SOME NOTES ON OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

Darian Leader
Lecture given at Leeds Metropolitan University, December 1992

We are used to talking about obsession in terms of the binary hysteria-obsession and
yet it seems that we are in general much more comfortable talking about hysteria.
Lacan’s remarks on this neurosis are relatively clear and it is not always difficult to
situate them in relation to our experience. But what Lacan says about obsession is
rather different. His comments in the 1950s seem extremely philosophical, filled with
references to the Hegelian dialectic, to the slave and the master and so on. If we can
understand Lacan’s identification of neurosis with a question, we can see readily
enough how a hysteric presents the inquiry “What is it to be a woman?” but it seems
more difficult to grasp the parallel question of the obsessional “Am I alive or dead?”.
This latter formation is, at the very least, a striking one. If one examines the
mainstream psychoanalytic literature in the 1950s on obsessional neurosis, one finds
elaborations on the theme of the anal organisation: no references to the dialectic of
the master and the slave. And yet, as we will see, Lacan’s elaboration is a very
Freudian one.

The Psychological Field

Freud had said, after all, that what characterised a neurosis was not the particular
drives at play (SE, X, p240). The key was not in the ‘content’ but rather in the position
of the subject in relation to the drive: in Anglo-Saxon terminology, the mode of
defence. Now when Freud came to discuss obsessional neurosis in detail in the Rat
Man text, he wrote that what matters is less the drive than what he called “the
psychological field”. How can we understand this expression? Why not start with the
most famous field in psychoanalytic history, the military field where the Ratman lost
his glasses and where his neurosis was to crystallise.

The obsession centering on the military manoeuvres is so complex that Freud was
forced to draw a map to help guide his reader through the discussion of the case
material. The Stracheys, in their translation, found Freud’s drawing inadequate and
substituted a second one. And the most recent commentator on the case, Mahoney,
tells us that “even the emendations of the Stracheys leave matters cloudy”
(Mahoney, p.53). Yet the map is a pointer to the nature of the problem itself:
obsessional neurosis is nothing less than a map designed to mislead. When Freud
speaks of the “psychological field”, we should take him literally. The key is not simply
to find one’s way around, but to find the point from which the perspective is fixed.
So, we can ask, what does the psychological field consist of in this case?

The Ratman loses a pair of glasses on military manoeuvres, he wires for another pair
from Vienna and receives it a short time later. But whereas he knows perfectly well
who he owes the money to for their purchase, he devises an obsessional scenario
which involves a certain Lieutenant A paying the money to a lady at the post office,
this lady then passing on the money to a Lieutenant B and then our subject giving the
sum of money to Lieutenant A! This scenario is complicated enough, but Freud had
to extract it from the contradictory and slippery account of Lanzer himself. Now, when
Lacan came to comment in detail on this case in his 1953 Individual Myth of the
Neurotic, he chose to focus on this episode rather than on the more sensational
episode of the rat torture so often discussed by other commentators. This indicates
that for Lacan the key features of the case are not found simply at the level of the
drive organisation. So what is it that makes Lacan privilege this part of the case,
ignored by other theoreticians? The answer supposes a little detour through the
realm of structural anthropology.

The Rat Group

The 1940s and 50s saw the introduction of certain mathematical methods into
anthropology, primarily, algebraic structures, structures of order and topology. What
interests us here is the use of group theory. Levi-Strauss is using the reference to the
transformation group as early as 1945 in his essay Structural Analysis in Linguistics
and Anthropology, and he develops it some four years later in the Elementary
Structures where marriage and descent are seen as operations that can be
combined and inverted. By 1957, Lacan is developing his own formulation of the use
of the group concept in his analysis of the Little Hans case, summarised succinctly in
the Écrits on pp. 519-20. Without going into detail here, the element that interests us
is the identification of an equation with a group of permutations, which represent the
symmetry properties of the equation. Now, what would such properties consist of?
For Lacan, as for Levi-Strauss, they consist in running through the different forms of
an impossibility: as Levi-Strauss writes “The inability to connect two (contradictory)
relationships is overcome/replaced by the positive statement that contradictory
relationships are identical inasmuch as they are both self-contradictory in a similar
way” (Journal of American Folklore, 1955, p.434). This provides likewise the
definition of myth that Lacan takes from Levi-Strauss. As he says, it represents “a
way of confronting an impossible situation by the successive articulation of all the
forms of impossibility of the solution”. Thus, Little Hans’ impossibility of leaving the
maternal circuit is reformulated as the impossibility of leaving with the father. Levi-
Strauss provides a formalisation of this structure: fx(a):fy(b)=fx(b):fa-1(y). In other
words, an equivalence relation is established between two situations which are self-
contradictory in a similar way, such that there is an inversion of terms and relations.
One term is replaced by its contrary and an inversion is made between the function
and the term value of two elements. Now, it is clear that this matheme is the implicit
reference to Lacan’s commentary on the Ratman case in the Individual Myth text.

