror.”111 Dance, therefore, epitomizes Zupančič’s understanding of the death drive of the “excess of  The fragmentation within dance theory is another way dance parallels psychoanalysis. Since Freud, psychoanalytic theory has fragmented into practices with various focuses, including (among others): ego psychology, relational psychoanalysis, object relations, etc. Rather than acting as (only) a defence, however, I suggest this fragmentation offers different lens through which to see the same phenomenon, something dance does, too, when portrayed as communication or representation, for example. Despite the fragmentation, there are underlying foundational principles that exist (and subsist) across all these different practices. 109  Seminar 19, 150. As this is Seminar 19 (before Lacan gives his seminar on the sinthome), Lacan is not discussing Joyce specifically, only noting that a text (from the Latin texere, i.e., to weave) always leaves a remainder. 110  Valéry, “Philosophy of the Dance,” 70. 111  MacKendrick, “Embodying Transgression,” 150. 108

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life” that exists within life.112 But being excess, and in excess of our comprehension, may seem to suggest we can never grasp dance: it appears to fall into the fallacy Best illustrates in splitting the rational and emotional.113 Yet, it is really drawing out that dance is reaching towards “what exceeds us” while remaining firmly bound to reality, bound within the limits of time and space, and bound “to matter [and] the human body with its limited manoeuverability.”114 Lacan states, “the equivoque is all we have as a weapon against the symptom.”115 If the equivoque—the expression capable of having more than one meaning—is a weapon against the symptom, then dance is a bodily instantiation of the equivoque as sinthome: an embodied sinthome as a weapon against the irruptions of the real (seen in the paradoxes that mean a definitive theory of dance involves an elusiveness) but that equally “works” on the dancer to help him incorporate and embrace the real. Dance, then, is an embodied practice of putting the oscillation between being and meaning to work. Zupančič notes that human condition is “the zone where the two realms [of the biological and symbolic or nature and culture] overlap” and cautions that the intersection of the realms is what gives rise to each realm individually.116 She adds, however, that there is no moment wherein one can separate the two or distinguish the moment of one becoming the other.117 Perhaps this idea is best illustrated with dance: dance is often believed not to have an ontology as it derives from the “rhythm within us,” yet dance is (also) culture. There is no point of dance as nature turning into culture: it is both concepts and the difference between the two. Pite, in her 2019 commission for the Paris Opera Ballet entitled Body and Soul118—the ballet I referred to in Chap. 1—offers a dance that embraces the intersection and relationship between nature and culture; this dance shows paradoxes, meaninglessness, and play all by taking, as she  Why Psychoanalysis, 55.  “Aesthetics of Dance,” 13. 114  Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 166. 115  Seminar 23, 9. 116  The Odd One In, 214. 117  The Odd One In, 215 118  Crystal Pite, Body and Soul. 112 113

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explains in a pre-talk to the filmed version of her dance, a “scrap of text”119 and transforming it into a theme of conflict and connectedness that runs throughout the work. She, in effect, illustrates the necessary connection of opposites that the sinthome permits: the holding of seemingly incompatible ideas simultaneously as each is necessary for the other’s existence. The same movement or the same basic idea of movement (e.g., left, right, left, right, left; chin, forehead, chest; neck, mouth, hip; etc.) has multiple manifestations in the body: In part one, conflict predominates, conflict between individuals, between groups, etc.; at 33:45 the external conflict becomes external connection. At 43:40, that conflict and connection is moved to the internal. In part three, the dancers take the idea of conflict and connection beyond the human, appearing as otherworldly creatures, perhaps accommodating to the alien presence within us. The show notes describe this movement by stating: “as the performance progresses, the script’s meaning morphs and deepens with each iteration,”120 or as Charlie Smith writes, “Body and Soul explores how the meaning of these words can change depending on how they are embodied by the dancers and presented by the narrator.”121 Pite juxtaposes conflict and connectedness explicitly in her filmed pre-­ talk, yet the tension between the two is evident throughout the movements: even the conflict shows connection in the repeated and shared movements. The beauty of her work comes in the entwining of the two. At one moment, what was once a mechanized, robotic like movement of conflict becomes imbued with a sense of humanity, or human connection. Furthermore, as all movements come from that same “scrap of text,” the moments of disconnection nonetheless partake of connection. Whether dance is a sinthome for Pite I can’t speak to (although Roslyn Sulcas in The New York Times did disparage the ending of the work as

 Body and Soul: In Collaboration, pre-talk, produced by Collide Entertainment and Kidd Pivot, directed by Tommy Pascal (Vancouver, BC), film, streamed online February 17–23, 2021. 120  National Arts Centre, “Crystal Pite’s Body and Soul,” show notes, https://nac-cna.ca/en/ event/28009. 121  “Crystal Pite’s Body and Soul, Created with Paris Opera Ballet, Coming to Canadian Screens,” The Georgia Straight, February 10, 2021, https://www.straight.com/arts/crystal-pites-body-andsoul-created-with-paris-opera-ballet-coming-to-canadian-screens. 119

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“schizophrenically unrelated” to the rest of the show122), but watching dancers perform her choreographies offers a glimpse of what a sinthome is. She says she wants dancers to push to the “limit of what they can handle physically,” and one of her dancers says it feels “like you’re kind of dancing on the edge” when he dances in her work Angels’ Atlas.123 Watching the dancing of her choreographies is likewise a process that pushes the viewer to the edge. Her work is beautiful but also intense; it’s almost impossible to view without having a strong reaction: it viscerally offers an idea of how close to the edge one has to play in order to grasp the real. Pite refers to this as the necessity of the striving, effort, work: only when dancers are dancing at their physical limits, can we come to “see glimpses of something bigger than us.”124 Where this differs from Nijinsky, say, is that Pite pushes to the edge without losing control. Like Polunin’s dancing, Pite’s choreography seeks the point of tension where the risk of balance turning to disbalance is evident, but doesn’t push past that point. I offer Pite as an example here because she is the one who, for me, has best been able to describe dance in language, not necessarily what dance is, but what it does. Furthermore, what strikes me about Pite and her work is that even though all dance offers a glimpse of the real and the connection between nature and culture or the body and the symbolic (and the real), she understands the tension and how two opposites rely on each other, and she choreographs this idea in her work and is clear about her goals: As a creator, I am mainly inspired by the same two things: conflict and connectedness. And conflict provides a kind uh of vital tension. So I’m trying to harness the thing that emerges when two contrasting ideas collide. And this can happen within a body or between two bodies or even in the very subject of a work. But connectedness is what I’m truly seeking. All the things that I make comes out of the desire to connect with people and to  “Review: Crystal Pite’s Disjointed ‘Body and Soul’ in Paris,” review of Body and Soul, The New York Times, Oct. 27, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/27/arts/dance/crystal-pite-body-­ and-soul-review.html. 123  Chelsea McMullan, dir., Crystal Pite: Angels’ Atlas, CBC, 2022, 16:48; 8:42, https://gem.cbc.ca/ crystal-pite-angels-atlas/s01e01. 124  Crystal Pite: Angels’ Atlas, 16:30–16:53. 122

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connect people to each other. So this performance—Body and Soul— explores conflict and connectedness through what I like to think of as a series of duets. They’re duets between two individuals. Duets between two groups of people. Duets between an individual and a group. Duets between two beings. Duets between physical language and spoken language. Duets between body and soul.125

Her reference to herself as a creator is notable here as well. She later adds, “The things that we make, they change us, they deepen us, and they teach us. So, it’s so important for me to have these artistic experiences, to create things with people that I love and that I trust and that I admire.”126 I suggest Pite, in bridging conflict and connectedness and in providing a place both elements can co-exist, creates a sinthomic dance. Her work, therefore, exposes how the sinthome, as a creation, also changes and deepens its creators. Verhaeghe and Declercq propose the sinthome is a creatio ex nihilo of “a new signifier” created “as it builds upon the lack of the Other.”127 The sinthomic dance, likewise, does not offer knowledge or purport to explain a symptom or reality; rather, it creates new relationships and, thereby, creates content. Bersani refers to an analytic exchange between Lacan and Suzanne Hommel in which a gesture from Lacan provided a defining moment in Hommel’s analysis.128 Bersani then comments on this moment’s lack: Lacan does not offer an analysis, nor does the gesture “cure” Hommel of her symptom. Lacan does, however, add a physical element.129 Bersani interprets this gesture (as does Hommel) as therapeutic in that it offered warmth “and the sense of having been the vehicle for a moral

 Body and Soul: In Collaboration, 2:50-4:00.  Body and Soul: In Collaboration, 15:35-15:58. 127  “Lacan’s Analytic Goal,” 20. 128  Receptive Bodies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 51–53; see also Hommel’s account: “A Story From Lacan’s Practice,” LacanOnline, YouTube video, 01:02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VA-SXCGwLvY. The gesture from Lacan is also an example of reflecting in a marked way an analysand’s unconscious communication: Hommel refers to “Gestapo,” and Lacan turns it into an enactment, a “geste à peau.” 129  Bersani, Receptive Bodies, 53. 125 126

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interpellation” to everyone.130 This, however, is the meaning the analysand and Bersani add to the gesture. The gesture itself, as Bersani admits, does not give Hommel knowledge, nor does it contain a meaning inherent within itself. It is a (relational) gesture that creates a content. With dance as a way of creating content, and by so doing potentially fashioning a sinthome, the person who stands to gain the most, at least from a practical perspective, is the dancer who opens to new possibilities regarding her subject and who may shift her (bodily) self as LaMothe writes.131 Nonetheless, arguing that dance combines all of the elements that are necessary for a sinthome does not change dance. Seeing dance’s relation to the sinthome only allows one to appreciate dance more fully. Furthermore, dance’s possibility as a sinthome does not imply that a dancer is healthier than others nor does it imply a dancer will or must create a sinthome. The plethora of fictional depictions of dance and its relation to psychosis or madness may also be capturing something true of dance. As previously mentioned, dance is often related to madness, so although dance contains the elements necessary for a sinthome, dance is not sufficient for a sinthome if one cannot or will not engage those elements. When someone does engage those elements, however, dance can become a sinthome, an embodied sinthome that is a singular solution as shown by Polunin. Sometime when we look at dance, we see its beauty and miss its pain. I’ve written about dance teaching play, but mostly neglected the pain that accompanies dance, pain that manifests both physically (sore and tired muscles, blistered toes, broken bones) and mentally (exhaustion, constant confrontation with one’s limits). One gives up many things when driven to dance,132 and dance is only a sinthome if driven to dance. Additionally, in the presence of a harsh dance instructor or when working for a choreographer who is demanding, dance can be physically damaging and emotionally torturous. Fosse, for example,  Receptive Bodies, 53.  Why We Dance, 5. 132  Bill Hastings relates how Fosse once sat his dancers down and reminded them of all they give up: “’We give up family. We give up wealth. We take a brutal beating daily, physically, emotionally, and in the business.’” Wasson, quoting Bill Hasting, interview with Sam Wasson, Jan. 8, 2011, quoted in Wasson, Fosse, 488. 130 131

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would sometimes find one person to pick on, locating a dancer’s weakness and using it to his advantage, or play terrible emotional games to ensure his dancers offered “authentic” reactions. But as painful as dance can be, pre-psychosis and psychosis are worse. Always. Paranoia, loss of trust, never feeling safe or knowing who or what to believe, losing all sense of reality and of continuity, etc.: these are the experiences arising from the real, the feelings that condition the drive for a sinthome. If I’m right about dance’s potential as a sinthome, it may be that dance is sinthomic in the company of others because it puts one close to the edge, and one survives. It is riskier than sitting alone writing. It also forces one back into one’s body. It offers a physical outlet and a connection back to others and to the world.

