Enjoy Your Enjoyment — Lacanian Jouissance in the Brain
How do you view the world, the cosmos, N(n)ature, G(g)od. Is it some transcendent, intangible oneness? Or is it split at its root, fundamentally antagonistic, frictive? Does it inspire to a unification or tempt to entropy? Are we best served, as the stoic Marcus Aurelius would suggest, by interrupting the chaos, asserting our influence upon our small domain of the universe — as the honeybee does his hive, and the beaver his damn — in a repetition of vane attempts at order?
Or do we resist and embrace the mess?
Those in the transcendent oneness camp may feel drawn to psychotherapeutic interventions that subtly embrace the spiritual. As I covered in my article The Religion of Therapy — Zen, Psychoanalysis & The Counselor’s Secret Radicalism, clients and therapists ought not to feel that the medico-clinical model of mental health prohibits spiritual perspective taking while engaging in psychotherapy. In many such mental health perspectives, the implicit or explicit goal of treatment is homeostasis — a return to holistic wellness, acceptance and transcendence of trauma, equanimity, peace. The practitioner guides toward and exemplifies this homeostatic psychology through what clinicians call “the therapeutic posture”.
But such is not the way of the neuropsychoanalyst.
Neuropsychoanalysis explores the unknown of the human soul (the first-person subjective experience of the client along with its potential to influence and be influenced by its natural and interpersonal environment) as one does an emerging science, indulging interpretive hypotheses curiously and testing them against the soft and hard evidence of both the mind and the brain.
And when the psychoanalyst shifts their focus from observation of their patient (analysis) to active attempts at influencing the psychic plane toward wellness (therapy), they indulge — only with the best intensions of course — in the subtle art of fucking up your homeostasis.
Allow me to explain.
Neuropsychoanalysis is a Problematization
In his book A Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis: Consciousness Enjoying Uncertainty (2024), Duquesne University Clinical Psychology doctoral candidate John Dall’Aglio challenges psychotherapy’s aspiration of homeostasis. He deconstructs the mystic’s vision of a “capital N Nature” that consumes and directs the totality of human, animal, and plant life — that transcendent unity comprehended only by a soul engaged in copious introspection and a master’s course in Emerson and Thoreau. Dall’Aglio uses instead the expression “evolutionary inheritance”, steering his reader’s mind away from the appeal to “Nature” and undermining any cozy childhood memories of exhibits at natural history museums that reduce eons of chaotic and undirected evolutionary selection to conveniently linear timelines.
Dall’Aglio expands the Lacanian adage — “There is no Other of the Other” — to apply to the aforementioned aspirational homeostasis. Just as there is no Ultimate Other to which the Other — the symbolic order to which our language and thought comport themselves— comports itself, there is no permanent, overarching, or transcendent state of homeostasis that corresponds to an objectively ‘well’ condition that clients can achieve. As Dall’Aglio puts it (borrowing an expression from Belgian professor of clinical psychology Ariane Bazan): “There is no homeostasis of homeostasis” (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.33).
Dall’Aglio reminds his readers that traditional Solmsian neuropsychoanalysis forces a “problematization” of homeostasis, highlighting the fundamental antagonism of the client’s symbolic plane, upsetting the balance, and prompting the mind to address conflict creatively, discover new solutions, and complexify both cognitively, affectively, and neuronally. Homeostatic states presume a mechanism of affective regulation by the cortex of deeply entrenched affective processes in the brain stem and limbic system. Deeply automated affective responses called affective hyperpriors are programmed through early childhood attachment dynamics and the resulting anatomical and physiological development of the brain. But if these automated processes — corresponding to what we call the subconscious mind — are shaped by traumatic experiences that distort the reality of risk and reward in the social environment, they may no longer serve the client’s best interests.
What follows is a shift of attention from the ideal of homeostatic balance (psychologically, neurochemically, or otherwise) toward a fundamental antagonism — the kernel of conflict that drives human behavior and social interaction — that builds upon the work of French psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. (For more on Zizek’s perspective, see my article of The Antagonism is The Real).