Lacan tells us that he will focus less on the classic motif of the rat torture than on the
system of relations involved. The starting point is the constellation preceding the
subject’s birth, which, he says, “happens to have a very precise relation, perhaps
definable by a transformational formula” (my emphasis). This formula becomes
“crystallized” in the scenario concerning the glasses that we sketched above. Note
Lacan’s use of the term “crystal” which we find again in his many references to the
“crystal of phobia” and we remember that the development of group theory is closely
linked to the science of crystals, via the formalisation of symmetry properties.
Crystals were no longer to be identified with the imaginary notion of, for example
glittering, glassy stones, but with a mathematically defined class based on
considerations of symmetry. With this passage from the imaginary to the symbolic,
such apparently non-crystalline objects as certain liquids were to “become” crystals,
just as, we might say, Hans’ first picture of a giraffe was to “crystallize” into the
crumpled giraffe that indexes the reference to the symbolic.
Lacan singles out two elements as the key factors in Lanzer’s constellation:

1) The father’s marriage to a woman of higher station, privileging the rich girl over the
 poor one.
2) The father’s gambling debt, from which he is saved by a friend whom he
subsequently fails to repay.

Lacan sees “a strict correspondence between these initial elements of the subjective
constellation and the ultimate development” of the obsession, that is, the scenario
with the transmission of money at the post office. Now, if we follow the logic, there
must exist a transformational formula which ciphers (1) and (2) into the scenario, or
better, which ciphers the contradictory relation between (1) and (2) into the
reimbursement scenario. When Lacan qualifies the imaginary scene as being
“complementary in certain points and supplementary in others, parallel in one way
and inverted in another” in relation to the initial constellation, we must take these
terms literally in the context of a Levi-Straussian formula: Lacan’s vocabulary here
can hardly be accidental.

So, the father owes money to the friend who has saved him on the one hand and he
has substituted a rich girl for a poor girl in his marital choice on the other.
Unfortunately, unlike in the comedy of Menander, the solution is not available
whereby the poor girl loved for her beautiful eyes turns at the end of the play to be
the rich girl he was intended by his family to marry. Within this scenario, Lacan says,
“we observe something like an exchange of the outside terms of each of these
functional relations”. The reader initially sceptical of the presence of a latent
matheme can hardly fail to be convinced at this point. If we follow the terms involved,
we might suppose that the transformation first comprises the debt to the friend
becoming a debt to the woman (exchange of the outside terms), more precisely, a
debt to the poor girl and through her to the rich girl substituted for her in the scenario.
The substitution of the rich girl for the friend is indeed, Lacan argues, what gives the
structure to the transference to Freud, a point which is generally passed over due to
the apparent predominance of the Cruel Captain signifier. Yet if we take Lacan’s
argument seriously here, one would be forced to rethink the transference here in a
radical way, as one which repeats and reformulates the relation to the mother.