8.3.5 Dance Therapy There is a final implication, one not related specifically to either dance or to psychoanalysis, yet one which can easily be overlooked unless and until these two fields are brought together. Under my argument, much of the current realm of “dance therapy” is irrelevant—and possibly harmful—at least for the (pre‑)psychotic. Dance therapy as it currently exists is focused primarily on self-directed movement, yet it is not “movement therapy” that is important (or the most important) for the psychotic133 but the learning, play,  and mirroring, as well as the concomitant binding (in space and time), that comes with dance. Movement is necessary, for example with its associated rhythms, but it is not sufficient. Also important is having a structure that not only allows focus but also provides a container. Occupational therapy (OT) as used to treat PTSD after the world wars incorporated this aspect. Although occupational therapy did not (necessarily) use dance, it did employ basket weaving and other artistic or craft pursuits, pursuits that require active teaching and supervision, pursuits that relate to the body and its attendant affects, not just to

 Dance therapy is not ostensibly for the psychotic, so one may accuse me of offering undeserved criticism to dance therapy. In reality, however, dance therapy is regularly used for related disorders such as eating disorders, PTSD, and dementia. 133

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thoughts.134 While dance, on my argument, is still the best medium for this type of activity, OT (as originally conceived) understood the purpose of structured learning that incorporated play, an element that has been lost today (not only in OT but also in dance therapy, art therapy, music therapy, etc.) Today, the main element of OT and other artistically based therapies is the play element; however, in dance when considered as an art rather than as movement set to music (or, rather, movement co-­ existing with music), there is an intention that is missing from play therapies. Kathleen Matuska writes of the evolution of OT, arguing that currently, the occupational therapist “helps her clients think about ways to engage in the occupations they once enjoyed and focuses her intervention on their goals.”135 In other words, OT has gone back to the basic idea of incorporating the “self ” of a person, but without the emphasis on the teaching and support that accompanied the original conception of OT.136 Like much of our world, the “occupation” is focused more on how someone can be productive or return to previous functioning then about arousing “new lines of thought”137 or accepting one’s fate. Yet it is arousing new lines of thought that is the creativity needed in the world. Among psychotherapists today (and the governments who regulate and often fund them) there are disputes regarding the best treatments. Often people focus on finding effective short-term therapies that return people to “proper” functioning based on rating scales, yet this  focus is the

 Susan E.  Tracy, writing in 1910 of the precursor to occupational therapy—“invalid occupation”—posits, “perhaps the most essential element in the success either of an occupation room in an institution or in the use of manual work as a therapeutic agent with the individual patient in the home or elsewhere outside of institutions is the teacher on the one hand, or the nurse on the other. Leadership and example are necessary. . . . It is futile to put work into the hands of the sick and expect them to create an interest in it.” Studies in Invalid Occupation: A Manual for Nurses and Attendants (Boston: Witcomb and Barrows, 1910), 5. 135  “Three Generations of Occupational Therapy,” OT Practice, November 20, 2010, 11–12. 136  There is, likewise, a relational aspect missing. Even in popular culture (as opposed to structured therapy), we are encouraged to “make” art (or colour or move the ways our body wants—as if the body were separate from us), but there is no one paying attention; there is no effort to explore the experience or the “product.” We’re left on our own to assimilate the experience. 137  Tracy, Studies in Invalid Occupation, 2. 134

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“displacement of flesh and blood references.”138 The focus on evidencebased therapies also erases the creative element in psychoanalysis that permits flexibility to turn chaos into something new, something that is essential when society is becoming psychotic. Although OT as originally conceived may not have the effectiveness studies to back it up like today’s practice does, it developed out of “a concept of free and pleasant and profitable occupation—including recreation and any form of helpful enjoyment as the leading principle,” suggesting that there was something specific to this content that mattered.139 The difference, however, between these forms of therapy and the ideas originally behind occupational therapy is that the learning aspect is lost. Adolf Meyer emphasises that occupational therapy (during his time) is “all a problem [for the therapist] of being true to one’s nature and opportunities and of teaching others to do the same with themselves.”140 The loss of this teaching is also seen in the developmental trajectory of music therapy or art therapy, for example, or even as it pertains to my topic, of dance therapy or therapies that involve writing. There is no longer any guidance; there is no longer a container; there is no longer the binding of space and time.141 In dance, steps are intentional; dance takes 138  Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992), 52. Keller’s looking at science through psychoanalysis and arguing that science removes the female and plays out the male (phallic) fantasy. 139  Adolf Meyer, “The Philosophy of Occupation Therapy,” Archives of Occupational Therapy 1, no. 1 (1922): 2, https://journals.lww.com/ajpmr/Citation/1922/02000/The_Philosophy_of_ Occupation_Therapy.1.aspx. Meyer goes on to suggest that what is specific to the content is a rhythm, a (defined) time, and success in a finished production. Ibid., 8. He also postulates that within a “frame of rhythm and order or time,” the occupational therapist “naturally begins with a natural simple regime of pleasurable ease, the creation of an orderly rhythm in the atmosphere . . . perhaps with some music and restful dance and play, and with some glimpses of activities which any one can hope to achieve and derive satisfaction from.” Ibid., 6. 140  “The Philosophy of Occupation Therapy,” 7; my italics. 141  GoodTherapy describes “expressive arts therapy” as a therapy in which one is encouraged “to explore their responses, reactions, and insights through pictures, sounds, explorations, and encounters with an art process. . . . A person who utilizes expressive arts therapy is not required to have any artistic ability. Rather, it is through the use of the individual’s senses that the imagination can process, flourish, and support healing.” “Expressive Arts Therapy,” GoodTherapy, last modified July 27, 2015, https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/expressive-arts-therapy. This definition is consistent with the other various definitions across different art therapy organizations. It does not mention creation through active learning (requiring active teaching). If we think of Winnicott’s squiggle game with children, he leads the activity; the game is a structured form of play that he participates in himself to help his patients learn to play.

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“movement” (in the broad sense) but codifies it (not always explicitly) and then combines those steps and phrases into different variations.142 “Free movement” (or “free expression” if outside the dance therapy construct), in contrast, requires an already connected psyche. If our imaginary ways of understanding the world diminish, thereby risking the dismantling of the entire psychic apparatus, then free movement may be too real; if one does not have what Joyce had—a pre-existing ability to play—then one cannot move freely. There is nothing to act as a container and nothing to stop the in-sistance of the real, so in these cases, free movement cannot help and may even harm. Rather than non-directed free movement and play (the current forms of these therapies rest on false premises), learning how to play by watching or following others and having a “safe” place to begin to play and to come recognize and accept our lack (of a lack) are what matter most.

 MacKendrick, “Embodying Transgression,” 145.

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LaMothe avers that “every leg or fin or wing represents a trajectory of movement that not only represents a given set of possibilities, but opens onto further possibilities.”1 Lear espouses that one of the goals of psychoanalysis is opening up possibilities, citing an example of a patient who “in grasping the constricted nature of the possibilities that she [the patient] has mistaken for reality, she opens up new possibilities for life.”2 Both dance and psychoanalysis open up possibilities, thus confirming a relationship between them, one that offers enormous potential. These possibilities are the possibilities of making the impossible, possible.

9.1 Bearing the Real Real The “incommensurability” that Van Haute references as entrenched within the subject3 is brought to the fore in the psychotic. The in-sistance of the real threatens the entire psychic structure, and the triggered  Why We Dance, 50.  Freud, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 413. 3  Against Adaptation, 287. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Sherritt, Dancing an Embodied Sinthome, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7_9

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psychotic has nothing to support the symbolic. Thus, the pre-psychotic needs to develop a personal structure that bypasses the (name-of-the-­ father) symbolic structure yet without entirely foreclosing on its possibilities: finding a way to live (without and) beyond phallic jouissance and the insistence of the real. Although Lacan argues that “psychoanalysis, when it succeeds, proves that the Name-of-the-Father can just as well be bypassed,”4 he doesn’t mean that it can be erased. The possibility of the name-of-the-father is still a condition for the sinthome. Indeed, Lacan explicitly states, “One can just as well bypass it, on the condition that one makes use of it.”5 Making use of the name-of-the father implies that it still exists, but as a “non-conditioned element”6 in the psychic structure. For one to use the sinthome to reach a jouissance beyond the phallus, one must still cognize the phallic function,7 for there is no beyond without the original set. For Joyce, the name-of-the-father doesn’t exist; therefore, the law becomes something that he has to (re-)conceptualize because of the threatened loss of the imaginary. This reconceptualization means the law otherwise provided by the name-of-the-father, the regulation required for someone to operate in the world that includes a symbolic and that contains the real, becomes a law “carried out by the sinthome itself.”8 In other words, the sinthome creates its own law, not the name-of-the-­ father, but a law that nonetheless allows one to operate within the symbolic. The sinthome becomes the support for a psychic structure no longer centred around a central lack, establishing a subject that lives with the threat of the real and the lack of the name-of-the-father rather than a subject seeking to merge with the lack as just another object and eradicate it. Bersani muses, “perhaps the therapeutic secret of psychoanalysis lies in its willingness to entertain any possibility of behaviour or thought as only  Seminar 23, 116.  Seminar 23, 116. 6  Seminar 23, 117. 7  As I previously mentioned, Chiesa argues differently, and while feminine jouissance still depends on phallic jouissance, he nonetheless holds that is does so “without being ‘beyond’ the phallus.” Subjectivity and Otherness, 187. This disagreement, I suspect, is that Chiesa takes the phallus too literally as an organ rather than as a signifier and component of fantasy. 8  Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, 189. 4 5

