Beyond the Oedipus Complex

chapter 3 Beyond the Oedipus Complex Tracy McNulty In his seminars of the 1960s, Lacan proposes that the function of the symbolic must be sought not in the Oedipal prohibition and the social order to which it gives rise, but in a reexamination of the “discourse of the hysteric” that founds psychoanalysis by revealing the transformative potential of the signifier (or the symbolic function of speech) as distinct from the “imaginary” of the social bond: the norms, values, and ideals with which the ego identifies in order to repress the fragmented body of the drives. Lacan marvels that, after years of listening to hysterics, Freud can come up with nothing better than the Oedipus complex to make sense of their experience: “Why did Freud mislead himself to this extent? . . . Why does he substitute for the knowledge he gathers from all these mouths of gold – Anna, Emma, Dora – this myth, the Oedipus complex?”1 (Lacan 2007:99). As women who were not addressed by the prohibitions that metaphorize a man’s relation to the lack in drive (for example, the incest prohibition that identifies certain sexual objects as impossible or forbidden), Freud’s first hysterical patients were confronted with a jouissance not limited by the law. The fact that they were able to benefit from analysis, however, demonstrates that they encountered through the transference another modality of the symbolic, the elaboration of the signifying chain that functions to limit and constrain the jouissance of the symptom. The logic of the transference reveals that the assumption of castration is not solely a matter of internalizing the phallic laws of lack, but more fundamentally of encountering and assuming the lack in the Other, its structural decompletion. That there is no signifier for the singular and unsettling jouissance the subject experiences means there is a lack in the Other (in language as such), a defect in the signifier inasmuch as it cannot name – and so repress – that jouissance. Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) is a case Lacan returns to several times as he works out his own understanding of the 58 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 Beyond the Oedipus Complex 59 symbolic nature of transference, and of the symbolic more generally.2 When Dora leaves the analysis after only six weeks, Freud concludes that he failed to appreciate early enough that Dora had made him the object of her transference-love, thereby confusing him with Herr K – who he supposes to be the object of her unconscious fantasy.3 In his 1951 “Presentation on Transference,” Lacan suggests that the case actually runs aground on Freud’s own “countertransference,” which leads him to oppose his own biases to Dora’s unconscious desire. Freud’s repeated efforts to prove to Dora her desire for Herr K, like his delayed realization of her homosexual love for Frau K, must for Lacan “be ascribed to a bias, the very same bias that falsifies the conception of the Oedipus complex right from the outset, making him consider the predominance of the paternal figure to be natural, rather than normative – the same bias that is expressed simply in the well-known refrain, ‘Thread is to needle as girl is to boy.’”4 For Lacan the solution is not to identify the “true” object of Dora’s desire, however (a quest that could only falsify the stakes of desire by assigning it to an object in the world, whether a man or a woman), but rather to examine the “real value of the object that Frau K is for Dora” by viewing her not merely as a possible object of sexual attraction, but as the representative of Dora’s own unconscious question: “Frau K is not an individual, but a mystery, the mystery of Dora’s own femininity, by which I mean her bodily femininity – as it appears undisguised in the second of the two dreams whose study makes up the second part of the case history.”5 The corollary is that transference is not merely the restaging of the analysand’s relationships with other people, but the elaboration of knowledge concerning an unconscious question. In his Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan returns to the case to suggest that the problem is not that Freud fails to notice in time the transference confusing him with Herr K, but rather that he fails to appreciate the symbolic dimension of Dora’s “love for truth” and how it might become “a love for what the truth hides, which is called castration.”6 At issue is thus the difference between the imaginary and the symbolic dimensions of the transference, or the movement from the complaint that posits an imaginary Other as the source of the subject’s troubles to the transference that addresses the symbolic (or lacking) Other as the locus of knowledge. Central to this argument is a reexamination of the paternal function, and the specificity of what Lacan calls the “symbolic father” as distinct from the real and imaginary fathers: a distinction that is central to his critical reappraisal of the Oedipus complex. The pseudonym Freud gives his most famous patient is the Greek word Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 60 tracy mcnulty meaning “gift.” Yet Lacan’s argument is that Freud fails to appreciate the gift Dora