Now, (1) and (2) constitute an impossibility. (1) indicates basically, the father’s
castration: the prestige, the money, is on the side of the mother. (2) indicates a social
debt. The mother’s money seems to accentuate the gap between the imaginary and
the symbolic father, a gap which is identified at this date in Lacan’s teaching as the
key source of the oedipal dynamic. In the Lanzer family, the money is always
somewhere else, anywhere, in fact, except with the father. The latter is constituted as
someone who fails to have. The gambling debt and the subsequent debt to the friend
present a similar scenario but at a different level. Now the problem consists, Lacan
says, “in the impossibility of bringing these two levels together”. So in accordance
with the formula for myth Lanzer tries to recipher this first impossibility. In other
words, he reciphers the way in which (1) and (2) cannot coincide. The
reimbursement scenario is the ciphering. Note how even in 1953 Lacan’s approach
to the problem of obsessional neurosis focuses on the motif of impossibility. When
Lacan refers to the “functional relation” we understand the relation of “owing”, the
relation centring on the debt, and when he refers to the “exchange of the outside
terms” we understand the exchange of the rich girl for the friend. The scenario itself
contains a number of relational elements:
a) Lieutenant A pays money to the post office lady. A debt, it seems, is paid.
b) The lady gives money to Lieutenant B. The woman is thus the one who
gives, but since she fails to recuperate the money, she is the one who loses out. She
ends up with nothing.
c) The subject gives money to Lieutenant A, that is, he repays a debt to a
friend.

But the key to all this is the superimposition of (c) and (a): the debt is paid
back to a woman, who at the same time, via (b), is not repaid. This contradiction ‘to
pay back the woman: the woman is not repaid’ ciphers the double debt of the father
with a new form of contradiction. The gap of the neurosis is opened up precisely
due to the crippling of the paternal image in the first elements of the constellation.
The relation is “parallel” in the sense of the debt operation, and “inverted” in that it
pays the rich girl, and not the friend. Thus Lacan has changed the coordinates of
what Kris had called the “personal myth of the neurotic”: in Lacan’s new formulation,
the myth is a quasi-matheme, a principle of transformation, what we may call a Rat
Group. Lacan’s text continues with a discussion of Goethe. Without commenting on
this section, let us simply point to the implicit irony in Lacan’s juxtaposition. The
Ratman case is explored from the perspective of the glasses scenario, and yet what
trait so often distinguishes the Weimar poet’s quirkiness if not his own pathological
suspicion of anyone wearing glasses! With his last cry for ‘More light’ he was to meet
the same gaze as Lanzer was to imagine in the sunken eyes of Freud’s daughter.

An Error and a Fault

The mother’s financial position together with the father’s debt accentuate the gap
between the paternal figure and the symbolic father in Lanzer’s case. This is
precisely the reason why Lacan condones Freud’s apparently mistaken intervention
on the subject of Lanzer’s marriage. Freud interprets with the idea that the father is
opposed to the match in question, when it seems that it is in fact the mother. The
intervention, however, is successful in the sense that what was needed at this point
in the case is just this reference to the father as prohibiting. It would be an example of
the inexactitude of an analytic interpretation. We could contrast this sort of
inexactness with one of Lanzer’s manias, his obsession for understanding everything
completely. “He forced himself”, Freud tells us, “to understand the precise meaning of
every syllable that was addressed to him”. This is hardly a convenient symptom to
have in the modernist era, to have a symptom which requires the production of
univocal meaning from every sign that one encounters. I’ll say something later on
about the tension at the clinical level between what appears to be the obsessional’s
demand for exactitude and the inexactitude of analytic interpretation, but for the
moment let’s elaborate on the characteristics of this subject’s relation to the signifier.
We could put it in the following way: a hysteric is a person to whom things
happen whereas an obsessional is a thing to whom persons happen. In other
words, he will do everything to avoid an encounter with the jouissance, the living
dimension, of another subject. When he does encounter this, he tries to deploy the
signifier to absorb all of the jouissance. The empirical result of this attempt at
reduction to the signifier is mortification. We see this for example in verbal
obsessions: a subject’s whole life can be structured by some simple verbal
command. One of the most important examples in the Ratman case concerns the
repayment of the florins. A particular signifying proposition comes to exert a tyranny
over Lanzer’s life; “You must pay back the 3.80 kronen to Lieutenant A”. The key
here is less the meaning than the linguistic formulation itself, the command as a
signifier, as we see from the fact that it is not acceptable for Lanzer to give the
money to someone else to pay back the Lieutenant for him when the opportunity
arises. When an officer returns the money after failing to find Lieutenant A, Lanzer is
greatly relieved: as Freud says, “this method of fulfilling his vow had not satisfied him,
as it did not correspond to the wording, which ran “You must pay back the 3.80
kronen to Lieutenant A” (Ibid. p.168). This attention to the letter makes us qualify
obsessional neurosis as a propositional neurosis.