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possibility. It aims to free desiring fantasies from psychological constraints, thereby treating the unconscious not as the determinant depth of being but, instead, as de-realized being, as never more than potential being.”9 For Lacan, this might equate to not being able to have what we desire, only what we need as I described earlier. Fulfilling our desire as occasioned by objet a is an impossibility, yet within the repetition of the search for the objet a, there is another repetition: the repetition of the gap between each repetition.10 Although we can never fulfill our desire, the drive that circles around our desire is nonetheless satisfied. Thus, despite how our lack occasions the belief in the possibility of achieving our desire and creating a whole, the gap between each repetition offers new possibilities. As a symptom, the repetition is merely the repetition of the search for what will make us whole, but the repetition of the gap ensures that within each repetition is there is always the chance of surprise. Psychoanalysis, in Bersani’s thought, may free us from the limit of repetition of representation, freeing us, thereby, to accept the gap of repetition and, thereby, the impossibility of possibility. This acceptance also can increase the capacity for creativity as it forces us to grasp for new ways to live. The repetition of the drives persists regardless of whether the psyche is knotted tightly or not, but for the traditional (neurotic) analysand, freedom from the incessant demand of desire is gained by making the unconscious conscious (that is, through psychoanalysis to the point of the psychoanalytic act). Making the unconscious conscious relies on the revolution into the discourse of the analyst, and upon seeing how she strives to be whole, the analysand can choose differently. Psychoanalysis with neurotics opens possibilities.11 Although making the unconscious conscious assists in this revolution, the subject always risks sliding back  Bersani and Phillips, intimacies, 28.  Zupančič explains that Lacan’s two types of repetition, automaton and tyche, can only co-exist, and within the tyche of repetition, one finds “the locus of surprise of repetition, of the Real encountered in it.” The Odd One In, 167. Furthermore, “the drive is satisfied through being thwarted, without attaining its end . . . nevertheless it does not miss its aim . . . the aim is merely the path taken.” Dolar, A Voice, 74. 11  Lear considers the neurotic as “constrained,” and the analyst “opens up for the analysand the possibility of new forms of relating to the analyst, and thus to people in his environment.” Wisdom Won from Illness, 182–83. 9

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into the master’s discourse; however, because the subject is now conscious, she can avert (or try to avert) a return to the master’s discourse. Psychoanalysis with the neurotic, however, aims to effect this revolution through verbalized speech, but not everyone can tolerate analysis, in which “not only must the analyst survive the patient, but the patient must survive the analyst” or else there can be no safe environment.12 In psychosis, verbalized speech creates a “nightmare,”13 so trying to work within that medium is fraught; rather, the process that frees the psychotic analysand to accept the gap of repetition is different yet somewhat analogous to the neurotic’s process in that it produces the psychoanalytic act with a difference: the sinthomic act or an ethical act supported by the sinthome. The sinthome then obviates the risk of returning to the master’s discourse, which is an impossibility for the psychotic because the sinthome does not install the name-of-the-father but rather allows one to exist without it. One exists “beyond” the set of men subject to the phallic function by allowing for (only) the possibility of the phallic function as a restraint on the real. What dance shows is that even when someone cannot tolerate traditional analysis, for example because of psychosis, the processes that contribute to a sinthome can take other forms (forms that don’t rely on a subject’s internal will and resources to make use of the drives, such as Lacan shows in Joyce). For the psychotic (or un-triggered psychotic) in particular, traditional psychoanalysis has too often failed. One implication of this failure is there is an assumption that insight-oriented practices are not for everyone because people need a base level of security, safety, and functioning first. Nonetheless, the elements Lacan sees as essential to the psychoanalytic act still matter. Yes, they play different roles (the objet a, for example, is what impinges upon the subject and threatens the edifice of the psyche), but neither those different roles nor the lack of the name-of-the-father eliminates the drive (i.e., one’s need); the drive just manifests differently. Therefore, the drive still repeats and still offers up a gap in the repetition. Thereby, psychoanalysis, by teaching play in the same way as dance does,  Jessica Benjamin, “Where’s the Gap and What’s the Difference? The Relational View of Intersubjectivity, Multiple Selves, and Enactment,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 46, no. 1 (2010): 117, https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2010.10746042. 13  Bollas, Catch Them, 78. 12

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has benefits even for those who do not fit the stereotype of the traditional analytic client, so long as the process is modified to focus on understanding and mirroring the psychotic’s internal world and to contain the real. Dance offers this mirror directly and visually, and analysis offers this indirectly and, more often than not, through words. Although using psychoanalysis to explore dance offers new ways to think of dance, and although looking at what dance is offers new ways to think of psychoanalysis, it is not always a question of what one practice can take or learn from another. It is also the recognition that despite their seeming incongruity, the two offer possibilities in their uses of “aethereal” elements to help someone connect with the real of the drive and desire (however those arise for the analysand). This parallelism is why my argument is dance specific. Other arts are products—they have “ends” and can more easily be co-opted by the master’s discourse—whereas dance creates new relationships and new content through an unending process. Psychoanalysis, too, offers a process, not a thing or an object or even an act. Dance is not a piece of music or an artwork with a defined end; rather, it, intrinsically, leads one to the ultimate ethical act, and thereby, dance requires a leap of faith.14 Lacan intimates that the sinthome does not rely on a conventional use of language, but on the real as experienced via lalangue and felt in the body, and thus the sinthome is not essentially linguistic; rather, the sinthome is a method for containing the real. Joyce uses specific processes to help him bear the real and to create a sinthome that can mediate among the elements of the psyche to support a subject. Notwithstanding how Joyce shows a sinthome can arise within the written word, the necessary aspects of a sinthome, those Joyce found through poetic language, are present more innately in dance. Art, specifically dance, allows one to feel and to experience the real and its concomitant affects as they arise. These affects are not just the pleasurable affects we often associate with art, but all affects. Experiencing these  Zupančič suggests that analysis “replaces hope with courage.” “Too Much of Not Enough: An Interview with Alenka Zupančič,” interview with Cassandra B.  Seltman, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 9, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/too-much-of-not-enough-an-interview-­ with-­alenka-zupancic. Maybe what dance shows is that neither dance nor analysis “replaces hope with courage,” full stop, but “replaces hope with the courage to reach a conclusion for which the evidence will only exist retroactively.” In other words, the courage to become a subject (through an ethical act). 14

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affects in this contained space and for the limited time of the dance, helps one, then, to bring them to consciousness, to see how fragmentation is possible and to accept that there is no name-of-the-father to hide the real. Only then, can we withstand the intrusions of the real into the psyche. The real manifests for Joyce as the voice of imposed speech: the real is present in a way he cannot represent it in the standard symbolic (the symbolic supported by the unconscious structured by the name-of-the-­ father), so he instead uses that real, splicing and suturing his psychic structure in such a way as to provide a new support holding the Borromean knot together. It is not the psychoanalytic act exactly, the act which results in a new relationship to one’s psychic structure in the case of the neurotic: it adds a term. But it is a way to access feminine jouissance and achieve a (semblance of ) the psychoanalytic act. It is essential to note that Joyce does not choose this; rather, the real becomes too real and in-sists upon him, threatening to destroy his psyche. Engley and McGowen suggest the real, when it in-sists, forces a change in the symbolic if the entire system is not to collapse.15 In psychosis, however, the support that is the name-of-the-father is missing, and therefore, the symbolic can’t change in order to prevent this collapse, and the psychotic needs a singular solution. That solution is the sinthome: the process that connects the psyche, allowing the psychotic to bear the real. The (absent) name-of-the-father becomes a possibility that allows the psychotic to then bypass that name and develop a feminine jouissance that satisfies the drives, allowing her to experience and welcome the real, without leaving her in a terrifying state of undifferentiated merger.

 “The Real,” 00:38:36. Engley and McGowen, however, are applying the sinthome to cultural practices more generally, an application that I do not believe can be made without changing the nature of Lacan’s sinthome. The symbolic is a totality, and to apply it to cultural movements is to carve the symbolic into separate, discrete entities. For Lacan, support for the symbolic is the name-­ of-­the-father, but he recognizes culture can shift and a new symbolic law can arise; however, whatever the new law is, it still operates as culture not within it. 15

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9.2 “Shifting” the Symbolic Lacan’s recognition of how we try to fill the lack in ourselves but never succeed and of how we work to shift the master’s discourse only for it to revolve back, is apparent in society today. Lacan’s theory of the sinthome brings with it a corollary that the symbolic may not shift when we confront injustice (via, say, the Black Lives Matter [BLM] movement) or subscribe to a new gender theory, for example. The symbolic only really shifts when threatened by the real real.16 Most of us have found ways to conceal or cope with the real and are able to “cover over” the cuts threatened by its irruptions “thanks” to the name-of-the-father. The attempts to shift the symbolic never shift the symbolic; they shift the imaginary but continue to cover over the cuts in the symbolic.17 For example, BLM’s “irruption” into the NBA18 does not shift the symbolic any more than recognition within society’s structure of LGBTQ+ rights or gender fluidity shifts the symbolic. These challenges to the status quo are not irruptions of the real. The real cannot be understood by relating it to “love” or “legalized marijuana.” The real is more accurately understood by relating it to the possibility of the square root of negative one; it is the possibility of an impossible—possibility that is not itself imaginable except as pure abstraction—whereas legalized marijuana (and love if not embroiled in Lacanian theory) are both imaginable and therefore not real. If the real “does not depend on the idea I have of it,”19 then only the square root of negative one can encompass that notion. The BLM’s “irruption,” then, 16  The real real, as previously mentioned, is what threatens to overwhelm the subject of psychosis. This argument is a direct response to Engley and McGowan in “Symbolic Order.” In that episode of their podcast, they suggest that the symbolic is a totality that we cannot see; we only see the real as is “irrupts” into it. Their example, however, is how BLM disrupts the NBA “symbolic” and causes the symbolic to shift. Yet, having already characterized the symbolic as a totality that we are fully immersed in (00:06:35), there cannot be a separate NBA symbolic. BLM and the NBA both exist within the symbolic. Although I disagree with Engley and McGowan on this point, their podcast has had immense value for me as I read (and re-read) Lacan, and I’m using their examples only to (hopefully) further their ideas in the same ways that they’ve furthered mine. 17  Engley and McGowan, “The Real,” 00:26:10. Covering over the cuts (the real) in the symbolic is how Engley and McGowan depict the imaginary. 18  BLM in the NBA, love, legalized marijuana: these are all examples that Engley and McGowan use to discuss the real and its relationship to the symbolic. 19  Seminar 21, XII 12.