really is, and what precisely she gives him: namely, an understanding of the symbolic father, and through it the nature of the symbolic itself. Unlike the imaginary dimension of the father revealed by the obsessional focus on “frustration” (the effect of the Oedipal prohibition), the “symbolic father” revealed by the hysteric is aligned with the stakes of desire as an effect of the castration implied in the signifying articulation. What then is at stake in the “mystery of Dora’s own femininity,” and how does it illuminate the stakes of the symbolic? Willy Apollon develops Lacan’s core insight about the difference between the masculine and feminine ways of relating to castration by suggesting that a man is confronted with a jouissance that language makes impossible, while a woman is confronted with a jouissance for which language renders all objects inadequate.7 The corollary is that a woman is not wholly inscribed within the phallic logic of the signifier and the object it both proffers and maintains at a safe distance. For the man who stands under the phallic function, says Lacan, castration is experienced when he approaches a woman, since “what he approaches is the cause of his desire that I have designated as object a.”8 Conversely, he notes that “on the side of The woman, something other than the object a is at stake in what comes to make up for the sexual relation that does not exist.”9 Her attempt to “make up for” castration turns around the quest for a signifier that would limit jouissance, a signifier she seeks on the side of man. Lacan’s two readings of the case (in “Presentation on Transference” and Seminar XVII) might allow us to articulate Dora’s fundamental question as follows: What use is a man in a woman’s relation to the jouissance for which language renders all objects inadequate? The Ks, like Dora’s own parents, are an unhappily married couple. At the time Dora enters into analysis, she is aware that her father and Frau K have been involved in an affair for some time, despite the fact that her father is sexually impotent as a result of a syphilitic infection. Herr K, on the other hand, has made repeated advances to Dora all through her adolescence. When Dora is eighteen he declares his desire to marry her, confiding: “you know that I get nothing out of my wife.” While Freud is puzzled by Dora’s refusal to take Herr K’s words in earnest, Lacan’s reading allows us to understand her reaction as a questioning of the phallus and its irrelevance for a woman’s relation to jouissance. To Dora’s ears, “I get nothing out of my wife” necessarily also means “my wife gets nothing out of me”; what Herr K’s words reveal to her is thus the inadequacy of the phallus where a woman is concerned. This central problematic is doubled in the case by another, Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 Beyond the Oedipus Complex 61 concerning the status of the signifier – and the paternal signifier in particular. Dora repeatedly characterizes her father as a “man of means” (ein vermögender Mann), a rich man. Yet as Freud notes, the irony of this label is that he is also “a man without means” (ein unvermögender Mann), sexually impotent.10 If Frau K manages to be satisfied by this “man without means,” then what does she get from him? And what relation could it have to the “mystery of her own femininity”? From Complaint to Transference Freud’s analysis of the Dora case hinges upon two dreams: one that is recalled early in the analysis and another that comes just before its end. The first dream (in which the father tries to save his children from a burning house, and tells Dora’s mother that he “refuses to let his two children go to ruin for the sake of her jewel-case”) gives the structure of the seduction fantasy and links it to two of Dora’s major symptoms: a childhood bout of bedwetting, and a vaginal catarrh. The dream occurs following a scene at a lake house where Dora and her father are staying with the Ks. When Herr K takes advantage of the absence of Dora’s father and Frau K to confess his attraction to Dora, she slaps him on the face and runs away. The dream is renewed on each of the three nights following the proposal, while Dora sleeps in a room whose unlocked door makes her vulnerable to Herr K’s advances. In Freud’s analysis, the repetition of the dream corresponds to the resolution Dora has made not to give in to Herr K’s advances: a resolution confirmed by the signifier of the “jewel-case” (Schmuckkästen), which in colloquial German is the name for female genitals that are immaculate and intact.11 Further associations to the same signifier, however (the pearl drop earrings her mother received as a present from her father, the gifts of jewelry that Dora received from Herr K), point in another direction: toward Dora’s repressed desire to be “wetted” by Herr K, such that his “drops” would fall into her “jewel-case.” Freud’s conclusion: Dora wants to keep her “jewel-case” dry and intact, but at the same time desires that it be wetted through sexual intercourse. This ambivalence is further complicated by additional associations pertaining to “drops” and “wetness,” which relate to the symptoms of the vaginal catarrh (a lesion produced by gonorrhoea) and of bedwetting, and thus evoke the dirtying of the genitals that Dora fears will result from sexual activity.12 The dream thus expresses an unconscious desire for intercourse that Dora represses out of her disgust at its possible consequences. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 62 tracy mcnulty On another level, which will be more important to Lacan’s interpretation of the case, Freud notes that Dora’s dream expresses the wish that her father protect her: against the advances of the man pursuing her, but also against her own desire for Herr K.13 In reality, however, Freud observes that it was her father who had brought her into danger, by leaving her alone with Herr K and exposing her to his advances.14 The dream exploits the day-residue of her father’s fear of fire to draw the opposite conclusion. In Freud’s words, its meaning could be translated as follows: “He foresaw the danger from the very moment of our arrival! He was in the right!”15 The latent thoughts given expression in the dream therefore posit the father both as the source of her afflictions (he is the one who made her ill, who delivered her to Herr K to hide his own extra-marital affair), and as a potential savior (the one who will save her from the “fire,” and so prevent her from “going to ruin”). Prior to the first dream, Dora had been asking herself why she had fallen ill, and had put the blame on her father.16 Freud then learns that she is afflicted with a vaginal catarrh: the legacy of a gonorrhoeal infection her father gave to her mother, who then transmitted it to Dora through childbirth. Her symptom is thus a trace of the father’s “crime,” the venereal diseases he contracted from consorting with prostitutes.17 Freud reconstructs its meaning as follows: “I am my father’s daughter. I have a catarrh, just as he has. He has made me ill, just as he has made Mother ill. It is from him that I have got my evil passions, which are punished by illness.”18 The symptom expresses at once an identification with the father and an accusation of the father as the one who is responsible both for her illness and for her “evil passions.” Considered from a Lacanian perspective, however, we could say that the seduction fantasy is concerned not with sexual gratification (the “wetting” that Freud sees as the object of Dora’s unconscious wish), but more fundamentally with the complaint that makes her father responsible for her ills, and so allows her not to confront the work of the drive in her own body. If her mother is sick (not only infected with venereal disease, but acutely neurotic), it is because her father was unable to give her what she needed; if Dora herself is sick, it is because her father was unable to save her. The seduction fantasy therefore positions the father as the imaginary Other who is at once held responsible for the drive and called upon to answer for its effects or provide a solution. The second dream (in which Dora’s mother writes to tell her that her father has died, and the others have already left for the cemetery) involves the traversal of a “thick wood” in pursuit of the station that will take Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 Beyond the Oedipus Complex 63 Dora to the family’s home. Freud quickly realizes that the words for the different locations in the dream – Bahnhof (station), Friedhof (cemetery), and Vorhof (vestibulum), as well as the “nymphs” (Nymphae) visible in the background of the “thick wood” – are anatomical terms for different regions of the female genitals. The dream therefore expresses a “fantasy of defloration” involving Herr K. In Freud’s words, Here was a symbolic geography of sex! . . . But anyone who employed such technical names as “vestibulum” and “nymphae” must have derived his knowledge from books, and not from popular ones either, but from anatomical text-books or from an encyclopedia – the common refuge of youth when it is devoured by sexual curiosity. If this interpretation were correct, therefore, there lay concealed behind the first situation in the dream a phantasy of defloration, the phantasy of a man seeking to force an entrance into the female genitals. I informed Dora of the conclusions I had reached. The impression made upon her must have been forcible, for there immediately appeared a piece of the dream which had been forgotten: “she went calmly to her room, and began reading a big book that lay on her writing-table.” The emphasis here was upon the two details “calmly” and “big” in connection with “book.” I asked whether the book was in encyclopedia format, and she said it was. Now children never read about forbidden subjects in an encyclopedia calmly. They do it in fear and trembling, with an uneasy look over their shoulder to see if someone may not be coming. Parents are very much in the way while reading of this kind is going on. But this uncomfortable situation had been radically improved, thanks to the dream’s power of fulfilling wishes. Dora’s father was dead, and the others had already gone to the cemetery. She might calmly read whatever she chose. Did this not mean that one of her motives for revenge was a revolt against her parents’ constraint? If her father was dead she could read or love as she pleased.19 Freud