The world precedes us
We exist even before we are born: in the place our parents gave us in their thoughts. Before we could speak, we were spoken; before we could name the world around us, we were named… and those words touched us, marked us, left traces on our subjectivity.
In the best case, there were those who desired something for us, and in that desiring, they poured in their own fantasies, their ghosts and fears. It is inevitable, it is human, and also necessary, because from those words, from those marks, we build a self, a way of standing before others, a way of inhabiting the world.
The marks that inhabit us
They are marks that have given us resources, that sustain us, but also marks that can limit us, distance us from our desire, make us suffer. Some words are heavier than others.
In analysis we work to recognise them, especially those that tie us to suffering. We seek to clear them, loosen them, make them more mobile, find new meanings for them, so as to open the possibility of a more our own and desired existence, less painful.
This is what we call being a subject: we are subject to these words that signify us. But the interesting thing is that none of these marks ties us down completely; there is always something that escapes, something unsayable. No word defines us entirely. A void remains, a lack in being.
Division and lack
That is why we are divided, incomplete, in contradiction:
- We want one thing but we also want the opposite;
- We complain about not being able to avoid ending up in the same situation again;
- We say we cannot find ourselves, that we do not know what we want;
- Or when we get that so-desired thing, we no longer want it.
Nothing is so homogeneous or harmonious in our human condition.
Desire as engine and discomfort
That movement, that thing that bothers us, that keeps us going back and forth, is desire.
Not long ago a patient called it a little worm, a “rum rum”, and I thought she hit the nail on the head. Desire bothers, discomforts, complicates our existence, does not let us be still, is never satisfied. Luckily! What would be left of life if everything were stillness? If there were no desire to get us out of bed? What would be left of us if we did not have that little worm that makes us jump out of the chair and move somewhere else? Desire is a sign that something is alive, an energy that pushes and mobilises.
Being a desiring subject
Being a subject implies being traversed by discourses, by demands, by the expectations of the other. But being desiring subjects… that is another thing.
Being a desiring subject is being able to sustain the void, the enigma, the lack. It is never closing completely. Because we can grasp that where it does not close, there arises what moves us and what separates us from death.
Being a desiring subject is accepting that there are no definitive answers, but there are paths to inhabit.
It is being able to do something new with the marks we carry, so that they do not become a destiny, but rather make it possible to invent something that includes our singularity.
There lies the wager of analysis: to host discomfort not to silence it, but to listen to it. To transform the repetitive complaint into a question that sets something new in motion, something of one's own.
Because instead of asking “who am I?”, perhaps the more alive question is: “what do I desire?”