But why is it that this particular proposition attains such a dominance? The answer, I
believe, is to be found in the detail that Lanzer knew that it was wrong. When the
Cruel Captain told him that he owed the money to Lieutenant A, Lanzer already knew
who he really owed it to. Thus the proposition has two initial characteristics: firstly, it
comes from the Other and secondly, it is an error. Now, why should an error be so
important for Lanzer? Let’s say that it is linked to the Captain’s evident pleasure in
cruelty. Where the Captain ought to have incarnated the military signifier, the system
of military rules and regulations which have as their object the eradication of
jouissance, what emerges in the Captain but a horrifying jouissance. The Captain is
not just a Captain: he is a Cruel one. Thus, in the place of the Other, the Ratman is
confronted with a terrifying fault. Now, how does he respond? To start with, he
responds with the new obsession: ‘You must pay back the 3.80 kronen’. In other
words, to the point of inconsistency in the Other, to the point of jouissance, the
subject replies with a signifier, one which is in fact borrowed from the Other. The key
here is that the Captain made a mistake: Lanzer could thus use an error to put into
correspondence with a fault. They are both forms of the Other’s inconsistency, the
difference being that one is signifying and one is non-signifying. Thus the obsession
is an attempt to introduce the signifier into the gap in the Other; a non-signifying
jouissance is turned into a signifying imperative. And it can do this because the
Captain was wrong.

A Good Natured Man

When Lacan discussed the Ratman case in the early 1950s, we have seen that he
treats it from the perspective of the tension between the imaginary and the symbolic
father. But by 1958, there is a shift in his perspective. It is now less a question of the
function of the father as such than of the dialectic of ϕ and Φ, a problematic that is
given its clearest exposition in the Direction of the Treatment. Lacan’s patient comes
up with the idea that his mistress should sleep with another man and that he would
watch. This is a relatively frequent male phantasy scenario; we find a version in
Herodotus, where King Candaule proposes to hide his bodyguard Gyges in his room
so that he can see his wife naked, and we see it in our experience in the relations of
many men with their best friends. This is what Lacan refers to earlier in the Écrits on
page 453 where he speaks about “abdicating one’s desire”. The subject places the
phallus on the side of the imaginary other and the jouissance he is deprived of is
passed over to the counterpart. The idea is that the phallic nature of the subject’s
position in his phantasy is so accentuated that any passage to the level of sexual
action will fail: he therefore dreads precisely what he aspires to, since it would
confront him with his deflation. Hence the appeal to the counterpart to act in one’s
place and Lacan’s formulation that the obsessional maintains his desire as forbidden.
It’s the sort of action by proxy that we find in Goldsmith’s aptly titled play The Good-
Natured Man. Whereas Jones had argued that the subject fears aphanisis, Lacan’s
formulation here implies the contrary: rather than fearing aphanisis, he takes refuge
in it. Rather than entering the arena of his desire, the obsessional is always, and with
reason, somewhere else.

