Anxiety,Desire,and the Object a : Lacan on Lucia Tower’s “Countertransference”

The Seminars

Lacan’s seminars, collectively, were offered in the same spirit, and in my mind have the same status, as the performances of a working musician or artist developing in an unfolding series of moments of creation. Consider your favorite composer or jazz musician. Think of someone who has talent, is captivating, and pushes, over decades, the boundaries of his art. There’s an extensive body of work, a track record, an evolution and trajectory in what the artist cares about, focuses on, and produces—all of it carried forward in a singular style, which, of course, is inseparable from the work. Let’s say this musician has a regular gig at a local club. Every Wednesday night he pulls out his horn and lays it on the line. Sometimes he’s on, and sometimes not so much. When he is, there’s no one like him, and when he isn’t . . . well, you wish you’d stayed home.

Whatever the quality of experience on a given night, for the dedicated listener the nuances and subtle changes in the evolution of the art (and artist) come to matter more, and increasingly so, as our knowledge of this artist deepens. This is how I think of Lacan’s seminars, which cover a wide range of psychoanalytic topics and questions. ³ The seminars were not formally written out. Someone in the audience carefully transcribed the proceedings, not unlike Deadheads pulling out their audio recording equipment to capture every last note of every single Grateful Dead show for thirty years. Needless to say, some shows were not worth recording, but recorded they were. Lacan in fact performed his weekly gig for close to thirty years, with nearly every word recorded. The analogy fails in one key respect: He was teaching working analysts in these seminars, closely reading Freud especially, and many others secondarily, against a professional backdrop of an evolving and ultimately fractious Paris psychoanalytic scene (Turkle 1992).

Like Miles Davis’s late acoustic period (epitomized by the album Nefertiti in 1967), let’s say, far removed from Birth of the Cool (recorded in 1949) and before his going electronic in the early 1970s, Anxiety is a similar kind of way-station, as it is the harbinger of Lacan’s gathering preoccupation with the Real of the body and the drive, the centrality of the symptom, jouissance, surprise, and the like. Action and accident become far more central as the force of the symbolically structured world takes a back seat. At the same time, Anxiety harks back to a rereading of classical Freudian theory regarding anxiety, castration, and the difference between the sexes. While this seminar has some of the desultory feel of a weeknight performance, the argument, in fact, is built slowly and carefully. There are many twists and turns in it, leaving simple summary a challenge; there is always the risk with Lacan of chasing this twist and that turn and finding yourself behind the nightclub stage where you can’t see or hear the performance, or in a dingy bathroom where you can barely stand up. (I will do my best to avoid these unfortunate outcomes!)

The Seminar On Anxiety: Overview

Even those with little knowledge of Lacan’s work, let alone the development of his thought, have at least a vague sense that he was into language. “The unconscious is structured like a language,” he often repeated. The key word in this sentence is not “language” but “structure.” ⁴ For anyone interested in understanding something of Lacan’s overall project, of central importance is his deep engagement with the formal elements that together make up an overall structure, whether that structure is the nuclear family, a dictionary, a municipal or state government, a system of logic, or Freudian theory. ⁵ He called these structures, loosely, the Big Other. ⁶ Though Anxiety is a harbinger of what’s to come, one still finds in it this formal, structural impulse—his ongoing aim being to figure out what logically fits, or doesn’t fit, with what. (More on that in a moment.)

But here I want to emphasize that the topic of anxiety brings with it a far more visceral focus, as if Lacan’s sightline is palpably lower: on the body, anatomy, and the language of emotion (alas, and thankfully, we can never entirely avoid language). In places, there are direct descriptions of various “realities,” stuff that nowadays analysts discuss routinely, such as the love that exists between analyst and patient, and consideration of emotions such as turmoil and embarrassment. In this seminar, metaphor is not only metaphoric; Lacan stresses that metaphor is often directly tied to the body, “to the letter,” by which he means the literal body (e.g., heart, spleen, penis); action and acting out are seen as challenging, and at times exceeding, the analytic frame and the transference that establishes it.

