An interesting question, in my opinion, always humble and respectful, because I consider it the prelude to the great question: What does it mean to die?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Life emerged in the universe, and life endures. Perhaps it is an immanently persistent system, guided and subjected to a purpose that constitutes its essence\u2014to survive, to endure\u2014, perhaps it is the result of a design\u2014a divine whim\u2014, or perhaps it is a fortuitous miracle\u2014the result of an external dynamic equilibrium maintained by a constant correction algorithm, in which chance proposes and selection disposes, as the immense variability among living beings seems to show. However, whether essentially persistent or miraculously fortuitous, life endures, but in that process, it sacrificed the individual being, perhaps so as not to deviate from its purpose\u2014to endure\u2014, or perhaps because, being the inevitable result of the corrective algorithm, it is subject to the necessity of enduring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Man, for better or worse, was born immersed in the bosom of life\u2014born having already tasted the fruit of the tree of life\u2014, but he tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree\u2014the tree of knowledge\u2014, deviated from the harmonious path of life and found himself, his consciousness and his individuality, the expulsion from paradise. This painful separation will be progressively repeated in every human being, starting from the cutting of the umbilical cord, the withdrawal from the mother\u2019s breast, the fleeting vision in the mirror, and in their relationship with their body. Comically, we might think that perhaps it was a new concession of life to durability\u2014as the sacrifice of the individual was before\u2014, perhaps it foresaw that only in this way could some descendant of Elon Musk take it off planet Earth before it perishes or we make it uninhabitable, but that does not invalidate the result: if the first concession meant death for the individual\u2014the finitude of individual life\u2014, the second meant the consciousness of death\u2014the tragedy of knowing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The consciousness of our individuality, the consciousness of our cleavage\u2014\u201cI, my body, life and the world\u201d\u2014, remains blurred in the first of the differentiations\u2014\u201cI, my body.\u201d Perhaps for religion, the answer is simple\u2014\u201cIn the beginning was the Word\u201d\u2014, thus, I am not my body, but my soul incarnated in my body; by splitting soul and body, the \u201cmiracle\u201d can be operated: if the body decays, dies, the soul, like life, endures\u2014the great human longing. Perhaps for science, the answer is equally simple\u2014though painful for not escaping death\u2014, \u201cI am stardust, I am my body observing itself through a complex, extensively interconnected neural network, whether through a computational process regulated by changes in electrical potential and small regulatory neurotransmitters, or through quantum processes occurring in neuronal microtubules.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps, however, the question is not, after all, \u201cDo I have a body or am I a body?\u201d but rather \u201cWhat is the body to the psyche?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From its inception, Freud pointed out that just as in the entire animal kingdom\u2014including man\u2014there is an influence of the somatic on the psychic, in man there is also an action of the psychic on the somatic. Life does not speak, but truth does speak\u2014for instance, through the hysterical body, the body that speaks, the hysterical conversion symptom in which an unknown truth is spoken in a coded way through the body\u2014, something that led him to introduce the concept of the unconscious. Thus, a distinction is established between the organism\u2014that which survives and reproduces\u2014, and the body, that from which the truth speaks. But the truth is always coded for the subject who suffers from it, since the truth speaks but is not spoken by the subject of the word; it is not something that is spoken about. The body speaks without the subject knowing what it is that their body\u2014marked by the word\u2014is talking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The symptom, in its psychoanalytic conceptualization, will remain faithful to this initial description. The symptom encloses a truth that the subject does not know and that is imposed upon them pathologically disguised, presenting a subject divided between their knowledge and their truth, an opaque truth that pushes them to act against their own well-being and to feel divided against themselves, for even while feeling satisfied and complete with their knowledge, they also suffer from that truth that the symptom embodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Freud\u2014who by then had already described drive satisfaction as a psychic representation linked to the somatic, received by the Id and managed by the Ego\u2014observed in the persistence of the symptom that it suffers from a compulsion to repeat, which is why it contains a satisfaction; but it is a strange satisfaction, unrecognized by the subject, since it makes them suffer. The body is not only a body that speaks\u2014marked by the word\u2014, but also the seat of a satisfaction that paradoxically makes it suffer. This paradoxical satisfaction does not seek pleasure like the life drive\u2014egoic drives of self-preservation and sexual drives\u2014, but is a satisfaction that goes beyond the pleasure principle, a satisfaction that attacks the subject's well-being which he called the death drive, which will tend toward the inorganic state of the beginning of life, to erase the mark of the truth in the body over the psyche, something that years later Jacques Lacan would define as \u201cjouissance\u201d (enjoyment).