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does not shift the symbolic; it only shifts the imaginary, and we can—and do—shift the imaginary (i.e., reality) often. When we change the imaginary, however, we still exist within master’s discourse. BLM may disrupt the NBA, but months later, any lasting influence has dissipated. LGBTQ+ rights may challenge our notions of white patriarchal heteronormativity, but that does not stop us from seeking the one(s) that we imagine will complete us. Shifting the symbolic is hard. If we think of the sinthome as permitting what Ogden describes as the growth of the contained and container20 that allows for play, then that growth can only happen “by having to deal with something that exceeds imagination. .  .  . It does not happen by straining one’s brain to be imaginative.”21 Having to confront what exceeds imagination then requires, according to Ruti, opening to the possibility that jouissance (elements of the drives and, therefore, of the real) will overwhelm you.22 Although Ruti suggests one can choose this path, choosing this path is merely falling back into the master’s discourse. Rather, as Joel Faflak proposes, the sinthome “is born(e) of a great deal of pain and suffering, but it’s a necessary creativity to stand in for a loss that is insurmountable.”23 That loss is the non-existence of the phallic function. Ruti’s suggestion is that the sinthome can undo the phallic function, yet because of its relation to (non-triggered) psychosis, the sinthome does not “undo” the phallic function but, rather, compensates for a non-­ existent phallic function. This is not to suggest that creativity cannot arise within the neurotic, nor does it suggest that a pre-disposition to psychosis is necessary for shifting the symbolic. I do, however, argue that the creativity linked to the sinthome is more likely to shift the symbolic because it is a necessary creativity.

 “On Holding and Containing, Being and Dreaming,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 85, no. 6 (2004): 1359, https://doi.org/10.1516/T41H-DGUX-9JY4-GQC7. 21  Bromberg, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” 8. 22  “There Is No Cure,” 00:33:57. 23  Faflak, responding to Ruti, “There Is No Cure,” 1:00:13. Zupančič, too, warns of thinking one can choose to experience the real. Making the real into a desire is pathological (in my understanding of her argument) and impossible because the real “does not have a subject.” Ethics of the Real, 237–38. 20

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Thus, the sinthome is unanalyzable (or cannot or should not be analyzed) because it is a support for the symbolic; to analyze it would take away that support, and no one can live without a symbolic, even a radically shifted one. Attempting to analyze the sinthome only removes the limits on the real that made its existence bearable. The attempt will also always fail. The sinthome has no meaning that can be analysed. It only conditions the possibility of meaning. It is not a symptom or a thing or a fantasy (or an object): it is a process. If the sinthome is not an analyzable symptom, then it is more accurately the drive to live when one cannot rely on other means. It is a singular and necessary manoeuvre that radically shifts the symbolic. Lombardi argues metaphorization is not all that psychoanalysis is (or should be): “I propose a radical shift of emphasis, such that the interest of the body is not limited to its symbolic meaning or to related unconscious phantasies. In other words, all of psychoanalysis does not come down to mere metaphorization . . . but does instead call for a confrontation with reality, and with that first expression of reality, the body,”24 or, as I argue, with the real of the body.

9.3 Creating Metaphor Dance, as a (creative) art, is not just the expression of creativity but also a scaffolding that provides the means for that creativity to emerge or come into being by generating that possibility of metaphor needed to exist beyond it. Dance, thus, offers the precondition for creativity and is creative in and of itself. When creativity (or play) is not possible, dance may offer the conditions in which what is initially experienced as threatening can be experienced in a new way. In analysis, Bromberg suggests, the ability of the analyst “to help transmute traumatic affect into the potential for ‘poetry’ … depends on a ‘safe-enough’ interpersonal environment.”25 This “safe-enough” environment, he contends, can only occur in a relationship  Body-Mind Dissociation, 38.  Philip M. Bromberg, “One Need Not Be a House to Be Haunted: On Enactment, Dissociation, and the Dread of ‘Not-Me’—A Case Study,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 13, no. 5 (2003): 708, https://doi.org/10.1080/10481881309348764; my italics. 24 25

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that contains uncertainty, as uncertainty is the only environment that permits “safe surprises.”26 These are surprises that are not so safe that nothing unbidden or spontaneous arises, yet are safe enough that whatever arises cannot overwhelm someone. These are also experiences that inherently involve pleasure: if the environment permits a new experience that contradicts or disrupts one’s predictions or expectations,27 then one can experience the pleasure of seeing the world beyond black and white. A safe enough environment, therefore, must be playful and hold the dialectic of pleasure and fright and not be too tightly controlled or contained. Furthermore, for the one who needs the sinthome, the safe enough environment must be one that shows the possibility of relations with the other and oneself that don’t collapse into merge or occasion (or support) a belief in the undifferentiated thing-ness of the world. We might be able to understand how to achieve this by looking at Kirsten Lewis’s discussion of the differences that exist within how we experience sensations in dance. She points out that the sensations of the body in dance (but also in general) can be split into two concepts: sensing and feeling. Sensing is going into the body whereas feeling is the body rising to perception.28 We can understand fear of feeling the body in dance as coming from the inability to control what arises from the body into perception. This feeling is the feeling of the real irrupting. The pleasure is felt when we have a safe space in which we can sense the body. By sensing the body, we can experience the real in a defined time and space, and as a result, the real may no longer insist; instead, one can come to experience the pleasure of the real without fleeing from it or feeling overwhelmed by it. In analysis, a “safe enough” environment allows for nightmares to becomes dreams, and dreams are what “allow[] the contained and container to grow, which includes the capacity to bear uncertainty and  Philip M.  Bromberg, “Some Potholes on the Royal Road: Or Is It an Abyss?,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 36, no. 5 (2000): 15, https://irp.cdn-website.com/682fedd7/files/uploaded/ Bromberg-Potholes%20on%20the%20Royal%20Road-2000.pdf. Bromberg’s footnote relates this to aesthetics and Edmund Burke’s thought that “safe shocks” relate to the sublime. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful: And Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, ed. David Womersley (London: Penguin Books, 1998). 27  Benjamin, “Recognition and Destruction,” 187. 28  “Dance Theory Lab. Thinker Edition: Embodiment and Theory for Non-Dancers,” workshop, March 7, 2021, virtual. 26

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doubt.”29 Ogden describes a patient who initially used “pathological containing” by “directing the play” of analysis in order that no psychological work could occur; nothing new could arise30 As the patient continued her analysis, however, Ogden saw how the “pathological containing function” (that she had foisted upon him) itself became contained by her, which led to a surprising response from him (in that he treated a dream as a real event, opening up new ideas).31 Dance is like this: dance directs the person who cannot play; one only has to “read [the] lines”32 until a change can occur within the dancer, then she can awaken from the dream (or nightmare) and experience herself in a novel way. Dance provides the scaffolding and directs the dancer, and only then can the dancer establish a position in which to expand both the container and the contained and, thereby, set up the possibility of metaphor.33 Ruti talks of how, for Lacan, creativity can offer a container via the use of the signifier yet adds that the drive (of the real) is what permits playing with the signifier (that is, a form of creativity), and that the more the subject can accept the drives and their associated jouissance, the more creative he can be.34 Within language this is a destructive process: language is destroyed to the point it can be reconstituted as something new; this is what Joyce does with language and is why the emphasis on language’s connection to the sinthome breaks down. Language is not a sinthome: the destruction of language by means of the play of the real is how Joyce creates his sinthome. This is where dance excels: dance’s inherent connection to the body and its relationship to specific elements of the symbolic (e.g., rhythm and resonance) necessarily link it to the real and its drives. Jacques-Alain Miller speaks of the possibility that all arts could be a sinthome,35 but what I think he means is that all arts offer the  Ogden, “On Holding and Containing,” 1358.  “On Holding and Containing,” 1361. 31  “On Holding and Containing,” 1361. 32  Ogden “On Holding and Containing,” 1361. 33  The corollary is that dance not only makes meaning possible, but also meaninglessness: we can accept the lack of any absolute meaning. This idea is captured beautifully by both Lacan’s and Joyce’s use of language and our inability to come to any determinate meaning. 34  “There Is No Cure,” 00:23:45–00:33:24. 35  “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body,” para. 29. 29 30

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potential for ameliorating object relations because they create a separation or distance from the object and can “objectify” it by providing order to chaos and offering new ways to explore relationships in some form (e.g., visual art, at minimum, looks at the relation between objects and space). This distance from the object, however, does not necessarily make any of the arts a sinthome; it only suggests that all arts have a relationship to creativity—and the sinthome is only one creative possibility—and that  all arts offer some protection from intrusions of the real. Therefore, dance, purely by being an art, offers protection. Dance, however, does not require one to be creative already; dance, rather, contains its own support for developing creativity by directing a script (of steps) that uses the real to help one connect to the body and thus embrace the jouissance of the drives. Dance thereby allows for “safe” surprises, by teaching one who cannot dream to open to the possibilities of playing with their dreams. According to Michele Ribolsi, Jasper Feyaerts, and Stijn Vanheule, Lacan “postulated that language makes up the experience of subjectivity and that psychosis is marked by a deficiency in certain metaphor uses” that results in non-meaning and non-identity,36 and I’ve already described how language loses all metaphoric possibility for someone in psychosis. Thus, to exist in the symbolic without the name-of-the-father, in a way that is non-psychotic, requires the possibility of metaphorization. Just as one needs the possibility of phallic jouissance for feminine jouissance, one needs the possibility of metaphorization to live beyond it. This is important because for many suffering from psychosis, “normality” is impossible, yet effective existence is possible, creating a possibility of the impossible. As Bollas writes of one schizophrenic analysand, “she remained a little odd,” but “was no longer broken.”37 The sinthome may not get one to a “pure” type of play, but in the struggle to create a sinthome, one creates the possibility for play: one sees that one could play (as the analyst or choreographer does) and how one might play, even if one previously has never fully developed the ability to play.