Now, the mistress of Lacan’s patient replies to this proposition to save the man’s
failing potency with a dream which she proceeds to relate to him. She dreams that
she has a phallus as well as a woman’s sex, but that she nonetheless desires the
phallus. Now, the dream does not simply indicate, as one might suppose, that the
mistress desires to be a man and a woman. We remember that Helene Deutsch had
a similar dream during her analysis with Freud and she could never accept his
interpretation that she wanted to be both boy and girl. It was only later when she
heard Abraham lecturing on the castration complex at the Hague conference that she
understood why Freud’s explanation had seemed incomplete. In other words, a
dream like this involves a reference to castration, the fact that having a phallus
does not stop one from desiring one. It involves the symbolic dimension and not
simply the imaginary nature of the ‘wish to be a boy and a girl’, indeed, exactly the
sort of wish that Lacan’s patient proposes as his own explanation of what was going
on. The phallus that Lacan’s patient situated on the side of the other man is an
imaginary one: there is still the dimension of desire and its reference, the symbolic
phallus, one which is impossible to restore to the imaginary body. The woman’s
dream shows clearly the impossibility of this restitution. The phallus as a signifier is
distinct, as the dream shows, from the question of having or no having the penis.
There is thus a change in the value of the phallus for the subject here: it is less the
imaginary object which he seeks via the other man than a signifier of desire. This
non-coincidence of ϕ and Φ is seen in the Osiris myth, a myth the emergence of
which Lacan claimed, at one point in his teaching, characterises the end of an
analysis. Isis searches for the scattered remains of her murdered brother Osiris,
retrieving all of them apart from the penis. So in its place she erects phallic
monuments to commemorate the lost organ, showing how the phallus comes into the
place of the lack of the penis. The scattered remains of the body are thus
distinguished from the phallic signifier, just as, for the Ratman, the function of the
symbolic phallus had to be distinguished from the register of equivalence present in
his “so many florins, so many rats”.

Now, in terms of technique, what can we learn from this vignette? Lacan does not tell
us what he said, but we can surmise, as Jacques-Alain Miller has pointed out, that
there was some play on the word contrebande - a term he uses to characterise the
conditions of the obsessional’s desire and which also contains a sexual allusion in
the verb bander. A clearer formulation of technique is to be found in the Écrits, p.315
where Lacan refers to the fact that the “working through of the subject is in fact used
for the seduction of the analyst// It is no accident that as the dialectical progress
approaches the putting into question of the intentions of the ego of these subjects,
the phantasy of the analyst’s death will invariably emerge, often experienced as a
fear or even as an anxiety. //And now the subject will embark on an even more
demonstrative display of his “goodwill”// How can one underestimate, at this point, the
effect of a certain contempt shown by the master for the fruits of such labour? It can
completely destabilise the subject’s resistance.//From this moment onwards, his
previously unconscious alibi begins to disclose itself to him, and we see him
passionately trying to justify all his work.” This passage offers a clear illustration of
the pertinence of the master-slave dialectic to the context of an analysis. Lacan is
elaborating Freud’s comment in the Ratman case where he says that the obsessional
introduces death as a solution to conflicts that are left unresolved, that is, most
crucially, the conflict with the father. As in German courts, where “suits were usually
brought to an end, before judgement had been given, by the death of the parties to
the dispute. Thus in every conflict which enters their lives they are on the look out for
the death of someone who is of importance to them, usually of someone they love —
such as one of their parents, or a rival, or one of the objects of love between which
their inclinations are wavering” (Ibid, p.236). Lacan reformulates this schema. As the
slave waits for the death of the master, he works. But not only are the fruits of his
work taken away from him, the recognition by the subject of his own being in these
fruits is simply the recognition of his own ‘not being there’. Where he actually ‘is’ is in
the anticipated moment of the master’s death, after which, he thinks, he will live, but
in waiting for this moment he is identifying with the master, as dead. In the meantime
all he can do is to work, in order to deceive the master about his good intentions.
Hence Lacan’s comment that the analyst’s sarcasm applied to all the good work that
the patient is doing can make this phantasy of the master’s death emerge. Thus the
apparently abstract philosophical reference is given a very concrete clinical context.

Now, what about Lacan’s use of the term “alibi”? The sentence is striking: how, after
all, can an alibi be unconscious? Surely an alibi involves a knowing form of deceit.
The key to the phrase is in the earlier reference to the relation of the slave to his
work. The slave “is not there” in his labour, but rather, he is in the anticipated moment
of the death of the master “after which he will live, but in waiting for which he
identifies with him as dead and as a result of which he is himself already dead”. Thus
the slave’s being itself is a not being there to the extent that he identifies with the
dead. He is not there in the fruits of his work, his associations, his dreams, as a being
but as a lack of being. Thus the obsessional’s alibi is his very existence: not being
there is precisely his being. The problem in all this is that, as everyone knows, there
is nothing more difficult than to keep a corpse dead...