But how can this prioritization of antagonism be leveraged therapeutically? Does not viewing n(N)ature as antagonistic at its core thrust us toward either compulsive capitalistic aggression on the one hand or a pessimistic, fatalistic, and passive nihilism on the other? And what does this look like in the brain?
Dall’Aglio’s Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis finds this antagonism in the very structure and function of the brain and leverages Lacanian clinical concepts to treat distressing psychological and behavioral symptoms with the disruptive playfulness of the psychoanalytic model. A Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis draws from a line of thinkers from the past 2–3 decades of psychodynamic thought that link psychoanalytic thought to the latest neuroscientific findings about the brain’s function. I was pleased to find in Dall’Aglio’s book a reference to some of the same thinkers I have covered on this blog over the past few years — Paanksepp, Solms, Friston, Zizek.
I didn’t expect my reading to lead down the rabbit hole to Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis, let alone to look around and see other bunnies. But here we are. Let’s dig a little further. I’m sure there’s a carrot around here somewhere.
Some Lacanian Fundamentals
As the name suggests, Lacanian Neuropsychoanalysis leverages the philosophical framework of neuropsychoanalysis (the anatomo-clinical approach to correlating psychoanalytic conceptualizations of first-person subjective experience with brain anatomy and physiology developed by the field’s pioneer, Mark Solms) with the work of the influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981).
It is fitting that the subtitle of Dall’Aglio’s book (Consciousness Enjoying Uncertainty) focuses on how uncertainty plays in the dynamic field of neuropsychoanalytic neurophilosophy , given Lacan’s reputation of being deliberately ambiguous, taking a therapeutic stance that, while frustrating, can prompt personal insights and nudge a client towards psychological development. I say this to warn my reader not to get caught up in the necessity to grasp a comprehensive understanding of Lacan to realize the therapeutic benefit of a neuropsychodynamic theory of mind that centers on the uncertainty of Lacan’s paradigm.
Let’s begin with a brief overview of some Lacanian principles.
The Real — The question of what is “real” writ large would require a much more thorough philosophical investigation than I will attempt in this article. However, Jacques Lacan’s “The Real” refers to a specific dimension of human experience that is so enigmatic that it cannot even be represented symbolically, let alone articulated.
Lacan’s Real captures what I refer to as the negative principle at its best. What is real is that which is intrinsically not. The key driver of human psychology is a vacuous absence that moves subjects and manipulates the symbolic object relations of our psychology. It is ineffable. We speak around it. The well act in acknowledgement of it. The hyper-intellectual neglect it. The confident rest with it. The wise remind us to stay humble before its power.
Dall’Aglio asserts, “The Lacanian real has a traumatic status” (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.74). The subject in Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis is split (indicated with the $ symbol to note the fundamental division of the subject) because of the inaccessibility of the Real. The more someone attempts to alight upon what is real, the more split, conflicted, obsessed, and neurotic they become.
The Other — The Other refers to the field of signifiers with which an individual (as a split subject) interacts. Included in the relationship between the split subject and the Other is the fundamental fantasy. The fundamental fantasy captures the initial attachment of a child with caregivers that imprints itself traumatically in the mind and brain, such that it is played out repetitively in the field of signifiers and transferred upon various interpersonal relationships in a distorted way across the lifespan. These are the parataxic distortions that lead an individual to psychoanalytic therapy. Lacan uses the capital A symbol to represent the Other.
Objet petit a — also using a symbol ‘a’ but a little one (petit a), is the sought-after object of desire that splits the subject ($), causing the rift that compels them to behavioral repetition compulsion.
Jouissance — According to Lacan, the split subject never fully satiates the desire for the objet petit a. But the attempt results in an excess, surplus pleasure that carries with it the sharp edge of the impossible, the traumatic. He calls this surplus pleasure jouissance. One is reminded of Anthony Kiedus’ “pleasure spiked with pain”. You know — “that motherf***er’s always spiked with pain” (Kiedus, 1996).