 “Metaphor in Psychosis,” 2–6.  When the Sun Bursts, 69.

36 37

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The sinthome, thus, is not a way of producing an artificial name-of-­ the-father, but a shift, reflected (Lacan denies38) by the “a” within Lacan’s comment about dance and condansation. Condansation is the shift from condensation—from metaphor as support and from identification with the lack—to condansation—the suppléance that is the support Lacan identifies with the sinthome. This latter support is of feminine jouissance and emerges from the identification with the lack in the other that reveals the possibility that merger has a limit. It supports the shifted symbolic, the symbolic that permits the sexual relation  /  feminine jouissance by mediating (as a process of creation, and within the imaginary) among the elements of the psyche. Derrida coined the term différance to refer to a “not,” an “impossible presence” that makes possible nominal effects despite itself being un-­ nameable.39 It is neither a word nor a concept, but that which produces difference without being a part of it. Différance conditions the possibility of language. Dance, then, as condansation would condition the possibility of lalangue, of a creation supported, as Shirley Sharon-Zisser argues, “outside sense.”40 The “a” in condansation, therefore, indicates condensation with a difference (différance) and indicates the possibility of condensation, of metaphorization—the possibility that is needed if one is to exist beyond it. Dance, then, becomes lalangue, the lalangue that in its connection to the real is “the concept of their [sound echoes and language, or the real and symbolic] very difference, the difference of the two logics, their split and their union in that very divergence.”41 Yet, sounds are not the only way lalangue reveals the existence of the real. The a in Derrida’s term is silent. (Différence and différance are indistinguishable in speech.)42 This, then, ties différance to the real effects of the voice, the voice that includes silence; although Derrida uses different language, I suggest the “a” is

 To be clear, Lacan does not deny the shift itself. He denies that dance is capable of producing this shift. 39  “Différance,” 19. 40  “Art as Subjective Solution: A Lacanian Theory of Art Therapy,” International Journal of Art Therapy 23, no. 1 (2018): 11, https://doi.org/10.1080/17454832.2017.1324884. 41  Dolar, A Voice, 143–44. 42  “Différance,” 4. 38

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therefore its tied to the gap between the speech and writing.43 Lacan, however, when he speaks of dance as condansation suggests that one (surprisingly) cannot find in dance something that serves the body (as suppléance). Although Lacan may not see the possibility of dance, his use of “condansation” sparks a creativity itself and is its own creatio ex nihilo.

9.4 Choreographing a Subject Bollas argues the baby’s initial internalization of the mother’s form (before his words) is the first human aesthetic.44 Bersani characterizes this argument as explaining how we are “choreographed into being”: we incorporate the maternal aesthetic into a distinct way of being as the idea that we are works of art, and our development parallels the development of art itself.45 Bersani further writes of how the process of analysis (in general) is recreating the possibilities of how we integrate the fragmented elements of the self. It is a new choreography, or a new choreographic process. He elaborates on this to argue that personality is “an aesthetics of handling” the space around us; the analyst, then, is the support to guide the integration of the self. In other words, the analyst is necessary for one to be “choreographed into being”: one cannot “choreograph” oneself, yet that is what a culture circling the name-of-thefather, a culture focused on the desire of the Other and an individual culture focused on being “the” exception, attempts to do. With dance, we are (or can be) truly choreographed into being in the way a baby is, or the way someone is in analysis: by being guided and supported as one creates new experiences (not necessarily conscious ones)46 and develops the possibility for a new way to be. Dance can be a sinthome if we accept the sinthome as linking the psyche in such a way to expose the lack of the name-of-the-father and a  “Différance,” 5.  The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 32–37. 45  Receptive Bodies, 54. 46  Stephen A. Mitchell, Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1997), 219. 43 44

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hole within merger, all while allowing a contained and controlled “tuché” (that missed encounter with the real) and the development of a feminine jouissance. It is not a sinthome if we see the sinthome as slapping/applying a meaning on the real. This is the ambiguity of condansation. Metaphor creates that “sense” and “heals” (or can), but dance cannot and will not offer “sense” or “knowledge.”47 Dance provides a way to experience something that cannot be symbolized, and it provides the support to experience the nonsymbolizable in a contained and playful way: it’s creating a (maternal) aesthetic in order to move beyond it. If psychosis is reminiscent of a (not-existent, pre-symbolic) mother-baby dyad (or mother-­ baby-­father fusion depending on theorist), then what’s missing is the movement from Kristeva’s chora to the subject. Thus, the pre-psychotic requires a healthy experience of individuation and separation, a process that precedes the Oedipal stage, or a way to embrace the experience of non-differentiation and engulfment so as to experience a new choreography (of being). It is when dance helps to achieve this that it creates a content, and only then can dance operate (similarly to psychoanalysis) to create a new subject.

9.5 The Next Joyce My look at dance through a (Lacanian) psychoanalytic lens raises one more question: what are we defending against when we leave dance out of discussions of the arts in general, why do we not talk of dance, or—to put it more psychoanalytically—what would it mean if dance received the same quality and quantity of thought as the other arts? My answer to that is, were we to pay more attention to dance, we’d have to acknowledge the deficits in ourselves, in society, and in our cultural institutions. We’d have to acknowledge that our (general cultural) focus on our lack and our need to fill it have privileged very specific ways of being, sets of skills, and experiences, and the result is that we’re not  In this way, dance is indirectly connected to the “new signifier” of Joyce, which marks his sinthome and “has no sense” and is directly connected to the real. Verhaeghe and Declercq, “Lacan’s Analytic Goal,” 19.

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only still far from the wholeness we desire, but we’re also creating divisions in places they needn’t exist. I also suggest that dance’s ability to reveal these divisions is why understanding dance as a sinthome and how to translate that into a clinical setting is important. Avoiding the real is impossible for everyone, but especially for the psychotic. Robert Freedman posits that schizophrenia involves a neuronal process that is defined by a combination of a sensory gating deficit and a miscategorization of sensory data.48 Sensory gating is the process whereby most people can tune out extraneous stimuli, and with a sensory gating “deficit,” people are particularly sensitive to their environments and notice more stimuli than the average person. In relation to Lacan, I argue that what this means is that given a traumatic environment, someone who has this deficit cannot help but experience far more stimuli, which play out in the body as irruptions of the real. Far from being a “deficit,” however, I see a link between experiences that threatens to overwhelm one and experiences that can be harnessed to challenge the symbolic. In Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker chronicles the lives of a family in which six of the twelve children develop schizophrenia. He tests (some of ) them for their sensory gating abilities. Those with schizophrenia do show a sensory gating deficit, but so does at least one of the others.49 That “other” is an event coordinator and owns an event-planning company; she also works to challenge the stigma of schizophrenia. Something, perhaps, protected her from schizophrenia just as Lacan argues something protected Joyce. One theory (mine) is that she found a way to contain her (traumatic and real) experiences.50 Just as John Frosch argues dreams, in addition to at times

 The Madness within Us: Schizophrenia as a Neuron Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 35. 49  Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2020), 244. 50  It is interesting (to me) to note that this “other” also took ballet; however, with only the account of her life as offered by Kolker, I will not theorize the role of dance in her life, even if it fits with my argument. She also was in long-term therapy and had someone to help “integrate” her trauma. Hidden Valley Road, 150, 193–98. 48

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presaging psychotic breaks,51 are (also) protective because they bind psychotic elements so one can live in reality, this person (like Joyce) found a creative way to exist with the real rather than become overwhelmed by it. In other words, the sensory gating deficit is not always a deficit; the same deficiency that is associated with psychosis is also linked to creative achievement and giftedness.52 The consensus is merely that deficient sensory gating helps one to see more, notice more, and make more connections. In the context of a trauma (such as the non-father) or the lack of a container or someone who can help one make sense of one’s experience of noticing more (noticing too much), deficient sensory gating may lead to a psychotic break. If, however, we nurture the abilities to see more before the extra stimuli overwhelm someone, then maybe those same qualities can turn into something that will challenge the symbolic in more a permanent way. Alternatively, if we do not value the irruptions of the real, if we—as a culture, as a world—do not see the promise in those who are pre-psychotic, then we may lose out on a creativity and divergent knowledge that (I claim) is necessary to alter the world in a way that does not always threaten to revolve back into the master’s discourse. We lose out on the next Joyce, for example.

51  “Severe Regressive States during Analysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 15, no. 3 (1967): 614, https://doi.org/10.1177/000306516701500307. Frosch’s belief is in the quality of the dream rather than the content, and he avoids referencing nightmares specifically, instead referring to those dreams that have markedly “real and vivid quality.” Ibid., 611. Mack argues that Frosch suggests dreams in which psychosis-related material is present and which occur “prior to the onset of psychosis may reflect an effort to prevent the illness or master the conflict.” Mack, “Dream and Psychosis,” 208. 52  One study has shown that gifted children in fact show stronger P50 suppression than their peers, which would suggest my hypothesis is inaccurate. See T. Liu, T. et al., “Sensory Gating, Inhibition Control and Child Intelligence: An Event-Related Potentials Study,” Neuroscience 189 (2011): 250–57, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2011.05.009. (P50 is a measurement of sensory gating; stronger P50 suppression correlates to a better ability to filter out stimuli.) This may, however, be a problem with the gifted definition: Darya L. Zabelinea et al. have shown “leaky” sensory gating may lead to enhanced creativity. “Creativity and Sensory Gating Indexed by the P50: Selective versus Leaky Sensory Gating in Divergent Thinkers and Creative Achievers,” Neuropsychologia, 69 (2015): 77–84, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.01.034. The participants for the first study (Liu et  al.) were selected from a “Gifted Youth Class” that focuses only on scientific domain giftedness and excluded anyone with psychiatric disorders (and participants were not screened for prior exposure to trauma).