The Right to Speak

In a clinical context, the dead position in which the subject wishes to maintain the
master is seen, for example, in the tendency to speak so much that the analyst can’t
say anything or to make all the interpretations himself. The subject here is like Cato,
who spoke for the most part of a day at the Roman senate so that no one else could
take the floor. After all, wasn’t it the right of a senator to discourse on any subject for
as long as he wished before a motion was put to the house? And isn’t it the analytic
rule that the patient can say whatever comes into his head? Lacan noted the
efficacity of the variable length session in countering this tactic. We could oppose
Cato here to Demosthenes, who instead of speaking to the Assembly for a whole
day, in an effort to overcome the listlessness of the dicasts, began a little story about
a donkey and its shadow, only to promptly stop speaking before the conclusion. The
result was, of course, an overwhelming increase in the listeners’ attention: a Greek
application of the Zeigarnik effect, we could say.

The right to speak introduces a further question here. Obsessional subjects

frequently demand the justification of the analytic intervention. What this means is
that what the analyst says has to be a strict derivation from material supplied by the
patient. It is the subject’s speech that will justify the analyst. But, of course, this is
hardly practical, given the notorious concealment which characterises their discourse.
The subject may well speak interminably but this is to avoid speaking about
something else. Hence the analytic intervention, in a sense, to be ethical, must be
inexact. Freud’s intervention in the Ratman case would be an example here. And the
subject, confronted with such a lack of justification, will often respond with
indignation: the analyst is allowed to know, but only if his knowledge is justified in
the right way. The right way here is, of course, the way prompted by the architecture
of the patient’s speech. Follow a different map and see how the subject gets upset.

This lack of justification, essential in the analysis of the obsessional, is one more
example of an inconsistency in the Other, presented in the form of the supposedly
unacceptable ‘leap’ of the interpretation. Now, we often hear about the
obsesssional’s desperate attempts to assure the consistency of the Other. For
example, in verbal formulae, in self-mortification, in the imposition of small-scale legal
systems in the household and so forth. Everything, it seems, must be reduced to the
signifier. He becomes a Casaubon, buried in ancient books and confined to the
particular library he invents for himself. This picture is no doubt often a true one, but a
peculiar contradiction asserts itself here. The Ratman approaches Freud for the first
time at the time of the military manoeuvres. He thinks, we find out, that Freud was in
fact the brother of a certain murderer of the same name. He then continues to
address Freud repeatedly as “Captain”. Furthermore, he tells Freud of an episode in
which a man shows great warmth to the subject and befriends him only to discover
that this “friend” merely procures Lanzer’s friendship in order to introduce himself into
the Lanzer household, where his sisters are to be found. He uses the term Freund,
friend, and Freud underlines this word in his case notes, juxtaposing it to his own
name, “Freud”. To sum up, Lanzer goes to a man he assumes is the brother of a
murderer, he calls him by the name of a man who delights in horrifying tortures, and
he puts him in the place of the friend who deceived him. So the Other, at the start of
the treatment, is clearly not consistent.

This is a feature we often find in the obsessional subject’s choice of an analyst. He

will select someone who no doubt incarnates an Ideal, but who at the same time
shows a little flaw, a little point of inconsistency. How can one reconcile this apparent
search for inconsistency with the famous obsessional demand for, precisely,
consistency? The answer is to be found in Lacan’s reference to the alibi. The subject
will do all the painful analytic work over the years, but he is not there in his work.
Rather, where he is, at the level of desire, is what he lodges in the Other’s
inconsistency: for the analyst to consent to ignore the key variable in the subject’s
desire, he must himself display a fault. It is in this fault that the subject hides his
desire. It gives the subject the hinge necessary for his deception. It is as if throughout
all the efforts made by the subject towards the progress of the analysis, there is
always the demand at the horizon “Can I go now?” As one may guess, such a desire
may often take the form of the one desire that the subject hopes the analysis will not
put in question: the desire to be an analyst.