Although not explicitly named as in Lacan’s work, the concept of jouissance is found in Freud’s model, in the contradictions and limitations he found with his pleasure principle (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.44). According to Freud, pleasure arises from the reduction of tension caused by the drives. In the classical Freudian model, tension persists through the stages of psychosexual development (oral, anal, phallic, latent), culminating in the genital stage. While Freud attributed deviations from this developmental endpoint to the death drive, Lacan attributed them to residual (and partial) drives associated with the excess of childlike sexuality. He referred to this excess enjoyment as jouissance.
The Negative Principle in the Brain
Philosophy, particularly after Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn, moved toward what I have referred to in previous articles as a negative principle — an attempt at an articulation, not of what is or ought to be, but of what is not or ought not to be. Christian mysticism like Ekhart drew the western mind toward the absence of God. The principle appeared in Hegelian dialectics and later reemerged in Marxist theory and the critical theories that developed from it. Later, existentialism drew attention to the absurd, the unresolvable pushing up and down of a rock on a hill, the irreducibility of our phenomenological perspective to objective reality. Postmodernism introduced the trace of unarticulated subconscious thought in every spoken or written word and the unresolvability of contradicting systems of knowledge and morality.
In short, such theories are not authoritative as would be positivistic science or phallic Judeo-Christian religious philosophy, but rather challenge the authority of religion, science, and analytical philosophy by attending to the gaps in their epistemologies, the insurmountable disconnect between assertion and reality.
But can we not point to brain scans in peer-reviewed articles that our friends forward to our already cluttered email accounts to settle our existential doubts, as the religionist might brandish the sacred text? Surely, strict adherence to a materialist neuroscience would strip that “something else” of negative unreachable space from its throne of enigmatic power.
Sorry, no.
Dall’Aglio puts it this way:
“The image of the brain ‘veils the real’; neuroscience cannot attend to the emergent excess uncaptured by representation.” (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.17)
(Thanks John, there goes my materialist holy writ, out the window with all the other sacred texts that I thought could account for all the awe-inspiring mysteries of my soul. Now, how am I going to be able to use the body of biological science to disprove my religionist buddies? You mean to tell me I can’t point to the sciences as the end-all of the ineffable experiences of my subjective world?
Guess I am left again to drift in my untethered mysticism.)
Dall’Agio clarifies:
“Neuroscience — the image of the brain, the formulas for its synaptic activity, its models for predicting human behavior — denies any notion of a structural lack or positive surplus that escapes symbolization…Neuroscience’s denial of contradiction or impossibility renders it incapable of attending to the real” (Dall,Aglio, 2024, p.17)
Acknowledging the limits of the neuroscientific body of knowledge is essential for the study of the human subjective experience. Dall’Aglio rightly refers to his work as “neuroscientific abstraction”. It is not as if reference to an fMRI proves that Lacan or Freud or psychoanalysis was right all along (although, the neuropsychoanalytic literature is full of instances where writers marvel at the genius of a psychological model developed long before modern imaging technologies provided a look into the function of the living brain that largely still holds up to the findings of modern neuroscience). Rather, Lacanian symbolic algebra is a useful concept to account for this “negative excess that cannot be imaged or grasped” (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.17).
This isn’t a prioritization of Lacanianism over materialism, but rather an acknowledgement of the limits of materialist neuroscience and a leveraging of Lacanianism as a way of attending to the gap. From the clinical perspective, this matters. If neuroscience solved the mysteries of human mental wellness, surely reading a neuroscience textbook would provide an individual with all the information needed to solve their mental suffering. But as any clinician knows who has spoken to a highly intelligent client with no lack of comprehension of the physiological correlates of mental wellness (neurotransmitters, pharmacology, DSM diagnoses, and the rules of IG therapy speak) but who still suffers, there remains “something else” about human distress that must still be addressed some other how. In the absence of (what I often advocate for) real-time manipulation of brain processes with advanced technologies for measuring and manipulating plasticity in the brain toward targeted regional complexification, we must attend to the gaps in neuroscience with philosophy, poetry, and play.