10 Beyond Psychosis

My arguments are not just relevant for those at risk of psychosis. The elements I’ve discussed that exist in dance and Joyce’s writing (and, of course, in psychoanalysis) can create possibilities for everyone. Yet, for dance to be a sinthome, one needs a sinthome. Dance, as I have shown, can be a sinthome, but I focused more on psychosis and dance’s relationship to elements within psychoanalytic theory that help the psychotic bear the ex-istence of the real. There is, as well, a relationship to the ethical act (sinthomic or psychoanalytic). Thus, it’s possible dance may lead to an act of becoming a subject regardless of one’s psychic structure. That is to say, even if one does not need a sinthome, dance is still a creative process and can thereby help develop creativity and offer new thoughts to think with, and this is especially urgent in our time of societal division, conflict, and polarization that strikes me as psychotic. As we try to grapple with the unravelling of society, unless we have a way of understanding the role of symbolic order, we only reinforce the status quo. We risk thinking we are changing things, only to have them return to the way they were. Like any good analytic conversation (or dance), what I have argued isn’t the end of a discussion about dance and psychoanalysis. There is more say, and things can always be looked at in a new light.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Sherritt, Dancing an Embodied Sinthome, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7_10

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10.1 Dance and Neurosis Dance, regardless of one’s psychic structure, still offers the dancer contained access to the real and the support to learn how to play with the real and develop creativity; however, with less of a drive to live, there is less of a use for dance as a sinthome; maybe it is then that dance becomes communication or representation, for example. Examining dance’s possibilities in neurosis brings us back to my previous discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement. If we accept BLM as an irruption of the real into the NBA, then it appears we address this crack by covering it with and interpolating it into the symbolic. What psychosis shows us is that covering over the real with the symbolic does not always work as in psychosis there is no possibility of covering over the cut; it is, therefore, by exploring psychosis that we can learn a new way to handle the real, not to fashion a sinthome (because we do not need one), but to play with the irruptions of the real rather than cover over the cuts. Pite exemplifies this. She uses dance to encourage us to see things differently, even when mired in the symbolic and operating under the name-­ of-­the-father (I presume), so we can come to see clearly the culture we are embedded in, then choose if and how to shift how we do things. The world needs a symbolic, but often one’s role within it is determined by the desire of the other. The possibility of dance for the neurotic is that one may see the role of the desire of the other and then see other possibilities, such as the (impossible) possibility of being true to one’s own desire (or being true to the fact that one’s desire is always somewhat unknowable). We need ways to dance in and open to new possibilities both for the world and for creating one’s role in it rather than blindly accepting (or seeking) the desire of the other. Yet, we need a symbolic, and we need each other. Without a symbolic there is only chaos or a confusion of voices and sensations. Lacan knows how we need all aspects of the psyche to work together. He also knows that some people are in danger of having the psyche splinter apart, and for the latter group, new solutions are essential; for everyone else, dance offers new possibilities despite abiding by the law of the name-of-the-father. What dance offer for most people is not essential but is still very much needed.

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When De Cuyper and Dulsster write of the power of dance, they refer to dance as a sinthome initially occurring as an isolated process, but from there, they argue it is an escabeau, or Lacan’s stepping stone, in that it creates a social bond once the dansêtre “shows himself to others and receives social recognition.”1 They go on to add that this relational component may also help others experience a similar phenomenon, vicariously, by creating material that others (or at least other dancers) can use to develop their own singularity. While I agree the embodied sinthome of dance may create a social bond for the dancer through the recognition received from others, or even through the connections of the audience to the real as it appears in dance, I believe that De Cuyper and Dulsster’s second point— about these relationships also helping others to develop their own sinthomes—is slightly misguided as not everyone needs a sinthome, and the sinthomic discourse does not map well to the culture at large. Where I see the benefit of dance as an escabeau (in the way they describe) is in how dance can be of benefit for those who do not need a sinthome or those who exists in neurosis not psychosis yet who have to deal with a world that is becoming increasingly psychotic itself, a world in which all nuance is lost and people are seen as their words, beliefs/actions, or associates. Dance as a stepping stone would then mean that it helps non-psychotics to reimagine the possibilities, to see more clearly the name-of-the-father and, therefore, to challenge the symbolic structure. Dance for neurosis may also, then, help us see our own limitations. Language, as relational, consists of elements that have no inherent/external meaning. It’s not the signifier that matters. We can ban all the words we want, but until we address the relationships that underlie the meanings of those words, we can’t really change things: we only shift the signifiers along in their chain. Yet, while the symbolic creates each of us (making us believe in an “I”), we also create it as well; therefore, maybe we can shift it. If we accept that our desire is always somewhat unknowable, then we can begin to see the symbolic that we are immersed in and, thus, evaluate it. If more of us can do that by playing with the real— through dance or analysis or however else this might arise—then we can shift the symbolic, even if only temporarily and still governed by the  “The Dancing Being.”

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name-of-the father (or a new law). This shift can then provide (temporary) change, which itself can promote new ideas and further creativity. Psychosis and neurosis are often considered to exist on a spectrum, yet for Lacan, there are vastly different. Jacques-Alain Miller’s concept of “ordinary psychosis” has, thus, always seemed a little specious to me. However, it may be that ordinary psychosis does exist if we recognize that there is a biological basis for psychosis that does not always manifest based on the environment: that Joyce’s father who was not a father to him was the point of foreclosure, but that other people may have fathers who are fathers and therefore are protected from psychosis. In this sense, “ordinary psychosis” would be a non-foreclosed name-of-the-father pre-­ psychosis or, rather, would describes those who never learn to play but are still operating under the name-of-the-father. The subject of this ordinary psychosis would not need a sinthome, exactly, but could maybe benefit from an analytic (or dance) environment that offers more support, as the traditional psychoanalytic act may be “impossible” for them (at least initially). Dance gets at what it means to be human, to fully experience our drives without needing to cover them over. Only once we stop covering them over, can we see what connects us, and only then can we effectively operate in reality and not merely via repetition compulsion or according to whatever fantasy we have created. Dance is a cultural creation that relies on the real, linking the two. The creativity of dance for the non-­ psychotic comes from how dance can show us we are not fated to live according to the desire of the other. Seeing things differently gives those who are operating under the name-of-the-father an option: we can search for answers we know must exist, with each generation building in incremental steps upon the knowledge of the generations before and changing tack at each barrier to “knowledge,” or we can accept the uncertainty within reality and, thereby, see other possibilities, possibilities that don’t rely on what we already know.

11 Weaving an Impossible

Lacan saw how interwoven the three elements of the psyche are; all are required equally for the psyche to operate in the more common mode (neurosis). Potentially, Lacan focuses on the real and symbolic because if the imaginary does “slip away,” the untied symbolic is the only element left through which the real can reveal itself. However, Lacan’s more important point is how Joyce fashions a knot that keeps the psyche—all aspects of it—together. That is, his focus is not on those lost to psychosis, but on those who learn to live when the name-of-the-father is unavailable to them. Therefore, the importance for us about Lacan’s sinthome is not in prescribing techniques to treat psychosis. There are too many unknowns within psychosis, including competing psychological, biological, and familial theories, and it may be that for anyone whose psyche has become completely undone, then the psyche can never be retied. Yet his theory is also not entirely about preventing psychosis. It is impossible for anyone “untriggered” yet predisposed to psychosis to choose to create a sinthome. Instead, then, Lacan’s ideas are important in that he identifies a sinthome, a way those who have foreclosed on the law may be driven to find a new way to live. His seminar helps us better understand psychosis and the experiences of those who live at risk of psychosis. It’s up to us to translate that into in a clinical application. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Sherritt, Dancing an Embodied Sinthome, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7_11

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Some may consider my re-interpretation of Lacanian theory as a perversion (père-version?) of his ideas. But I asked in Chap. 1, “what might we gain if rather than looking at Lacan’s seminars and other works as information, we look that them as processes?” When seen as information, his seminars contribute to a desire for mastery: we think we can discern his intent and meaning and, therefore, come to “know” Lacanian theory. When seen as processes, we can see his seminars as his own process for working through his ideas with others (in relationship with others), contradicting and correcting himself and showing us (not telling us) how to think differently or live with uncertainty. As processes, his seminars are (and he is) teaching us how to “be” in ways that challenge the phallic function or how to come to think as an analysand or analyst does, and my book is the culmination of that teaching and my own process for thinking through the relationships among Lacan, psychosis, and dance. Lacan uses Joyce to push forward his own theory; he is not analyzing Joyce. He is, I suspect, trying to articulate how the sinthome is not the hysteric’s discourse (that is, why Joyce is not hysterical) and how one can nonetheless articulate question of meaning and truth without the signifier. In other words, Joyce shows Lacan how one can maintain a relationship to language without a signifier or phallus to tie it to: Joyce makes language work for him rather than on him. In this way, Lacan uses Joyce to illustrate how to accomplish the psychoanalytic act—or something akin to it: the sinthomic act as I distinguish it—without the objet a as the object cause of desire. This process, as I have argued, suggests the need for a fifth discourse (or sixth if you include the capitalist discourse), one that does not risk a return to the master’s discourse (nor, for that matter, any of the others) because it introduces a new term. The analyst occupies the space of the sinthome (surrounding feminine jouissance). If the end point of analysis is the psychoanalytic act, then for the psychotic, the sinthome is a necessary precondition for any ethical act. The real must be bound before it can be embraced. Once the analysand becomes his own sinthome, once the analysand “does” this, he also incarnates himself as a subject. In other words, when at risk of psychosis, one can commit a sort­of psychoanalytic act that does not require the psychoanalytic act, thus my use of the ethical act, which can encompass both the sinthomic act and the psychoanalytic act.