In this seminar, the body, its parts, its remnants, are key objects of inquiry and even fascination, yet they remain, as is Lacan’s wont, embedded in a symbolic matrix, named and thereby cathected, both of the human symbolic realm and what is outside it. While the body—the Real—exceeds symbolic capture, it always sits in relation to this larger, enveloping structure. As mentioned, Lacan’s shorthand for these overarching structures is the Other with a capital O (or A in French for Autre). These symbolic structures precede our arrival into the world. We are, as Heidegger says, thrown into them, and are saturated by them. Each of us—from start to finish, from our beginning to our end—must grapple with and one way or another take a position in relation to the Big Other, starting with one’s family.

Anxiety explores many related themes, but its formal focus is that which the Other cannot contain, that which eludes/resists symbolization. Lacan calls this remainder, this piece, the object a, the little other: “We designate this object with a letter. This algebraic notation has its function. It’s like a thread designed to enable us to recognize the identity of the object behind the various incidences in which it appears to us” (p. 86). All representational systems fail in some measure to account for what they represent. There is always a constitutive, irreducible lack or incompleteness within the structure. This is why we have courts to adjudicate ambiguities in the law, and why patients can say to their analysts “I don’t think you have that quite right.” It’s also why we desire what we don’t have, and then struggle when we think we actually have it. This lack, this “piece” that is beyond representation, this cause of our desire, is what Lacan designates the a. ⁷

In the best of circumstances, the leftover unsymbolizable remnant is a cause for further symbolic elaboration. ⁸ In less optimal situations the subject’s relation to the symbolic order is impeded, causing anxiety—as we will see, anxiety neurosis is precisely about not having a place within the Other—and also trauma, repetitive symptoms, excesses of pain or pleasure (what Lacan termed jouissance). A kind of social or symbolic death can ensue.

There are many examples—“various incidences”—of this fact regarding formal structures—families, communities, governments—that necessarily leave a stain, a fault line, a remainder. Consider Lacan’s “excommunication” (briefly described earlier) from the IPA. Or King Lear’s banishment of Cordelia in order to keep his crumbling world “intact.” Frank Wilderson’s argument in Afropessimism (2020) relies on a similar logic and claim: “Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness: Blackness is social death: which is to say that there was never a prior meta-moment of plenitude, never equilibrium: never a moment of social life” (p. 102). Even Bion’s work on the way some groups function by generating a scapegoat can be read through this lens of structure maintaining itself through the requirement that there must be something it can’t contain (1961).

Symbolic Castration

Though in the paragraph above I emphasize the casualties of a lack of symbolic containment, in fact things we “can’t contain” or represent are not, usually and for the most part, failures; they are, instead, necessities that allow the structure to maintain itself as intelligible and the human subject to live generatively within it. Crucial to understand is that negation—lack, absence, incompleteness—is not inert; nor is it only an intrapsychic concept, as it is in Freud’s paper on the subject (1925). Typically, negation drives things forward (see Litowitz 1998). Consider Freud’s story of his grandson in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): his mother’s absence propels the small child into the human world as he begins to represent it with a wooden reel, string, and the phonemes fort! and da! In this sense, the absent object is generative, and the constitutive lack in any symbolic system is what allows the human subject, potentially, to take up a living place within it (see Wilson 2020, chap. 5).

The fort! da! is, arguably, the exemplary psychoanalytic story of the emergence of the human subject, as he/she/they begin to use symbolic tools to represent their experience. This is a logical as well as developmental moment: the object, in this case the mother, is lost as the child simultaneously—creatively, generatively—mediates this absence with human tools, symbols, and meaningful objects ready-to-hand. Lacan calls this moment symbolic castration, a subjective and cultural achievement that is not without difficulty, though the “knot of castration,” as Lacan calls it, is more easily loosened for the woman than for the man. ⁹ This difference is related to the following claim, one directly relevant to how Lacan glosses Tower’s paper: “Woman,” he asserts,

turns out to be superior in the domain of jouissance, on account of their bond with the knot of desire being much looser. Lack, the minus sign that stamps the phallic function for man and means that his nexus with the object has to pass via a negativizing of the phallus and the castration complex, the status of the (–phi) at the centre of man’s desire, all of that does not form a necessary knot for woman [p. 183].