There is Cerebral Non-rapport
Dall’Aglio extends the Lacanian adage “There is no sexual relationship” (meaning that conflict underpins all sexual relationships as a fundamental root of the engagement. No perfect harmony can be established) to his “There is no cerebral relationship” — no perfect mapping of mind to brain is possible.
Dall’Aglio cites Johnston who highlights the “sedimented, out-of-joint nature of evolutionary dehiscent brain systems”(Johnston, 2019 as cited in Dall,Aglio, 2024, p34). The evolution of the layered brain, often oversimplified into the reptilian brain stem, the mammalian limbic system, and the uniquely human cortex, did not result in a neat organization of function, connection, and sensation across these layers. Evolution is messy. And much of the way our minds work results from evolutionary exaptation — anatomical mechanisms originally shaped by survival needs have since been repurposed for entirely different functions now that the original threats or reproductive pressures that shaped them no longer exist.
As much as we look up to science, and neuroscience in particular, to solve the mysteries of the human condition and give us the tools we need to biohack our way to superegoic ideals, human subjective experience resists comprehensive representation by brain imaging. There is something else that cannot be captured by our current neuroscientific technology. Lacan and Zizek’s discussions of absence and antagonism are “not a claim of positive (substantial) existence; it is an affirmation of the negative…a present absence” (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.35)
Beautifully put: the negative principle in Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis.
Jouissance in the Realm of the Affective — From Symptom to Synthome
As I mentioned previously, Dall’Aglio draws from foundational work in affective neuroscience from the 90s by Jaak Paanksepp. Paanksepp identified 7 neural circuits associated with emotion in the brains of rats — SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, SEPARATION DISTRESS, and PLAY (written in all caps to differentiate them from the everyday emotions — these are innate subcortical processes that yield predictable outcomes across mammalian species). Panksepp’s pioneering work led to the development of affective neuroscience, which diverged from the cognitive focus of computational neuroscience and has become of particular interest to psychotherapists as they navigate their clients’ complex emotional landscapes.
In this Dall’Aglio follows the model of Mark Solms, who also leverages Paanksepp’s affective neuroscience in his neuropsychoanalysis. Solms’s big claim in his 2021 The Hidden Spring is that consciousness is primarily affective, based in the periaqueductal gray (PAG) of the brainstem. He tells the story of neuroencephalopathic patients who smile, become frustrated, and cry (the parts of us that therapists often refer to as “human”) even though they don’t have a frontal cortex (classically associated with consciousness). In Solmsian terms, the ego encompasses processes of affect and drive regulation occurring throughout the brain, at the brain stem, in the limbic emotional areas, and the cognitive, predictive processing of the cortex. This focus on the homeostatic regulation of drive energy bursting up from the brain stem tracks with Paanksepp’s S.E.L.F., a homeostatic balancing mechanism at the lowest areas of the brain that influenced the evolution of the brain throughout its layered development. This homeostatic regulatory tendency moves us toward homeostasis through the satisfaction of drive needs, with emotional systems pointing the way.
Like Solms, Dall’Aglio combines the above with Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle (FEP), a computational theory stating that all intact systems seek homeostasis by limiting surprise through a combination of belief updating and acting upon the environment. FEP calculations occur at every system-to-system interface within the organism, from the synaptic level of the sense organs, through the brainstem, limbic system, and cortex, with ever-increasing complexity, culminating in the uniquely human cortical capacity for computational and strategic rationality.
This is quite a tidy conceptualization that combines leading theories of computational neuroscience, affective neuroscience, and our understanding of nervous system functioning.
So, where is that gap?
Dall’Aglio points out that Paanksepp’s affective systems are not static. The potential for experiencing varying emotions depends on the situations and object relations to which the mind maps those emotions as the brain develops. Dall’Aglio refers to these as “holes” that “allow experience-dependent learning” (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.100). The Freudian drives are oriented toward these points of juncture between affective circuits, disrupting any homeostatic balance achieved by them and causing (from the Fristonian conceptualization) surplus prediction error — jouissance. This disequilibrium of affective circuits, dynamic emotional balancing and subsequent disruption, corresponds to the Lacanian register. It is the neurological “place” of the object petit a and jouissance and is experienced as uncertainty.
