Abstract
In Seminar VIII, Lacan describes phobia as ‘the most radical form of neurosis.’ In this chapter, we—two clinicians working with patients presenting with phobic symptoms—explore how the appearance of phobic objects opens up inquiries into the role of the inanimate and the nonhuman in analytic praxis; the production of the subject; and, ultimately, a potential beyond, of and for, psychoanalysis. Drawing from our clinical work, we look at the ways in which Lacanian clinical praxis might be able to engage more fully with the affective–material dimensions of language and the objects that occupy it. In this manner, phobic subjects might be thought to produce a more radical analysis for psychoanalysis through the decentering and failure of the human and its metaphors.
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Notes
- 1.
Vincente Palomera, The Paternal Function and Little Hans’ Phobia. Newsletter of the Freudian Field 6(1–2):49–61, 1992.
- 2.
Sigmund Freud, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1909). In Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, Vol. 3, ed. E. Jones, trans. A. Strachey and J. Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1953), p. 153.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Freud (1953), p. 256.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 151.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 152.
- 7.
Ibid., pp. 257–168.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 184.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 187.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 189.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 253. As Hans’s father notes at one point in his correspondence with Freud, as cited in the Little Hans case study, ‘His fear of horses became transformed more and more into an obsession for looking at them. He said: “I have to look at horses, and then I’m frightened.”’
- 12.
Palomera (1992), pp. 49–61.
- 13.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 14.
Cf. Derek Hook and Calum Neill, Perspectives on ‘Lacanian subjectivities,’ Subjectivity 24(1): 247–255, 2008.
- 15.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VIII: Transference, p. 305; quoted in Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 163.
- 16.
Palomera (1992), pp. 49–61.
- 17.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 270.
- 18.
Danuza Machado, Phobia and Perversion. Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research 2, 1993.
- 19.
These are only a few of the stories Anjali shared about animals. She also spoke of parrots and cats in equally idiosyncratic and often sensuous terms. The clinician often found herself unmoored by the strangeness of these stories, a sentiment echoed by her Lacanian supervisor. Anjali spoke about staying up late ‘washing the hamster’ and ‘petting the parrot,’ neither of which she found to be odd behaviors for the animals noted in the least. In fact, she seemed completely perplexed by the punctuation of these phrases and inquiry into these moments explicitly describing contact with the nonhuman.
- 20.
While the clinician had considered Anjali’s previous statement that her mother was always ‘spying’ on her in her room and wondered as to its possible connections with ‘bugs in [her] room’ and the spider dream , Anjali herself did not have any associations herself to spiders in particular or ‘spying’ at this point, and so the clinician did not go further and make this connection or interpretation.
- 21.
Cf. Jennifer Matthews, The Clinical Structure of Phobia: Lacan’s Reformulation of the Variables of Its Treatment (unpublished master’s thesis, Middlesex University. London, 2010).
- 22.
Hans. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2(12): 69–79, 2007.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 24.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987), p. 256.
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Pietrusza, C., Dunn, J. (2018). A Horse: No Worse? Phobia and the Failure of Human Metaphors in Psychoanalysis. In: Basu Thakur, G., Dickstein, J. (eds) Lacan and the Nonhuman. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63817-1_3
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