construes the father in an Oedipal light as one who forbids, putting an obstacle between Dora and her illicit desire (for Herr K, but also for sexual knowledge). But while his analysis identifies a shift in the father’s role from the first dream to the second, we are dealing in each case with what Lacan calls the “imaginary” father of the seduction fantasy: alternately construed as the cause of her woes, as a potential savior, and as the one who forbids – and so protects her from – her unconscious desire. Lacan’s rereading of the case offers a very different interpretation of the second dream, which emphasizes the father’s symbolic role as a support for knowledge, and thus the difference between the imaginary character of her complaint and the symbolic dimension of the transference. In 1951, Lacan had already claimed that the latent content of Dora’s second Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 64 tracy mcnulty dream, with its “symbolic geography of sex,” was the “enigma of her own bodily femininity” that also underlies Dora’s fascination with Frau K. Here he develops that reading by emphasizing the symbolic dimension of the transference as an interrogation of the lack in the Other. Instead of expressing a fantasy of defloration, as Freud suggests (a fantasy that would make her “bodily femininity” nothing more than the anatomical object of a man’s lust), Lacan argues that the dream articulates a desire for knowledge, signified by the encyclopedia whose calm perusal is the final detail Dora reports. In the process, he offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the father’s psychical importance.20 While Freud construes the father as an obstacle to Dora’s quest for forbidden knowledge (and thus as an agent of prohibition), Lacan reads him as the object of her appeal for “knowledge about the truth” (implicitly, the truth of her own femininity). The proof is that when Dora reaches the empty apartment of the dead father, vacated by those who have left for the cemetery, she “easily finds a substitute for this father in a big book, the dictionary, the one that deals with sexual concerns. This dream makes clear that what matters to her, even beyond the death of her father, is the knowledge he produces. And not just any knowledge – knowledge about the truth.” It reveals that “the dead father is indeed the symbolic father,” and that “one only accedes to him from an empty locus that is without any communication.”21 If the first dream concerns the imaginary father (who is at once the source of her afflictions and a potential savior), the second dream evacuates this image by substituting the “big book” for the person of the father. In the movement from the first dream to the second, the intersubjective dimension of the transference as an address to the locus of the Other begins to displace the imaginary staging of the complaint and the seduction fantasy. It reveals a symbolic understanding of the paternal signifier and its function that aligns the father with the Other as the “empty locus” of speech. The dream gives form to an equivocation. (Lacan underscores it by turning the “encyclopedia” of Dora’s associations into a “dictionary,” as if to make a point about the limitations of the signifying articulation with respect to truth.) Dora appeals to the father for knowledge about the truth, but her search leads her to a “dictionary”: a book in which every word merely leads to other words. Like the apartment of the dead father, it is an “empty locus without any communication,” a repository of signifiers that does not communicate with the things of this world. The image suggests that the knowledge produced by the signifying articulation has nothing to do with the truth, and in particular the truth at stake in Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 Beyond the Oedipus Complex 65 jouissance. When Freud characterizes the dream as a “symbolic geography of sex,” the upshot of Lacan’s reading is that “symbolic” must be taken in its most structural sense. Mapped on to the “big book,” the “symbolic geography of sex” opens on to the larger question of the relationship between language and sexuality, or the failure of knowledge (the order of the signifier) to address the truth of feminine jouissance. It points to the incommensurability between what can be located in the real of sexuality (the different parts of the female anatomy) and what cannot (the errant jouissance of femininity, which is not localized in an organ or system). While the dictionary is full of words for sexual organs, bodily functions, and so forth, it has no word for the jouissance of the fantasy. The image suggests that although the hysteric appeals to the father for “knowledge about the truth,” he in fact “knows nothing of the truth”22: not as a result of some personal deficiency, but because structurally he cannot know anything about it. The dream therefore reveals the lack in the Other, the fact of a truth (jouissance) that cannot pass through the signifier. Dora never attempts to construct the lack in the Other to which the second dream leads, however. Shortly after its appearance in the analysis, she decides to terminate the treatment. This is where Freud claims that he mishandled