Since forever, some patients have come to us because of a love affair that causes suffering, because of a break-up, or a difficulty in making a commitment. The sexual non-relation, the real that is lodged within it, is at the heart of their narratives, in an infinite number of variations on the story of the mountain chalet.1
Contemporary responses in the face of the impossible present a number of recurring instances.
Common discourse which endeavours to cover over the real of the sexual non-relation includes new signifiers intended to be shared in many groupings or communities. These seem to serve as "new institutions" that might function as landmarks or points of support, there where it fails to knot a subjective position.
In contemporary language, the word "relating" emerges whenever it concerns the bond to the other, whether that be in terms of love, desire, sex or friendship.2
The relation is conjugated as a verb and comes to cover over a whole range of diverse realities3 compacted beneath the same signifier—whereas the types of possible relations abound.
As Jacques-Alain Miller says in A Fantasy: "people today, the post—or even hyper-modern subjects are disinhibited, neo-disinhibited, desamparados, distressed, disoriented."4 They are undoubtedly astray in the face of a too much of freedom, the choice is theirs in an infinite number of declensions as to how to knot their affective, sexual and amorous bonds.
At every turn, "relating" brings the relation and the Other back into discourse, a veil put back over the failure. And on the jouissance of the One-all-alone, which makes itself nonetheless omnipresent.
When the attempt at veiling fails, the explanation for the failure is, for some subjects, based on a logic of "fault". Faced with the non-sense of this "it doesn't work/it doesn't match", they adopt an explanation in terms of fault, which leans more towards the imaginary register. A villain is "necessary" to take the blame—either it's me, or it's the other person. If it's "me", it's a collapse on the slant of melancholia. If it's "the other", it's hatred. Both are facets of devastation [ravage].
For some people, failure reduced to the register of fault seems to encounter a difficulty in their finding a knotting between the three registers that holds together at all.
Repetition is never far away and, since forever, it opens up the possibility of such subjects coming to our consulting rooms to pose questions and to cast some doubts. And perhaps to hear something of their jouissance, to take responsibility for it, and to open the door to a singular subjective invention, on the border of the real.
[1] Cf. Lacan J., Le Séminaire, livre XV, L'Acte psychanalytique, established by J.-A. Miller, Paris, Seuil, 2024, p. 266–272. Unpublished in English.
[2] With or without "benefits": Friends with benefits, sexfriends.
[3] Couple, commitment, a love story, an affair, being in love, a passion.
[4] Miller J.-A., A Fantasy, Conference in Comandatuba. IVth Congress of the WAP, 2004, Comandatuba, Brazil. Published in French in the journal Mental n° 15, 2005. Available online: congresamp.com.