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Dancers, however, are not guaranteed mental health nor the ability to knot their own sinthomes purely through their participation in dance. I am not arguing that dance, unlike writing as shown with Joyce, will provide the means for reconnecting and de-centring the psyche; I only argue that the processes Joyce uses and the elements that contribute to his sinthome exist inherently within dance more so than within writing, and in this way, parallels exist between dance and what happens within the psychoanalytic clinic. The idea of using language—the prototypical example of the symbolic—to deal with the real is a misapplication or misrecognition of Lacanian theory.1 Joyce uses language and writing to create a sinthome because that’s what he knows. Joyce employs language to mirror his experiences of the real and to play with the real, using language’s rhythm and cadence, etc., as he experiences it in his body—as it in-sists upon him—binding these experiences within written works so they do not upend his existence. He inhabits the potential space of fear-pleasure that is characteristic of the paradox of play. Joyce uses language (or a semblance of it), but I argue that dance inherently possesses the elements of this sinthome more than other arts: dance is the intertwining of the imaginary, symbolic, and real amid a structure that limits the real while teaching one to play with it. Dance intrinsically offers the opportunity to play with the mirror image and with elements of the real (containing and binding them) as experienced in the body, and in that play, paradox can exist rather than having everything contradictory collapse into an undifferentiated whole. Dance is the potential space that allows for the development of play. Joyce could play with language. Not everyone can play, and this is particularly true of the psychotic. Dance teaches one to play, and playing needs to happen if one is to do the work that embraces creativity or leads to a new choreography of being. When one learns to  I do think the arguments that focus on the sinthome and language are recognizing something unstated in Lacan. That Joyce’s specific sinthomic process was linguistic does matter for Lacan, much more than it matters to Joyce. Joyce’s writing (and his use of the materiality of language to communicate a sense of the real) means we (i.e., us, as readers or Lacan’s seminar audiences) have a chance to experience the overwhelming feeling of the real impinging upon us without a symbolic to make it understandable. Thus, Joyce’s use of language also means Lacan has a non-patient example (Lacan never did give case studies) to help teach others about the sensations of the real. If Lacan had tried to use Nijinsky (or a dancer in general), Lacan wouldn’t have been able to convey the sense of the real as easily as he can by using Joyce. 1

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dance, one is thrust into the play of the other (that is, of the choreographer), creating a safe space in which to learn to play, where one knows any “surprises” or intrusions of the real have been successfully experienced by others. Over time, the repetition of embodying someone else’s play can teach one how to play and, thereby, how to experience the real and the lack. Dance, thus, teaches one to play through a creative engagement that brings together the real and the imaginary, tying them to the symbolic. The real is tied to the symbolic, and dance is a part of the symbolic; dance, however, allows for expression without the demand characteristic of communication that normally accompanies writing. This version of entwining thereby allows one to inhabit the potential (middle) space between the imaginary and real and creates a different jouissance from that associated with the phallus, one which in turn creates the possibility of meaning, but without the ascription of meaning. It creates the possibility of metaphor, but possibility as only possibility. A possibility of an impossible, of living without the name-of-the-father and living in the world when at every turn that world threatens to upend itself. That dance is a sinthome but does not guarantee the formation of one helps us to understand dance in general, and dance’s ability to link the real, symbolic, and imaginary thereby gives us a language in which to talk about dance. In terms of aesthetics, dances incorporate the whole psyche. The “art” of dance is that it puts us—as dancers or as audience—in contact with the real, a bearable real and a bearable jouissance. Although Lacan does not endorse this view of dance as a sinthome, his theory has helped me understand how dance can present a new way to identify with the image of oneself. This is, however, also why the mirror is occasionally seen as a “problem”: we see our deficits, and some people cannot step outside of this belief in the “I.” However, the mirror also offers the chance to step beyond it, to step beyond an ego-ideal and see one’s image with its concomitant yet inherent fragmentation. Lombardi argues that among the psychoanalytic theories of schizophrenia that are still relevant today is Bion’s “distinction between the psychotic and the non-psychotic areas” that “are present in everyone, from those who are phenomenological psychotic to those who are

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considered generally sane and integrated with reality.”2 Although Bion articulated his idea prior to Lacan’s theorization of the sinthome, this idea of everyone having elements of the psychotic psyche within them is decidedly important for understanding my argument about how the sinthome is not a solution for all. If we can accept that we are all a little psychotic—in part because the world changes and old explanations no longer work or because we are still internally structured by a symbolic law of the name-of-the-father, yet the external world changes, structured by new laws we cannot comprehend—then we can see how the theory behind the sinthome may benefit us all. Lear offers a suggestion of how this might appear: “Challenges build up, there is ever more pressure to explain things in the traditional ways, yet there is an inchoate sense that the old ways of explaining are leaving something unsaid. And yet one doesn’t yet have the concepts with which to say it.”3 Although Lear discusses the Crow and what they experienced as their traditional ways of understanding the world were taken from them, his idea applies equally to us today. We can no longer use our old concepts to explain and understand what is happening in the world. Thus, we need new solutions and ways to envision new possibilities.4 This is why dance is important: everything I have argued about the sinthome and the necessity of the real and the body as opposed to language—even the concepts of containing and the potential space that Lacan never mentions—all of those elements are in Lacanian theory, even if unspoken. But it was only because I dance that his comment about condansation and dance struck me as important and I decided to look at Lacan via dance. And only then could I see the possibilities embedded in  Lombardi, Body-Mind Dissociation, 9.  Radical Hope, 78. 4  You may be wondering, if life in general is seemingly “psychotic” now, what’s happening in dance? It all comes down to what I have said about how dance can be a sinthome but does not have to be one; people can remain caught in the image in the mirror or in focusing on perfection. Fashioning a sinthome, through dance or any other medium, entails a lot of work and pain and suffering, aspects that we are often inclined to avoid. Mark Morris notes that what is happening in the world is paralleled in the dance world today generally: dance has “reconservatized” and re-established a divide between intellectual and artistic dance opposed to entertainment and a way to kill time—in other words, dance is returning to old concepts rather than working to create new ones. Mark Morris and Wesley Stace, Out Loud: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2019), 330–33. 2 3

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his arguments. Dance offers a different relationship to the real and a different way to think, opening us to new possibilities for how to be. When psychology or psychoanalysis looks to the arts, researchers often ask, what is the purpose or aim or message the art conveys? But what if dance’s “purpose” is not to be useful as theory (as a method of healing, for example) nor even in theory (by making social commentary or giving release, for example)? What if its “use” is that it functions as a support to teach us about being human because it encapsulates what it means to experience being human? That is, dance elevates all aspects of the psyche in(to) an art and shows us how to live in possibility without needing to establish meaning. It might be that we see the elements of aesthetics as unity, lines, tones, symmetry, etc., because we are stuck in the symbolic when really aesthetics is closer to what Immanuel Kant argues when he explicates the intuitive aspect of aesthetics: the experience of the raw sense data when removed from our cognition and sensibilities of it5 or, rather, the beauty of being human with (infinite) possibilities.

 “Transcendental Aesthetic.”

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Index1

A

Act, 49, 84 act vs. doing, 145 creative act, 83, 162, 191 ethical act, 60n85, 126, 137, 144, 150, 151, 151n37, 168n89, 190, 191, 191n14, 205, 210 psychoanalytic act, 7, 20, 49–53, 50n52, 52n58, 52n61, 53n68, 55, 81, 89, 92, 115, 126, 131, 137, 150–152, 150n36, 151n37, 175, 189, 190, 192, 205, 208, 210 sinthomic act, 150–153, 150n36, 190, 192, 205, 210 Aesthetics, 6, 9, 11, 16, 71n15, 80, 90, 134n25, 154, 158n51, 172, 173, 176, 196n26, 200, 201, 212, 214

Aethereal, 91, 191 Affect, 3, 9n19, 10, 16, 36n14, 67, 70, 74, 76–78, 90, 151, 155, 155n44, 157–159, 159n57, 183, 191, 192, 195 emotion, 7, 9n19, 36n14, 67, 71, 71n15, 101, 164 Ambiguity, 3, 12, 21, 97, 99, 102, 102n112, 126n6, 128, 129, 131, 132, 153, 201 Arts, the, 3–5, 7–10, 9n19, 12n26, 13, 16, 36, 36n14, 64, 71n15, 86, 87, 88n68, 89, 91, 99, 106, 107, 112n12, 116, 133, 134n25, 135n29, 139, 145, 159, 172, 173, 173n101, 191, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 211, 212, 214

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Sherritt, Dancing an Embodied Sinthome, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42327-7

233

234 Index

109, 135, 156, 159, 184, 189, 194, 195, 197, 198, 200, 203, 203n52, 205, 206, 208, 211

B

Ballet, 6, 59n83, 100, 104, 106, 127, 128, 129n15, 130, 202n50 Beauty/beautiful, 6, 10, 137, 174, 179, 180, 182, 214 Bind/binding, see Containing/ contained/container/ containment Black Swan, The (film), 59, 59n84, 79n39, 112, 127, 129n15, 141 Borromean knot, 1, 10, 29, 35, 47, 48, 192 C

Choreography, 7, 12–15, 18, 36, 60, 60n85, 61, 64, 94, 100, 103, 105n123, 180, 200, 201, 211 Condansation, 1–3, 199–200, 201, 213 Condensation, 199 Containing/contained/container/ containment, 10, 23, 26, 33, 41, 60, 67, 67n8, 77n38, 81, 83, 86, 87, 93, 95, 96, 100, 101, 106, 109, 122, 133, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 164, 168, 169, 171, 191, 192, 194, 196, 197, 201–203, 206, 211, 213 as bind/binding, 1–5, 61, 71–74, 76–79, 81, 83–86, 93, 95, 96, 98, 105, 107, 113, 115, 120, 129, 130, 135–137, 143, 144, 151, 152, 157, 183, 185, 203, 211 Creativity, 6, 7, 16, 64, 73, 75, 76, 80n45, 81–83, 87, 89, 93, 96,

D

Dance therapy, 9n19, 183–186, 183n133 Dansêtre, 10, 11, 154, 169, 169n96, 207 Death drive, 34, 59, 92, 133, 144, 169, 177 Différance, 125, 199 Discourse, 13, 24, 115, 137, 189, 207, 210 analyst’s discourse, 49, 50, 53, 53n68, 89, 142, 150n36, 169n97 master’s discourse, 49, 52n60, 89, 116, 142, 152, 155, 171, 190, 191, 193, 194, 203, 210 sinthomic discourse, 150, 207 Dreams/dreaming/dream work, 72, 72n17, 73n22, 74n24, 77n38, 81, 87, 96, 97, 99, 109, 145, 160n62, 196–198, 202, 203n51 E

Embodied sinthome, 5, 112–114, 126, 139–186, 207 Emotion, see Affect Enjoyment, 55, 82, 98, 114, 116, 131, 134n25 See also Jouissance Ephemeral, 12, 91, 92, 121