the transference, by failing to realize early enough that Dora was confusing him with Herr K. While Lacan agrees that Freud bungled the transference, he interprets the problem differently. The implication of his reading is that Freud misses the movement in the second dream from the imaginary to the symbolic, or from the complaint to the transference properly speaking (the address to the locus of the Other as the locus of knowledge). In misrecognizing this symbolic father as the imaginary father (the father of the prohibition), Freud also misses the figure of the symbolic to which Dora’s dream gives access. Oedipus Revisited In Lacan’s reading, hysteria implies a recognition (albeit unconscious) that castration is the essence of the father, and that the castrated father is the only one who can fulfill the paternal function in its symbolic guise: that of supporting the subject’s relation to castration, rather than modeling her relation to the object or sustaining the ideal ego through identification. The hysteric addresses the father in the truth of his castration, and not as all-powerful. But she also reveals that his function is tied to a “potency of creation” linked to the signifier, rather than to the imaginary omnipotence that gives its force to the Oedipal prohibition. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 66 tracy mcnulty For Lacan, “the idea of positing an all-powerful father as the principle of desire is very adequately refuted by the fact that Freud extracted his master signifiers from the desire of the hysteric. We must not forget that this is where Freud begins.”23 Freud’s myth of the father dissimulates the fact that “once he enters the field of the master’s discourse . . . the father, from the outset, is castrated . . . Freud gives us the idealized form, which is completely masked. However, the experience of the hysteric – if not her words, then at least the configurations she offered him – ought to have guided him here rather than the Oedipus complex.”24 What then does her experience reveal? When Dora refuses the jouissance Herr K. offers her, she makes clear that what she wants from a man is not the phallus, but knowledge: “what she wants is knowledge as a means of jouissance – but in order to make it serve truth, the truth of the master that she, Dora, incarnates. And this truth . . . is that the master is castrated.”25 This truth is not merely the object of a triumphant unmasking, however. The hysterical symptom has two faces: the revelation of the father’s castration, and the assumption, by the hysteric, of the “jouissance of being deprived,”26 in which she identifies with the father in his castration. Lacan describes Dora’s childhood bedwetting as the “stigmata” of the imaginary substitution of the child for the impotent father,27 an identification with the castrated father. Later in Seminar XVII, Lacan develops the link between hysterical desire and castration through a lapidary rereading of the Oedipus myth. Its focus is not the murder of Laius and wedding of Jocasta, but the second part of the Theban trilogy: the story of Oedipus at Colonus. In other words, it considers Oedipus not as the son of a father, but as the father of a daughter, Antigone. Oedipus is now a blind old man facing death. For Lacan, the fate of his eyes shows that he does not simply undergo castration: rather, “he is castration itself: that is, what remains when he loses, in the form of his eyes, one of the supports elected as object a.”28 But even as he loses his eyesight, Oedipus gains a support in the form of his daughter: Oedipus’ “stick,” says Lacan, is Antigone herself.29 This is a reference to a recurring motif in the play, the characterization of Antigone and Ismene as the crutches of their aged father. Oedipus repeatedly apostrophizes his daughters as the “props of my age!,” to which Antigone responds: “So sorrow sorrow props.” How then does the sorrow or suffering of the daughter “prop” the father? And what is the face of the father she supports? The “stick” is an allusion to the third part of the Sphinx’s riddle (What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?), and evokes Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 Beyond the Oedipus Complex 67 the cane that supports a man in his old age. As such, it both compensates and underscores a fundamental deficiency. The same ambiguity marks the way Antigone “supports Oedipus in his blindness.” On the one hand, she supports Oedipus because he is blind, lending her eyes to make up for his loss. But on the other, she supports Oedipus in his blindness, sustaining and upholding him there where he is blind. If Oedipus is castration, then Antigone is the support of castration itself. In a departure from Freud’s treatment of the Oedipus myth, Lacan’s reading suggests that the father at issue in the tragic story is not Laius, but Oedipus: not the murdered father, that is, but the castrated father blinded by the truth he cannot access. As a myth, the story of Oedipus concerns what it means to be a father, not to be subject to the father’s prohibition or wish him dead so as to enjoy the mother. As Lacan puts it, “if the essence of the master’s position is to be castrated, does this not mean that