The argument here is that the reality of the anatomical penis presents a certain problem for men that women do not confront. An extra step is required for a man to arrive at a specific ontological reality regarding “his own lack, (–phi), primary castration” (p. 199), to come to the liberating though painful fact that he doesn’t have what he thought he had. Lacan discusses the circumcision ritual as one instance of a human practice, reaching back many centuries, that literally performs the creation of the “little piece,” the object a, that must be paid for entry into a covenant with God. It’s a symbolic relation, through and through, that allows desire to circulate within God’s demands (namely, the Law). The argument is crystal clear here: symbolic castration is of an order different from that of anatomical castration. When he says, “Nothing is less castrating than circumcision” (p. 80), in addition to flashing his wit, he is stressing this crucial distinction between the dynamics of the symbolic machinery of man and the reductive and concrete reality of the loss of the anatomical penis. In places Lacan simplifies things by distinguishing between being and having the phallus—the former is related to a clinging to the concrete reality just mentioned, leading to a neurotic or perverse structure; the latter involves making the move into the symbolic use of the phallus as a signifier, a use available to any person, male, female, queer.

This basic difference in the knot of castration between men and women has important implications for the working analyst:

This simplified relationship with the desire of the Other is what allows women, when they apply themselves to our noble profession, to be with respect to this desire in a relationship that we can feel to be much freer, notwithstanding each particularity that they may represent in a relationship that is . . . essential. This is shown each time they broach the field confusingly labelled the field of countertransference. She possesses this greater freedom because she doesn’t clasp onto this relation to the Other as essentially . . . as men do, in particular in anything to do with jouissance [p. 183].

The evolution of Lacan’s theorizing as regards feminine sexuality is itself the subject of substantial scholarship. ¹⁰ As he asserts here, analysts who are women appear to be far freer to feel the potential range of emotional experience in analytic work than do men. Lacan does not mention Eissler in this regard, but the shoe obviously fits. Margaret Little, Barbara Low, and Lucia Tower all fall under this more liberatory umbrella.

Anxiety neurosis, also, is directly related to the struggle to make this move from being to having, and in the case of the neurotic one finds a failure to fully make it.

What the neurotic shrinks back from is not castration, but from turning his castration into what the Other lacks. He shrinks back from turning his castration into something positive, [and instead he acts as] . . . the guarantee of the function of the Other, this Other that steals away in the indeterminate echo of significations, this Other in which the subject no longer sees himself except as fate, but fate that has no end, fate that gets lost in the ocean of histories [p. 46].

This is a picture of inhibition and compliance with the Other’s demands—classic neurotic conflict—as if there is no space there to reply, to find meaningful tools to represent oneself, or to forge one’s own path. As if, in short, the Other is not lacking and so the subject has no place within it. This is what Lacan means, or at least one of the things he means, when he says that anxiety is caused by the object’s being too present. Consider a helicopter parent, or an insecure romantic partner, or an analyst who compulsively interprets the transference: each risks creating a kind of psychological claustrophobia in the person who is the object of such intense scrutiny. ¹¹

Finally, a bit more needs to be said about this little object, the a, the little piece that is necessarily sacrificed for entrance into the symbolic order. It is nothing, if directly pursued and sought after. We can never find it, because it is that elusive, alluring “thing” that conditions possibilities in meaning-making and desire. Within popular culture one finds any number of examples of the object a. In the film noir classic The Maltese Falcon, a statuette is imagined to be filled with jewels. In the end, it turns out to house nothing at all, yet it motivates all the action with which we had been so engrossed. As Sam Spade says of the “black bird”: “It’s the stuff dreams are made of.” ¹²

Lacan On Tower

What is immediately evident as Lacan begins his discussion of Tower is the fidelity with which he summarizes the clinical cases of the two men she describes in her paper. Interspersing verbatim quotations with clarifying summary, he glosses things sensitively so his audience can easily identify with her position as analyst. Early in his commentary he says: “We really need to read things in their innocence and freshness” (p. 193). The task here—the analytic task—is to meet Tower where she lives—her “prodigiously confid[ing] in a very profound avowal of her experience that she gives” (p. 149)—and to see what can be learned from an approach to her work that is nearly naked, unadorned. Here we glimpse an ethics of close reading: a rigorous effort to take account of textual effects and dynamics, to engage with the ethos of the author that shines through these effects, and, at the same time, to not impose an interpretive grid from without.

And yet, serious Freudian that he is, Lacan reads the specifics of the case of Patient #1 through the lens of castration, the lost object, sadism, and desire.