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Lacan, by pointing out that the unconscious is structured like a language, that it can be deciphered through the word, the action of the psychic on the somatic became the action of language on the somatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Starting from the death drive, Lacan introduced the concept of jouissance, but Lacan contradicts Freud regarding the goal of this drive being the one pointed out by his master\u2014a decrease in tension, an inorganic state of \u201cnirvana\u201d\u2014, instead pointing out that the goal of the drive is jouissance, the always unsatisfied demand of the drive that will relaunch it again and again, so that the drive can never be satisfied in its totality and the jouissance of the drive will always be partial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Lacan, the paternal interdiction\u2014The Name of the Father\u2014will establish the symbolic order, inserting the subject into language and generating desire\u2014which will be the alienation of jouissance in language\u2014, generating a loss of jouissance, but a remainder of jouissance will always remain that will escape this operation and represent in the psyche the inscription of the real of the body upon being affected by language. Thus, desire and jouissance will be contrasted: desire will be a defence against jouissance, desire will be linked to lack\u2014desire for what one does not have\u2014, while jouissance will be what one does have as a demand of the body, of the drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But returning to the beginning, alongside the body as a biological organism, the one that survives and reproduces, regulated by health and disease, whose psychic expression will be the libidinal body, the body that pursues well-being\u2014the body of the Ego\u2014, there exists the body that stands for the subject as the space of truth (Freud) and the truth marked by jouissance (Lacan)\u2014the body of jouissance\u2014, the truth that escapes the Ego\u2019s knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, for both authors, the body will also and essentially be the seat of narcissism, of the narcissism of the Ego.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Freud, the body will initially be the projection in space of the narcissism of the Ego. Lacan, in his reinterpretation of Freud, will say in a first moment\u2014in \u201cThe Mirror Stage as Formative of the I\u201d\u2014that the body as a non-fragmented reality will appear in the psyche starting from the reflection in the mirror, from the unified image of the body (until then fragmented) in front of the mirror (the Ideal-I), of an imaginary nature (specular image), which will constitute the Ego, the feeling of identity. However, upon recognizing themselves for the first time, the child cannot help but be surprised at the same time by what they see, and will seek in the Other (the mother) the confirmation that the image they contemplate is their own (the Ego-Ideal), of a symbolic nature (desire of the Other), from where they are looked at, spoken to, and confirmed by the Other in their identity. Thus, imaginary alienation will be at the origin of the formation of the Ego, an Ego that is formed by its capture in the image of the other, of that other who in principle is the very image of my unified body in the mirror, of a body as an imaginary phallus that responds to the question of \u201cwhat am I for the desire of the Other?\u201d The failure of this appropriation of the unified image which will originate the feeling of an Ego will lead to the experience of bodily fragmentation and feelings of depersonalization that can appear in psychoses. Here the body does not speak; rather, it fragments, it explodes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The formation of the Ego from the appropriation of the specular image of the body from the gaze of the Other will entail empathy, ideal identification with the images of our fellow beings, the mirrors in which we also look at ourselves, with whom we compare ourselves, whom we admire, and with whom we compete. However, it will also entail a passion for the bodily image, as much as a visual delight (phallic), as a suffering (jouissance), as a demand of the Superego on the body (commodity of aesthetic medicine), which will lead Lacan to say that beauty is the veil that hides the horror of jouissance, but at the same time evokes it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later, Lacan will resignify the body, not so much as a construction from its specular image but as something captured by the network of language and marked by the signifier function, something that transcends it and is already there before birth and will remain there after its death\u2014the body as the result of the living organism upon being altered by the symbolic. As this author noted, the animal is an organism, but man has a body. Man, subject of the word, does not say \u201cI am a body\u201d but \u201cI have a body,\u201d so the body will be experienced as something distinct