succession proceeds from castration? If castration strikes the son, is it not what makes him accede to the function of the father?”30 Lacan implies that Freud dissimulates the castration of the father with the “idealized” form of this truth, the myth of the all-powerful father. He keeps the father’s potency alive by having him murdered, which allows him to become the foundation of an entire order through the love he inspires in his sons. In “idealizing” or dissimulating this castration as murder, Lacan suggests, Freud also forecloses its true potential – a potential glimpsed by the hysteric. In drawing this parallel between Dora and Antigone, I believe Lacan is claiming not that Antigone is a hysteric, but that she sustains and supports what is only implicit or veiled in the hysterical symptom: the interdependence of desire and castration that the symbolic father sustains. Dora is well aware that her father is a castrated man with respect to his sexual potency, an aging man afflicted with syphilis.31 But what is clear in the Dora case, as in every case of hysteria, is that the potency that sustains the father’s position for the hysteric is neither a sexual potency nor omnipotence, but what Lacan calls a “potency of creation”: In all the cases, from Studies on Hysteria onward, the father is constituted of symbolic appreciation . . . The word father implies something that is always potentially creative . . . Insofar as the father plays this major, pivotal role in the discourse of the hysteric, it is precisely this potency of creation that sustains his position with respect to the woman, even if he is out of action. This is what characterizes the function from which the hysteric’s relation to the father emerges.32 Earlier I suggested that Dora’s unconscious question might be summarized as follows: what good is a man in a woman’s relation to the jouissance Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 68 tracy mcnulty for which language renders all objects inadequate? As we have seen, Dora’s father is at once a “man of means” (a rich man) and “a man without means” (sexually impotent). Lacan’s reading departs from Freud’s in construing this ambiguity not merely as ironic, but as an insight into his true function. If Frau K manages to be satisfied by this “man without means,” then what interests Dora is to know what it is she gets from him. In emphasizing the creative potential implied in the word father, Lacan suggests that the “potency of creation” that sustains the idealized father is linked to the signifier and the knowledge it supports. It is thus directly related to the lack in the Other, and not to some plenitude or power. Apollon writes that the object of the girl’s desire with respect to her father is neither the coveted penis nor the baby that would function as its substitute, but a certain quality of love: more precisely, “words of love . . . addressed to her alone in the intimacy of a unique relationship with her father.”33 The love a girl expects from her father therefore differs not only from the love the sons feel for the murdered father of the horde, but also from the love Freud diagnoses in the attitude of the believer, who sees in God an all-powerful protector. For Apollon, the girl’s expectation posits her father as a “man of the signifier,” revealing that his love entails “the gift of a word,” a word that addresses her singularity as a subject: “This word is seen, at the limit, as a love of something that only has meaning for her, since she and her father are the only ones able to grasp its true signification.” He hypothesizes that “one dimension of paternity – to be the father of a girl – depends on this gift of the signifier, through which the girl recognizes, thanks to her father, the ‘man of the signifier,’ and thus another savoir [or knowledge] about what constitutes love.”34 Dora’s dreams transmit a knowledge about the symbolic father, the hysterical knowledge Lacan identifies as the pillar on which psychoanalysis is built. But her knowledge is an unconscious knowledge, which does not know itself. This symbolic father is simultaneously revealed and obscured by the symptom of bedwetting, which posits the father both as the source of her woes and as a potential savior. Dora sees herself as the victim of a crime, and this allows her to repress her own unconscious desire. To put it another way, she clings to the idea that there is a truth to be revealed, a crime to be unearthed, and therefore a possible “knowledge about the truth”35: a wish that remains internal to the fantasy of seduction. For Lacan, the way Dora terminates the analysis proves that Freud was unable to support the transference as a love for knowledge. Observing that Freud is not satisfied with the outcome of the analysis as concerns Dora’s “destiny as a woman,”36 and consistently overstates the value of Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 Beyond the Oedipus Complex 69 Herr K’s marriage proposal, Lacan implies that Freud derails the transference by emphasizing the problematic of the object (the object of desire he takes Herr K to be) over the stakes of “truth” in its relation with castration. This misplaced emphasis finds expression in the clinic of the symptom