At this point we encounter the crucial, even irreducible, connection between the countertransference and desire, in this case the analyst’s desire: “At the end of the day, even the stoniest ears cannot fail to hear that, in the difficulty these authors [Margaret Little, Barbara Low, Lucia Tower] have in approaching countertransference, the problem of the analyst’s desire is what creates the obstacle . . .” (p. 149).

How desire and countertransference are linked could perhaps be better explained in Anxiety. Lacan is somewhat telegraphic here, so I’ll try to clarify the connection. ¹³ Tower herself writes early in her paper: “There is much that is obscure about our understanding of the vicissitudes and functions of the analyst’s libido in the treatment relationship” (p. 231).

And a little further on she notes:

I have for a very long time speculated that in many—perhaps every—intensive analytic treatment there develops something in the nature of countertransference structures . . . which are essential and inevitable counterparts of the transference neurosis. These countertransference structures may be large or small in their quantitative aspects, but in the total picture they may be of considerable significance for the outcome of the treatment. I believe they function somewhat in the manner of a catalytic agent in the treatment process [p. 232].

The obscurity of the “analyst’s libido in the treatment relationship” and Tower’s long-time speculation about what she calls “countertransference structures” together form the basis of her argument. And this is what Lacan latches on to. There are three steps involved in his answer to Tower’s inquiry:

For a good long time (a duration that she bemoans in retrospect) Tower struggles to find a flexible yet resilient position with Patient #1, whose passive dependency, mumbling speech, and subtle seductive maneuvers leave her overidentified with and worried about the patient’s wife, who she feels is a rival. Tower tells us: “This all came to a head about a year later. I had been getting both uneasy and frustrated with the monotonous masochistic and depressive character of this patient’s resistance. I suddenly had a dream which so startled me that it blotted out all recollection of what led up to it” (p. 245).

Before we get to the dream and its impact on Tower, let’s note the following: desire is clearly at work and is most obviously apparent when it is unsatisfied. In Tower’s case she is “uneasy and frustrated.” She is in a state of unsatisfied desire. She doesn’t tell us what it is she wants that she isn’t getting from Patient #1—in short, the conditions of satisfaction she was imposing on the patient—but we can say, for starters, that she wishes he not be so masochistic and depressive, that he be more active and assertive, even sadistic perhaps, and in any case more direct with her. While not exactly at an impasse with Patient #1—things are improving somewhat in his outside life—Tower feels stuck and unhappy.

Then she has her dream, in which, as we know, the patient’s wife invites her to their home, “seemed glad to have me, and was being most hospitable and gracious” (p. 245). Tower gives “very careful thought” to the dream and its implications for how she has been approaching the case. She sees that she has been caught in a particularly fixed view—an imaginary, rivalrous fantasy—about the patient and his wife. There are dynamic reasons for her getting stuck in this way, as she alludes to difficulties in her past, as well as certain pressures she feels from Patient #1. Her more mobile and open desire as an analyst, one in which a genuine steadiness might lead to more genuine analytic progress, had been for too long congealed into something more fixed, more projective, more rigidly wishful (i.e., that the wife come around to supporting the treatment, that the patient be less passive, etc.). Tower calls this state of desire a “countertransference neurosis” (p. 227).

Tower then tells us: “After I had given all of this very careful thought and felt fairly sure of my ground, I went into action” (p. 245). This I went into action means that her desire as an analyst has changed. Actions of this kind have aims and conditions of satisfaction; she has a far clearer idea now of what she is aiming at. Tower’s resolve, her intensity, her strength, are palpable. Most important, one feels her ethical commitment to the analytic act, an intervention the results of which can’t be predicted, and can only be experienced in the now-and-the-next of the work. This key moment in the paper I find deeply moving.

In Tower’s case, none of this is at all easy. She pays a price at the level of being in which she describes going to a vital edge in order to make a real difference to Patient #1: “I became very direct in discussing the aggression against his wife through the mechanism of his masochism, and his dependent hostility. . . . Following this, I discussed again and more actively his attempts to play off his wife and myself against each other, and how he had exaggerated and prolonged the bad marital situation for purposes of transference gratification . . .” (pp. 245–246). And the like.

