Johnston, Adrian. “The Vicious Circle of the Super-Ego: The Pathological Trap of Guilt and the Beginning of Ethics.” Psychoanalytic Studies. 3.3/4 (2001): 411-424.
🙂 Johnston does not agree with Žižek’s take on das Ding.
Žižek’s definition: das Ding doesn’t exist prior to the ‘backwards glance’ of the nostalgic subject of the Symbolic wishing to have lost something he/she never possessed in the first place (das Ding is a result of the fundamental strategy of fantasy, wherein the structural impossibility of the drives’ ‘full satisfaction’ qua ‘jouissance obtained’ is concealed from the subject by making it seem as if this enjoyment is hypothetically re-obtainable).
However, this is a misleading exaggeration that treats Lacan as wholly Hegelian.
The most misleading feature of virtually every extant commentary on Lacan’s ethics of psychoanalysis is the attribution to him of the imperative “Do not give way on your desire!”
In the seventh seminar, Lacan does not present the link between desire and guilt in the form of a command, an injunction to ‘persist’ in one’s desire.
Instead, he merely states that guilt is the result of ‘ceding on’ (i.e., not enacting in reality, refraining from concrete actualization ) one’s desires—“Je propose que la seule chose don t on puisse être coupable, au moins dans la perspective analytique, c’est d’avoir cédé sur son désir”.
At the beginning of this seminar, Lacan remarks that psychoanalysis is confronted , across the range of its analysands, with the omnipresence of guilt in human life.
Lacan is not so much interested in proposing a new prescriptive ethics as in comprehending the precise nature of ‘moral masochism’, in fully grasping how the constellation of the id, the super-ego, and the socio-symbolic Umwelt of reality ‘pathologize ’ the ethical field.
At most, this Lacanian analytic diagnosis of moral masochism should be interpreted as a preparatory clearing of the ground for a genuine ethics, as a mapping out of the obstacles hindering the construction and enactment of a non-pathological ‘metaphysics of morals’. 417
Lacan repeatedly makes reference to the Freudian super-ego as an excessive, greedy, and out-of-control agency. Echoing Freud, he observes that, “the more one sacrifices to it, the more it demands”.
The super-ego isn’t satisfied with mere external/behavioral conformity to ethico-moral precepts; it uncompromisingly insists upon the impossible purification of intentionality itself (thus, the super-ego is, in a manner of speaking, a spontaneous Kantian). 418
… when Lacan speaks about being guilty for having ‘ceded’ or ‘given ground’ relative to one’s desire, what he really means is the following: the more the subject surrenders (to) his/her desires by obeying the restrictions of the Law, the more guilty he/she feels, since such concessions only aggravate the (unconscious) volatility and intensity of these same desires (namely,‘internal’ repressed desires which never fail to escape the notice of the omniscient authority of the sadistic super-ego).
Near the end of his 1974 television interview, Lacan clearly advances this claim in saying that, “Freud reminds us that it’s not evil, but good, that engenders guilt” (Lacan, p. 45).
To be Continued …