 Index 

235

F

J

Feminine jouissance, 57 Finnegans Wake, 18, 46, 64, 95–98, 110, 121, 122, 140, 160n62, 175 Foreclosure, 25, 40, 41, 43, 43n35, 44n40, 45, 53, 82, 143n13, 166, 208 Fosse, Bob, 15, 37, 37n16, 61n87, 64, 94, 99–104, 106, 107, 116, 117, 141, 175, 182, 182n132 Fragmentation, 41, 46, 66, 67, 69, 71, 78, 95–97, 110, 115, 129, 157, 166, 177, 177n108, 192, 212

Jazz (dance), 6 Jouissance, 10n24, 30, 45, 48, 60, 141, 142, 194, 197, 212 feminine jouissance, 44n40, 47, 50, 54n72, 55–59, 64, 83, 88–94, 90n77, 98, 99, 102, 103, 112–116, 113n16, 115n20, 125, 126, 132–134, 143–145, 152, 160, 169, 169n96, 188n7, 192, 198, 199, 201, 210 other jouissance, 98, 126n8, 133, 136, 169 phallic jouissance, 47, 52n60, 53, 55–59, 90n77, 93, 98, 99, 114–116, 115n20, 125, 126, 126n8, 155, 162, 169n96, 177, 188, 188n7, 198 surplus jouissance, 54, 125 Joyce, James, 2–5, 9n22, 15, 17–23, 18n3, 25–27, 39, 39n24, 42, 43, 46–48, 48n47, 49n50, 57, 58, 61, 61n87, 63–65, 71, 72, 83, 85, 86, 90, 90n77, 93, 95–99, 104, 106, 107, 109–117, 119–123, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136n31, 140–143, 143n14, 147, 149, 150, 154, 154n43, 159–161, 160n62, 161n66, 173n101, 175, 177, 186, 188, 190–192, 197, 197n33, 201–203, 201n47, 205, 208–211, 211n1 Joyce, Lucia, 95, 111n8, 119–123, 119n1, 119n2, 121n4

I

Imaginary, the, 1, 4, 20, 25, 29, 30, 31n4, 33–37, 41–45, 43n35, 47–49, 51, 51n55, 54–58, 54n72, 61, 66, 79, 81, 83, 85, 98, 101, 110–112, 116, 116n21, 130, 131n16, 132–134, 141, 145, 152, 155, 156, 160, 162n72, 163, 172, 173, 175, 177, 186, 188, 193, 193n17, 194, 199, 209, 211, 212 Impossible/impossibility, 4, 5, 14, 20, 34, 34n11, 49, 52n58, 55, 56, 58, 58n81, 60n85, 98, 116, 125, 126, 131, 131n20, 132, 141, 141n3, 142, 151, 152, 156, 160, 180, 187, 189, 190, 193, 194n23, 198, 202, 206, 208, 209–214 Indigenous dance, 170

236 Index L

Language, 2–4, 7n8, 10, 11, 13, 17–26, 18n3, 32–39, 41–43, 45, 46, 50, 58, 63, 76, 88n68, 90n76, 92, 93, 95–97, 97n93, 103, 109–114, 111n8, 121, 140, 141, 141n3, 143, 154, 154n43, 159, 160, 160n62, 162n71, 163, 165n83, 170n98, 171, 172, 175, 180, 181, 191, 197–199, 197n33, 207, 210–213, 211n1 Linguistics, 15, 18, 24 M

Madness, 86, 107, 120, 122, 127, 182 Meaning/meaninglessness, 8, 9n22, 10, 17–22, 18n3, 24–26, 32, 35, 38, 40–43, 45, 48, 50, 52n60, 54, 58, 72, 74, 76, 80, 82–84, 93, 96–98, 102, 106, 107, 107n128, 110n5, 112, 113, 121, 123, 131, 140, 142, 154, 162, 169, 173, 178, 179, 182, 195, 197n33, 201, 207, 210, 212, 214 Merger, 15, 41, 44, 46, 68, 93, 97, 98n95, 103, 114, 116, 136, 141, 154, 164, 192, 199, 201 Metaphor, 3, 7, 24, 32, 39–42, 43n35, 45n41, 47, 48, 51, 55, 58, 74, 83, 110, 113, 134, 135, 140, 174, 195, 201, 212 Metonymy, 42, 43n35 Mirror/mirroring, 5, 26, 30–32, 31n3, 43n35, 58, 61, 64–71,

71n15, 78–81, 79n39, 80n45, 85–87, 93, 95, 96, 96n92, 98–100, 105, 105n123, 109, 116n21, 120, 122, 126, 127, 129, 130, 135, 137, 153n42, 155, 164, 166–169, 166n86, 171, 173, 183, 191, 211, 212, 213n4 as reflect/reflecting/reflection, 66–68, 77n38, 78, 80, 88n68, 100, 120, 122, 135n28, 167, 170, 174, 181n128 Moebius strip, 58, 59, 96n91, 135 Music, 8, 36n14, 39, 71, 88, 88n68, 89, 112n12, 134n25, 137, 173n101, 184, 185, 185n139, 191 N

Name-of-the-father, 2, 21, 23–25, 23n10, 31n4, 32, 39–41, 44–49, 44n40, 48n47, 51, 53, 54n72, 55, 58, 66, 68, 71, 81, 85, 90, 98, 111n8, 113–115, 125, 132, 134, 140–142, 143n13, 144, 146, 152, 174, 177, 188, 190, 192, 192n15, 193, 198–200, 206–209, 212, 213 Neurotic/neurosis, 15, 30, 31n3, 32, 40, 42n31, 45–47, 49, 51, 53–55, 58, 66, 69, 103, 112, 126n8, 150, 155n45, 157n50, 169n97, 189, 189n11, 190, 192, 194, 206–208 Nightmares/night terrors, 72–74, 160n62, 190, 196, 197, 203n51

 Index  O

Oedipus complex, 32, 40, 45, 47, 51, 55, 141, 142 P

Paradox, 10, 10n24, 58, 59, 64, 79, 88–94, 88n70, 98, 102, 122, 123, 133–135, 133n23, 164, 165, 172–174, 178, 211 Pathology/pathological, 13, 72, 74, 127, 131, 131n17, 161, 194n23 Performance, 13, 91, 92, 99, 121, 127, 128 Pite, Crystal, 6, 92, 92n82, 98n95, 155n44, 178–181, 179n121, 206 Play, 5, 16, 22–24, 26, 61, 79–87, 79n40, 89, 93, 95–99, 101, 103, 106, 109, 112–116, 120, 122, 125, 126, 130, 132, 133–135, 136n31, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 153, 155, 156, 161, 164, 166, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178, 180, 182–184, 186, 190, 194, 195, 197, 198, 202, 206–208, 211, 212 Poetry/poetic(s), 4, 22, 65, 79n40, 112n12, 161, 191, 195 Polunin, Sergei, 104, 104n117, 105n123, 106n127, 129, 180, 182 Possibility, 64, 65n1, 74, 75, 78, 82, 83, 85, 98, 106, 107, 110, 111, 126, 126n6, 126n8, 129, 131, 133, 134n25, 135n28, 136, 137, 143, 144, 146, 182, 189, 195, 199

237

Potential space, 26, 61, 76, 109, 120, 122, 126n6, 129, 130, 133, 135, 135n28, 145, 153, 211, 213 as dream space, 72, 73, 75, 145 as transitional space, 72, 75 Psychosis, 1–6, 14–16, 18n3, 21, 23n10, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 36, 46–48, 53–55, 60, 63–65, 67–70, 69n12, 72, 73, 73n22, 77n38, 78, 79, 82–85, 87, 93, 95–98, 96n92, 107, 110, 110n4, 111, 111n10, 113, 114, 116, 119, 126n8, 127, 129, 130, 132, 148n29, 149, 149n33, 149n35, 150, 153, 154, 154n43, 157–160, 158n55, 163–165, 173, 177, 182, 183, 190, 192, 193n16, 194, 198, 201, 203, 203n51, 205–210 R

Reality (as opposed to the real), 33, 35, 45, 51n55, 73, 95, 99, 104, 110, 113, 114, 116, 135, 141, 155n45, 169, 174, 195, 203 Real, the (Lacanian), 1, 4, 5, 10, 11, 14, 16–21, 23–27, 29, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 48, 51, 54, 56, 57, 60, 61, 65, 68, 69, 71–87, 71n15, 88n68, 90, 92, 93, 95–106, 97n93, 98n95, 109–116, 110n5, 119, 120, 122, 125, 126, 137, 141, 143, 144, 153, 162, 168, 169, 171, 173–178, 180, 187–193, 194n23, 196, 199, 202, 207–209, 211, 211n1

238 Index

Reflect/reflecting/reflection, see Mirror/mirroring Repressed/repression, 40, 47, 51, 141, 142, 143n13, 155, 159 S

Schizophrenia/schizophrenic, 6, 10, 14, 26, 39, 41, 44, 63, 65, 68, 77, 84, 86, 95, 107n128, 119, 120, 148, 148n29, 148n30, 160n62, 163, 198, 202, 212 Semantics, 18, 20, 160 Silence, 38, 88, 88n68, 88n70, 160–165, 160n62, 161n68, 163n79, 165n83, 199 Symbolic, the, 1, 3–5, 18, 18n3, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32–37, 39, 41–43, 43n35, 47, 51, 51n55, 54–58, 61, 77, 81, 83, 89–93, 96, 97n93, 98, 99, 104, 111–115, 111n8, 119, 123, 130–134, 134n25, 141, 142, 145, 146, 146n23, 152–154, 159–163, 162n72, 170n98, 171–175, 177, 178, 180, 188, 192–195, 192n15, 193n16, 193n17, 193n18, 198, 199, 202, 203, 205–207, 209, 211–214, 211n1

T

Time, 8, 10, 12n26, 70, 76, 78–80, 82–85, 91, 92, 93n84, 97, 101, 103, 127, 134, 157, 158, 158n51, 166, 167, 172, 173, 178, 183, 185, 185n139, 192, 202 U

Unary trait, 31n4, 126 Uncertainty, 53, 80, 99, 123, 150n36, 161, 196, 208, 210 Unconscious (the), 9n19, 11, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 38, 47, 48, 50, 57, 72, 73, 87, 90, 90n76, 98, 143, 143n14, 149, 166, 167n88, 169, 173n101, 181n128, 189, 192, 195 W

Whole/wholeness, 30–32, 31n4, 40, 45, 49, 51, 51n55, 51n57, 52, 54–59, 55n77, 64–66, 68, 70, 78, 89, 144, 145, 155, 156, 176, 189, 202