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Every week, we invite you to explore a striking quote from a great psychoanalyst to reveal its depth and richness. These lapidary, often provocative formulas open up new perspectives on the intricacies of the human psyche. By deciphering these quotes with rigor and pedagogy, we invite you on a fascinating journey to the heart of psychoanalytic thought to better understand our desires, anxieties and relationships with others. Ready to dive into the deep waters of the unconscious?
“There is no sexual relationship.” J. Lacan
This aphorism by Jacques Lacan, extracted from his 1972 seminar, resonates as a provocation or rather as an enigma that may surprise many, but it lies at the very heart of his theoretical developments. So, what is sexuality? It is, above all, something that is constructed subjectively throughout individual history; it is a developmental process during which the sexual intertwines with the psychic, interweaving the fantastical, the imaginary, and the symbolic.
The very first experience of the erotic and loving relationship is that of the infant with its mother, the traces of which remain buried deep within our unconscious and determine our future adult relationships. It is with this primitive sexuality that we first encounter the other. Subsequently, to the eroticized bodies will be added what is transmitted from the parents’ own sexual desires. In other words, human psychosexuality, from its inception, is caught in the relationship to the other, in the desire of the other, inscribing a subject in language, this subject becoming a “parlêtre” (speaking being). A language in which it bathes from the beginning of its life, constantly referring to the Other, a dreamed, idealized Other, which transforms into a particular fantasy for each individual, resulting in a fundamental heterogeneity between a man and a woman. Understood this way, human sexuality is extremely complex and is never reduced to the concrete reality of the present moment.
What does Lacan mean by this aphorism? First, that human sexuality is never restricted to a simple instinctive coupling as it is with animals. Second, that there is a distinction in humans between the sexual act, whose existence Lacan does not deny, and a sexual relationship, that is, a sexual connection that would be formed between two subjects.
We sometimes think that a completed sexual act is successful, and this can sometimes be the case. Yet, for Lacan, the most successful sexual act is also a failure. It is true that in this act, the bodies come together, intertwine, but they are always accompanied by the fantasy of becoming one, as one can be convinced during synchronized orgasm, a fantasy accompanied by this ineffable feeling of losing oneself in the other, of becoming one with him or her. However, from the moment two beings speak, they find themselves in a disjunction, that of two divergent beings whose desires for union clash and dissolve. Language always introduces a gap, a non-coincidence, between words and things, between the subject and the other. It is the same in sexuality, where there is always a fundamental discrepancy between the desire of the man and that of the woman, between masculine and feminine enjoyment. Each approaches the other with their own unconscious fantasies, inherited from their childhood history and psychosexual experiences.
Men and women thus find themselves in two radically heterogeneous subjective positions, two ways of positioning themselves in relation to the phallus and castration, which can never harmoniously complete each other.
Explanation: in Lacanian theory, the phallus is not the penis but a signifier, the signifier of desire and lack, which we have already discussed. The phallus symbolizes what the subject believes the Other (initially the mother) desires beyond his or her own person. The child wants to be the phallus to fill this lack in the mother. Growing up, he must mourn this desire, he must accept no longer being this phallus, accept being marked by symbolic castration. Men and women do not position themselves the same way regarding this phallic dialectic. Their enjoyment is also heterogeneous, misunderstood by one and the other.
Human sexuality is therefore not a matter of biology, even less of instinct; it is deeply marked by language, the symbolic, which cuts us off from a natural and immediate relationship to the body and the sex of the other. It is the site of an always partly inadequate enjoyment, out of the norm, singular to each individual.
In this sense, Lacan’s formula is a radical critique of all normative and conformist visions of sexuality, such as those the media tend to propagate, whether they are biologizing, sociologizing, psychologizing, or generally reductionist. There are no recipes that some “experts” claim to recommend, even less a “normal” or “successful” sexual relationship that could serve as a universal model. Essentially, there are only singular tinkering, symptomatic inventions more or less happy to deal with the impossible sexual relationship. Each “parlêtre” will have to learn to enjoy in their own way, in a more or less awkward and problematic manner, never being able to achieve the ideal fusion of bodies and minds.
And it is often such a difficult thing that, for those who give up this learning, pornography has been invented. In pornography, there are only raw bodies that excite each other, fabricated cries and moans that erupt, objects that intertwine and give the illusion that a sexual relationship is possible. Pornography aims to convince us, with supporting images, that one can get rid of anxieties, failures, the heterogeneity of enjoyment, and thus any speech and affect that risk creating a dreaded disjunction.
Yet, paradoxically, it is the very failure of the sexual relationship that can lead us to give up a magnified relationship. It is then that love can appear as a sort of substitute for this failure, a love that can transform into “Love Doctor” arising from the debris caused by the heterogeneity of masculine and feminine relationships and anxieties. A “Love Doctor” that can bring about an encounter that cannot be synchronized but which nevertheless pushes to assume one’s desire without expecting the other to fulfill it perfectly, to make contingency and the structural inadequacy of the sexual relationship the very condition of an encounter always to be reinvented.
*The Love Doctor is a comedy-ballet written by Molière with music by J-B. Lully.