Lacan calls this move a “rectification.” Through her taking hold of her desire as an analyst, she puts her patient’s desire back in its proper place:

And the patient was only able to translate this rectification, so it seems, in the following terms—his desire is much less lacking in sway over his analyst than he thought, and it is not ruled out that this woman, who is his analyst, might be made, up to a point, to bend to his desire—to stoop in English, to bend. She Stoops to Conquer, the title of a comedy by Sheridan. This is at least what Lucia Tower brings us in these terms. We can but trust her. . . . Through this rectification, which appears to him as a concession, an opening that is made for him, the patient’s desire is truly put back in its place. Now, the whole question is that he was never able to find his place. That’s what his anxiety neurosis is [p. 198].

In directly confronting Patient #1 Tower shows her desire, that she has been implicated and moved by the patient’s ongoing engagement with her, and in so doing signals to him that her desire has changed. Hence the possibility that her patient can begin to “find his place.” But the allusion to Sheridan’s comedy is perhaps too light a touch at this moment; in other places in his discussion Lacan assumes a far graver tone: “You have to read her to understand that from that moment on the analysis becomes particularly hard for her to bear. . . . Though she can’t see everything, she nevertheless knows how to name what’s involved. It is, she says, phallic sadism couched in oral language” (p. 195).

With Patient #1, what had been tedious and burdensome is now nothing short of high drama, high analytic drama:

What she encounters at that moment . . . is an outburst from her patient. This outburst puts pressure on her. She is subjected to scrutiny, scrutinized as one says in English, which makes her feel like she can’t make the slightest false move. She says that she’s being put to the test, cell by cell, and, if I were to fail to meet this test, he would fall apart.

What does this mean? Precisely that, having sought out the man’s desire, what she encounters from him by way of response is not a search for her desire but the search for a, for the object, the true object, for what’s at stake in desire, which isn’t the Other, but this leftover, the a. She sustains this search. This is what she refers to as developing a greater amount of masochism than she thought she had [p. 198].

The drama is one of Tower staying with her patient’s ongoing effort to find something in her that will plug up his lack, and solve the question of his desire. This is a question only he can answer. We don’t know precisely what her patient said to her, nor do we know what she said to him. What we do know is that he grinds away at her with great intensity, while at the same time undertaking “a comprehensive review of his entire development” (p. 246), which Tower goes on to explain in some detail. Lacan comments:

She copes extremely well, in spite of how exhausting it is. As the holidays approach, she’s feeling at a very low ebb. Fortunately, vacation time arrives and suddenly and amusingly she realizes that, after all, none of that is going on any longer now that the sessions have come to a stop. She shakes herself off and thinks about other things.

Why? Because she knows quite well that search as he might, he will never find anything. That’s precisely the point, for him to realize that there’s nothing to be found, because that which for the man, for male desire, forms the object of his search concerns no one, as it were, but him [p. 199].

One way to translate these ideas is to say that by inhabiting her desiring and therefore lacking position, Tower allows her patient to sustain his search for the lost object. It’s a sadistic search, one that partakes of a desperate kind of extraction. This is because his search for the object is for something that she doesn’t have and that doesn’t exist. It’s the a, the minus phi, the remnant of symbolic castration.

There are patients who want something indelible from the analyst, something, when all is said and all is done, beyond the commonplace human experiences that might endure in memories by turns salubrious and painful, and in identifications, “insights,” words said and not said, wishes perhaps partially granted and many certainly not—in short, the flickering stuff that lingers in post-analytic life, more holographic than anything we might call fixed, concrete, permanent. Tower’s Patient #1 is such a person. It is at this level of analytic engagement that Lacan is setting his sights regarding the take-home message here, one that has broad and enduring implications for what analysts can offer their patients and what they cannot.

“Let me tell you this,” he tells his audience, “and don’t get all worked up”:

she knows very well that she doesn’t lack anything. Or rather, that the mode by which lack plays a role in feminine development is not to be situated at the level at which the man’s desire is seeking it out, when what’s really involved is the sadistic search I stressed at the start of the year, which consists in making emerge what must be in the partner at the supposed place of lack.

This is what he has to grieve for. In the text she states very clearly that what they’re doing together is a work of mourning. He has to mourn ever being able to find in his partner—in so far as she has positioned herself as a female partner, without really knowing what she is doing—his own lack.

That is the object of today’s lesson. What he’s looking for is (–phi), what she lacks—but that’s men’s business [p. 199].