in particular. At this moment in his practice, Freud is satisfied merely to clear up the patient’s symptoms; as a result, Lacan contends, he actually silences the subject of the unconscious to which the symptom leads. The proof is that by the time Freud next sees her, Dora “has gotten everyone to recognize the truth which, as truthful as it may be, she nevertheless knows does not constitute the final truth.”37 Dora ends the analysis because she is satisfied with making everyone recognize the truth that Freud helps her discover: everything the others wanted to bury about Herr K’s conduct, her father’s relation to Frau K, and so forth. This imposed recognition allows her to “put a dignified end to the analysis”38 by establishing the truthfulness of her accusations. The “whole truth,” however, is that there is no whole truth: that while these individual claims may indeed be true, they are not adequate to the truth of the unconscious. Dora, like every hysteric, uses “the truth” as a weapon to validate her own complaints, to expose the hypocrisy of her social world and thereby disavow her complicity in the seduction fantasy – precisely so that it can continue to function for her. In clinging to her complaints, Dora retreats into the jouissance of the symptom. She glimpses the father’s castration only to retreat from it, and therefore refuses the opening on to desire it represents. The second dream shows that the signifying articulation has led Dora to the point where she glimpses something of the truth of castration, a truth she flees. How then could Freud have supported her desire to know? Lacan’s implicit argument is that while the hysteric is satisfied with the truth, the analyst must assume that this “love of truth” is – or can become – an embrace of castration, even if the hysteric does not know it. Even if she is interested only in truth, that is (and especially in forcing others to recognize the truthfulness of her complaints), the aim of the analytic maneuver is to redirect this love of truth toward the unconscious knowledge the transference sustains, so that it can become a love of what that truth is calculated to hide. As Lacan puts it, the aim of the analytic maneuver is to drive the analysand to the realization that “the love of truth is the love of this weakness whose veil we have raised; it is the love of what the truth hides, which is called castration.”39 In other words, the love of truth that supports the hysteric’s relation to the idealized father – who Dora appeals to as the source of a “knowledge about the truth” – ultimately leads to an “empty Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 70 tracy mcnulty locus without communication”: that is, to castration as the principle of the master signifier40 The Empty Locus of the Father’s Desire We might imagine Antigone pronouncing the same complaint about her father to which Dora gives voice, but she does not. Antigone too is the heir of her father’s crime, but she relates to it differently. If Dora says, in essence, “I have been defiled by my father’s jouissance” (a complaint that allows her to repress her own desire), Antigone’s assumption of her fate suggests that she has been marked by the father’s desire, and that his castration will be upheld as the basis of her own ethics. Immediately following her father’s dramatic death at the end of Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone tells her sister that she wants to “return to that place,” the unmarked site where the earth opens up to receive him. This desire finds its elaboration in the tragic action of Antigone, where she accedes to “that place” by entering the tomb Creon has prepared for her. After she reads the edict forbidding the burial of Polynices, and resolves to commit the act anyway, Antigone speaks to Ismene of her certain punishment as a “fate that comes down to us through our father.” “Fate” here must be understood not merely as something that “befalls” her as a passive victim, but as desire (which is always “desire of the Other”). Antigone’s desire is the desire that comes down from her father, whose desire to know drives him all the way to castration. Dora does not actually enter the arena to which her second dream gives access, the “empty locus” opened up by the father’s death, but Antigone does enter it. In this “empty locus without communication,” it is impossible not to hear an echo of Antigone’s tomb. In its juxtaposition with the Dora case, however, it also functions as an image of the symbolic itself in its non-communication with the “truth.” Lacan observes that while the Oedipus myth is supposed to show that the father’s murder allows for the jouissance of the mother, Oedipus actually accedes to this jouissance not by killing the father, but by answering the Sphinx’s riddle. In thus “becoming the master,” however, he also exposes himself to the castration that is the structural condition of the master’s discourse. Oedipus can answer the riddle, but he has no idea that “his answer will end up anticipating his own drama,” nor of the “extent to which, through his making a choice, this answer perhaps falls into the trap of truth.”41 The castration Antigone props is the castration Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 