Images from Paradise. Eszter Salgó
Lacan is pessimistic about man’s longing for reencountering the mother of idyllic infanthood. He used the term “imaginary solutions” to describe people’s attempts to replace unmanageable reality with wish-fulfilling fantasy by constructing all kinds of self-defeating solutions. His thinking again recalls Freud, who in “Totem and Taboo” defined fantasy as “tak[ing] flight from an unsatisfying reality,” which implies also one’s withdrawal from the community of man (Freud 1913: 74). Immersion in fantasy represents for Lacan not the denial of difficult inner and outer realities, but perhaps the only way to accept them and find a symbolic resolution. The fact that nothing in the Symbolic can fulfill our desire to transform our division into completeness drives us to bring something in from another realm—the quasi-imaginary objet petit a, from the field of fantasy, in the hope of being able to leave behind our frustrating state.
Lacan argues that a residue of the “primal union” with the maternal body survives the infant’s entry into the symbolic order. After its ban by the Symbolic, the “fundamental phantasy” is attached to the remnant of the Real in the form of the little nugget of originary enjoyment, which Lacan called the objet petit a. He used the term jouissance to capture the satisfaction provoked by the use of the desired object. The subject’s only object of complete satisfaction, the mother, is forbidden; the subject will search for substitutes, but these desire-provoking objects will never fulfill the dream of complete joy. Jouissance is something total but impossible; it is what desire can never reach, the void that can never be filled. Jouissance is an excessive pleasure and pain, something extra that turns pleasure into a fascinating, even unbearable intensity; it represents the “excess beyond the given, measurable, rational, and useful … for the stake of which we do what might otherwise seem irrational, counterproductive, or even wrong” (Dean 2006: 4). Unlike the pleasure principle, jouissance provokes a rise (rather than a drop) in tension.
One consequence of the subject’s dependence on ego-gratifying fantasies is that they mislead him to seek self-fulfillment through the objet petit a—the objectified cause of desire that the subject believes will return to him the precious sense of wholeness that has been lost. The objet petit a represents the desired integrity or wholeness; it does not refer to a specific need, but to the wish to become complete again, to be fully loved by the other, which is both impossible (since the self, created only after the separation, has no access to the primal union) and prohibited (through the action of language and Law). The object petit a is a compelling marker that pushes the subject toward substitutes that hold the potential illusion of fulfilling the constitutive lack, only to be reminded again and again that this lack is not fulfilled. It makes all substitute objects inadequate, deferring and differing pleasure, always in search of something else or more or elsewhere. This objet petit a is the inner secret or the kernel of the subject, creating a ceaseless and descriptive pressure to return to the “primal union,” which at the same time gives rise to an awesome, obscene enjoyment. As the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek asserts, the objet petit a is “a gap in the centre of the symbolic order—the lack, the void of the Real setting in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a pure semblance of the Mystery to be explained, interpreted” (1992: 8). Phantasy is a construction that stimulates desire exactly because it promises to cover over the lack in the Other, the lack created by the loss of jouissance:
It is because reality is articulated at the symbolic level and the symbolic is lacking, that reality can only acquire a certain coherence and become desirable as an object of identification, by resorting to fantasy; the illusory nature of fantasy functions as a support for the desire to identify. (Stavrakakis 1999: 46)
In a nutshell, fantasy is a longing for reconciliation and fullness, an attempt to compensate lack, to heal the wound caused by the primary trauma. The objet petit a and the “transformational object” do not refer to a specific need but to the wish to become again complete, to be fully loved by the other, in a way that would fill the lack. They both function as metaphors for the lost paradise: a paradise where we can enter for a limited period of time (Bollas), a paradise that will remain for us forever unreachable (Lacan).
Fantasy is not a strictly individual entity. From Freud’s standpoint, fantasy has always been present at the societal level in all civilizations in the form of legends, fairy-tales, and myths. Lacanian thinkers also believe that fantasy belongs to the social world because it is a construction whose primary function is to cover over the lack in the Other.
People’s shared dreams manifest themselves in myths. Myths constitute the common illusory experience that holds communities together. On the one hand they express populations’ striving for a return to idyllic infanthood and for ideal parental figures; on the other, they mirror politicians’ attempts to create the illusion of a pristine family and of regained order, harmony, stability, and happiness. Like dreams, myths surface as expressions of the mental state of societies. They disclose people’s shared needs, desires, fears, and traumas suffered. The tendency to explore wish fulfillment rules not only nocturnal dreams but daydreams as well, not only individual but also collective fancies. Myths are like the concealed fulfillment of a repressed wish. Societies in their fancies attain just that which is painfully missing; they may escape from a real or imagined danger or obtain the extinction of real or imagined enemies. Myths reflect man’s longing to attain rebirth through a return to the womb, a yearning that received various symbolic representation.
According to Jung, in ancient times man expressed his creativity by narrating and re-narrating myths; the realm of myths was the “world of fantasies,” the result of the activity of a highly artistic mind, where rather than seeking to gain an objective understanding of the real world, the goal was to adapt it aesthetically to collective fantasies and expectations (1979: 20–21). In this sense, the world represented in ancient myths had little to do with the external reality and reflected instead man’s inner reality. The Swiss psychoanalyst compared this psychic reality to children’s way of thinking. Just like imaginative children who attribute to their dolls and toys the qualities of animate things, ancient Greeks with their myths created and became inhabitants of a world of marvels. An expression of the indissoluble link that binds us to the men of antiquity is “fantasy-thinking,” which corresponds to the archaic ways of thinking and feeling and which “re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies” (Jung 1979: 28).
Myth for Lacan is a mixture of the Imaginary and the Symbolic; its main functions consist in “papering over the impossible, real kernel” around which the myth is constructed and for which it was originally formulated (Grigg 2006: 55). Žižek’s extensive study of the role of fantasy and myths in contemporary social and political life finds that ideology is an imaginary domain that is reproduced though the fantasy identifications of human subjects. In line with Lacan, he argues that the purpose of ideology is to fill in or cover over the lack caused by the loss of jouissance. Its function is “not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the special reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (1989: 45). The French-Greek psychoanalyst and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, inspired by Freud, arrived at a similar conclusion. According to Castoriadis, people have difficulties in accepting the chaos, the abyss, and the groundlessness from which humanity has emerged. Many refuse to recognize the death dwelling within every life; thus, “myth is essentially a way for society to vest with meaning both the world and its own life within the world—a world and a life that, otherwise, are obviously meaningless” (1997a: 11). Myths, which are expressions of the negation of the chaos, allow for circumscribing the abyss, for covering over the groundlessness.
Žižek contends that politics has become the “politics of jouissance,” concerned with “ways of soliciting or controlling and regulating jouissance” (2006: 307): “all politics relies upon, and even manipulates, a certain economy of enjoyment” (Žižek & Daly 2004: 114). A nation exists “only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths or fantasies that secure these practices” (1993: 202), and a community may fall into pieces if the belief in a shared enjoyment, connected to an idealized past or future, evaporated. What really binds a community together, argues Žižek, is not their knowing what laws to follow “but rather identification