Whether to have child or not is linked to desire, however desire can vanish when one wants a child at any cost. [1]
This brought to mind a recent announcement by a high-profile woman whose career is invested with image and beauty After saying to the Nation she suffered over a dozen miscarriages before making a choice to opt for pregnancy by a gestational surrogate, she was told that she was unlikely to carry a pregnancy to term. Surrogacy remains a legislative limbo in Ireland with no Laws to [enlever “to”] governing it.
Within months of the arrival of the newborn by gestational surrogate, she was “taken by surprise” to find she was pregnant with identical twins. This time the pregnancy was successfully carried to term. Traditionally the pleasure or pain related to procreation generally remained away from the intrusion of all, being a private and intimate matter. However, for some procreation becomes a public affair, under the gaze of all the others. This particular woman takes to the media to “share” her story. This sharing is in the order of the imaginary and the symbolic and does not have the same order of Lacan’s concept of extimacy; an intimacy that the subject is ignorant of, connected to the real in the symbolic, and which is paradoxically the most exterior, an intimate exteriority. [2]
There is no doubt that the availability of modern medical technologies in reproductive science has increased demand and made possible for many women to have a child. To want a child is not restricted by the law of natural order, conventional family or religious concepts. There is a jouissance for all who want a child.
What is the desire to be a mother or the impregnable drive that pushes a woman to want a child, particularly when there is trouble in the natural order, what is the devastation and ravage on the body with repeated pregnancy-miscarriage? What jouissance is at play, is it towards life or against it?
The phallus that veils the lack of a signifier for woman is another name for desire, where the woman can assume her function in the sexual relation as mother. [3] The drive insists and is mute while retaining its masochistic essence in its aim for pleasure. It gives unbearable satisfaction by means of displeasure. This paradoxical pleasure comes into play as what is impossible, as what is real, it appears in analysis and it does not stop not being written, it is what does not turn out right. [4]
Freud tells us that sexuality is present from the beginning of life and its real presence is attributed to the concept of the unconscious. [5] The real of sex being ordered around the imaginary and the symbolic, with both sexes having a relation to the phallus, either having it or being it. In Lacan’s later teaching sex for the speaking being belongs to the not-all. [6] Not-all referring to the hole, the impossible, the point of real that cannot be symbolised nor grasped, which means that there is no knowledge in the real concerning sexuality. Lacan approaches sexuality by confrontation with the hole in the real, the vanishing point of meaning that the sexual non rapport makes. [7] Where there is no sexual rapport there is a jouissance and it is solely the place of a living body. [8]
Proof: Sébastien Dauguet
Photography: ©Nathalie Crame
[1] Ansermet, F., “Same Sex Procreation”, Psychoanalytic Notebooks, Issue 29.
[2] Sanabria, A., “Privacy”, Scilicet: The Speaking Body. On the Unconscious in the 21st Century, NLS Publication, 2016.
[3] Brousse, M.-H., “Feminism with Lacan”, Journal Return, Spring/Fall 1995, Vol. 5, p. 113-14.
[4] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 11, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis”, London, W.W.Norton & co., 2004, p. 166.
[5] Freud, S., Three Essays on Sexuality, SE, Vol. 11, (1901-1905), Hogarth Press.
[6] Laurent, E., “The Use of Neuroscience for Psychoanalysis”, Psychoanalytic Notebooks, Issue 21, p.121.
[7] Miller, J.-A., “A Fantasy”, Psychoanalytic Notebooks, Issue 34, p. 168.
[8] Miller, J-A., “Six Paradigms of Jouissance”, Psychoanalytic Notebooks, Issue 34, p. 69.