From the clinical perspective, when drive energy finds maladaptive ways of relieving this uncertainty, repetition compulsion arises — the neurotic, compulsive, or addictive behavioral symptom.
“Drive is the aberration of instinct. More specifically, the aberrated instinct is oriented towards objet a — hence the ongoing repetition and manifest (self-reflectively conscious) dissatisfaction, the strange enjoyment (jouissance) in the suffering of the symptom.” (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.100)
What follows is a masochistic logic of excess (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.100). Working in Friston, this logic of excess seeks not the resolution of homeostasis through the minimization of free energy and prediction error (as would be the case for the adaptive function of instinct), but sets prediction error, jouissance — the sensation of uncertainty, excess, and insatiability — as the goal.
“Jouissance…names the surplus prediction error outside predictive management. Specifically, jouissance arises at the point of instinct being hooked into the logic of excess, being oriented toward objet a” (Dall’Aglio, 2024, p.101)
So, how does the clinician interrupt this logic of excess? Dall’Aglio recommends leveraging the PLAY affective system to remetabolize the excess drive energy that creeps into the gaps between affective systems to interrupt the aberrant instincts’ movement toward the unfillable object of desire (objet petit a). Theoretically, the PLAY system is activated when psychoanalysis problematizes the automated but maladaptive affective hyperprior, inserts prediction error, and prompts a remetabolism of the excess drive energy into new affective responses. The goal is that maladaptive repetition compulsions (symptoms) resolve into new syntheses of drive energy toward homeostatic management of the client’s internal and external worlds (synthomes) that are more adaptive for the client and their social environment.
The concept of the synthome brings to mind Fromm’s idea of productive engagement with the world and Marcus Aurelius’s rather flimsy argument for industriousness — that one should work hard to organize life simply because bees and beavers do. One could think of good old-fashioned “productive work” as a synthome of homeostatic disruption. This transformation may manifest professionally (through renewed career or vocational engagement), creatively (by channeling a new relationship with emotion into artistic expression), or socially (through new forms of communication that give voice — both literally and metaphorically — to drive energies that, prior to treatment, had been fueling distressing repetition compulsions in the client).
Enjoy Your Enjoyment
Often the pursuit of the object of insatiable desire (objet a) yields jouissance’s “pleasure spiked with pain” in a way that does not reach the individual’s conscious awareness. That is to say that an individual may reach out for the object of desire and find success, but the success does not register as a fulfilled desire. When one develops a reflexive awareness of the pleasure derived by the drive, while acknowledging the antagonism that will always exist when pursuing an elusive object of desire, they can learn to enjoy their enjoyment (Fink, 2011). This halts the repetition compulsion.
The therapist prompts to reflexive awareness this enjoyment of uncertainty. In acceptance of the affective conflict that arises from fundamental antagonism, and acknowledgement of the futility of attaining a “homeostasis of homeostasis,” one resigns oneself to taking the pleasure as it comes, stripping the objet petit a of its traumatic pull and becoming instead its master.
Uncertainty can be fun. Every opportunity for play presents an opportunity to learn. Not the “I know stuff you don’t understand” kind of learning. But the kind of learning that affective systems do as they jostle around — alighting upon holes and remetabolizing drive energy, reaching and releasing homeostasis.
So get out there and remetabolize your jouissance. Do that thing. Know you are doing it. Do it fully. Enjoy it. Fall apart. Come together. Rinse yourself off. Repeat.
And most importantly — enjoy your enjoyment.
References:
Dall’Aglio, J. (2024). A Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis: Consciousness enjoying uncertainty. Springer International Publishing AG.
Johnston, A. (2005). Time driven: Metapsychology and the splitting of the drive. Northwestern University Press.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press.
Solms, M. (2021). The hidden spring: A journey to the source of consciousness. W. W. Norton & Company.