from the subject, independent, enabling one to believe in the existence and immortality of the soul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thus, the subject, insofar as they are a subject of the demand (the signifier), cannot identify with their body, which is why it presents itself to the subject as an attribute (\u201chaving a body\u201d) and not as their own being (\u201cbeing a body\u201d). A loss of the jouissance of life has occurred, of the communion with nature\u2014where spoken language does not exist\u2014, the jouissance of the prehistoric ancestor who at a given moment deviated from his path without knowing that he could no longer return\u2014the jouissance of Adam and Eve running naked through paradise before tasting the forbidden fruit and being expelled by God. The mythical jouissance has been lost through paternal interdiction, establishing the subject in the symbolic order and language, and splitting the original\u2014natural\u2014jouissance into desire\u2014the defense against jouissance, linked to lack (\u201cdesire for what one does not have\u201d)\u2014, and drive jouissance\u2014what one does have as a demand of the body, of the drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Biological needs, the animal instinct that places the organism in direct relation with the objects that satisfy it, will in man be disturbed by language; need will bump into language and be transformed into demand, returning to him alienated in the word. Crying, the scream as a somatic discharge in the face of need, will be deciphered by the Other in the form of language and transformed into a demand; it is the Other's response that transforms the scream into a signifier\u2014into language\u2014, into the demand of a subject. The substitution of need by demand will give rise to desire, so that the effect of the demand (of the signifier) will alter and transform an organism governed by biological need (the real) into a body driven by desire (the symbolic), a desire marked by its relation to lack (a desire for nothing), always unsatisfied by what has been lost and cannot be found again (the objet petit a of the drive), yearning to give what one does not have (yearning to love), having been traversed by desire (by lack).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, not all jouissance will be transformed into desire; a remainder of the original jouissance will remain, the drive jouissance (the jouissance in the body), expressed in its erogenous zones, from sex to the very skin, drives that will not be biological needs or instincts, but \u201cthe echo in the body of the demand of the Other,\u201d since it will be through the action of the Other, of the demand of the Other\u2014\u201ceat,\u201d \u201cpoop,\u201d \u201clook, look at yourself,\u201d \u201clisten, listen to yourself\u201d\u2014, that certain zones of the body will end up becoming erogenous zones, partial drive sources (oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a final phase, this question of the body as the seat of a residual\u2014drive\u2014jouissance will be defined as an autistic jouissance. Jouissance will always be the jouissance of one\u2019s own body, a jouissance in one\u2019s own body, although by means of the body of the Other, a body that enjoys itself through the Other (\u201cthere is no sexual relationship\u201d), opposed as much to phallic jouissance, masturbatory, without relation to the Other, as to love, which requires the Other (\u201clove, that longing that allows jouissance to condescend to desire\u201d), while jouissance\u2014idiotic and solitary\u2014will not want to know anything about the Other. Thus, the body will be constituted as the seat of jouissance, a body that will enjoy in different ways, intertwining with another body, touching itself, or simply speaking (the body that speaks through the drives).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In conclusion, the organism, which because it is alive survives and reproduces\u2014\u201cI am a body\u201d\u2014, by action of the psychic on the somatic also becomes the seat of the symptom, of the truth that the subject suffers from and of jouissance, the demand of the body (drive), and the projection of the narcissism of the ego, which, upon being captured by the network of language inserting it into the symbolic order as a signifier, will be experienced as something distinct from the subject, independent, which will become an attribute, an object\u2014\u201cI have a body\u201d\u2014and not the subject itself, enabling one to believe in the existence of a duality, of a soul that transcends the body, and, therefore, does not have to be subject to its decomposition, subjected to death.<\/p>\n\n\n
Accessed 102 times<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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An interesting question, in my opinion, always humble and respectful, because I consider it the prelude to the great question: What does it mean to die?...<\/p>\n
Accessed 102 times<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":521,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,145],"tags":[42,43],"class_list":["post-519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-incertezas","category-totum-revolutum","tag-cuerpo","tag-psicoanalisis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":590,"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions\/590"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.masrampinyo.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}