Beyond the Oedipus Complex 71 at stake in the riddle itself, which concerns the split between knowledge and truth, or the impossibility of knowing – and so mastering or controlling – the truth of the jouissance that operates outside of consciousness. “Becoming the master” does not lead to the promised jouissance, that is (understood in its most imaginary guise as the ultimate enjoyment), but rather to a state of being caught between two registers: knowledge (the order of the signifier) and truth (jouissance). When Oedipus reveals his identity to the men of Athens who make up the chorus, they beg him to give an account of himself. When he protests that they surely know his story already, they respond by saying, in essence, “yes, we know all about your story – but what we want to know is the truth.” His answer concerns the crime of incest: not as an act or deed, however, but as a failure of nomination. These girls you see before you, he says of Antigone and Ismene, are at once my daughters and my sisters. Daughter and sister, father and brother, both and neither: the “dictionary” can tell us nothing about the truth, because it appears here only as an unspeakable. For Antigone this appears not only as an extra-symbolic truth, but as a truth about the symbolic itself. Truth is not jouissance, that is, but something that cannot be said, that cannot pass through the signifier; it is thus an excluded jouissance. Dora and Antigone reveal what might be called a “feminine Oedipus”: not an Oedipus complex particular to the feminine subject, but a feminine take on Oedipus as the castrated father rather than the murderous son. If we were to consider Antigone as the subject in whose unconscious we encounter the tragedy of Oedipus, and not the male child who fantasizes about killing the father so as to enjoy the mother, the result might be a decentering of the obsessional view of the father that tends to dominate in Freud’s cultural writings.42 Oedipus at Colonus can be read on at least one level as a confrontation between two competing ideas of paternity: the totemic or “Oedipal” view in which the brothers banish the father and struggle for the privilege of taking his place, and a feminine perspective in which the daughters are the supports of their blind father. The hysteric’s revelation of the symbolic father changes the stakes of castration by showing that it is not a matter of submitting to the law, but a structural fact of the signifying articulation in response to which one must construct an ethics. The father is the one who does not know, who cannot help, but whose love is also an initiation into the confrontation with the “lack in the Other” or “unfoundedness” of the symbolic, something that allows it to be born. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 72 tracy mcnulty Notes 1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 99. 2 For a diverse range of scholarly and clinical approaches to the Dora case, see Bernheimer and Kahane’s edited collection Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane. In Dora’s Case: Freud – Hysteria – Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. 3 Sigmund Freud. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), 108. 4 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, tr. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 182. 5 Ibid., 180. 6 Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 52. 7 Willy Apollon, “Four Seasons in Femininity, or Four Men in a Woman’s Life,” Topoi 12 (1993), 101–115, 101. 8 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 72. 9 Ibid., 63. 10 Freud, Dora, 40. 11 Ibid., 83. 12 Ibid., 82. 13 Ibid., 77–78. 14 Ibid., 78. 15 Ibid., 81. 16 Ibid., 66. 17 Ibid., 66–67. 18 Ibid., 74. 19 Ibid., 91. 20 Lacan, Écrits, 180. 21 Ibid., 97. 22 Ibid., 130. 23 Ibid., 129. 24 Ibid., 101. 25 Ibid., 97. 26 Ibid., 99. 27 Ibid., 96 (translation modified). 28 Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 121. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 95. 32 Ibid., 95. 33 Apollon, “Four Seasons in Femininity,” 103. 34 Ibid., 103. 35 Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 130. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004 Beyond the Oedipus Complex 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 73 Ibid., 36. Lacan, Écrits, 183. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 96–97. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 124. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 120. In the legendary chronology of the house of Laius, the events recounted in Oedipus the King come first, followed by the events of Oedipus at Colonus, and finally the story of Antigone’s defiance of Creon’s law and untimely death. But this is not the order in which Sophocles approaches the legendary material: he begins at the end, with Antigone. Historically we know that Antigone was the first of the three plays Sophocles wrote, and Oedipus at Colonus the last, as if he were trying to figure out what kind of father produced this daughter, Antigone. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Cornell University Library, on 17 Feb 2022 at 22:47:43, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108650311.004