The wedding night was quite eventful. She was under twenty, he was much older. It was a failure; the marriage was not consummated: the husband turned out to be impotent. This sexual failure was not without consequences for her.
More than ten years later, Freud was summoned to her side to help her.1 By that time, already separated from her husband, refusing to file for divorce and forced to remain chaste, she lived in seclusion to avoid temptation, always with the aim of not damaging her husband's reputation.
Freud thus meets a woman who is in the grip of a serious obsession, in the form of compulsive behaviour, which compelled her to perform the same senseless actions several times a day.
Freud reported that she would run from her bedroom to another adjoining room, where she would stand near the table in the middle, ring her maid, give her some order or dismiss her without giving her one. She would then return to where she started. This meaningless symptom stimulated Freud's "desire to know".
At first, she was reluctant, responding with "I don't know" to questions such as "Why are you doing this? What is the meaning of this?" However, Freud managed to overcome the patient's reticence, and she told him about the unfortunate incident that had occurred on her wedding night.
During that night, the impotent husband had run countless times from his room to hers to renew his attempt, without success. In the morning, exasperated, he felt ashamed in front of the maid making the bed, and grabbed a bottle of red ink that happened to be in the room and clumsily poured it onto the sheets, not in the right place.
Freud did not understand the connection between this memory of the wedding night and the compulsive action, apart from the fact of running tirelessly from one room to the other. The patient had to lead Freud to the table in the second room and show him a large stain on the tablecloth. The patient then explained that she called the maid so that she could see the stain.
This detail provided the evidence needed to establish a link between her husband's failure on their wedding night and the patient's compulsive action.
The elucidation of this symptom reveals three aspects.
On the one hand, the patient's imaginary identification with her husband, who, in a state of panic, repeated his back-and-forth trips between the two rooms on their wedding night.
On the other hand, using the symbolism of dreams, Freud interprets that the patient replaces the bed and sheets with the table and cloth. On this point, Freud provides us with valuable insight into the function of the symptom when he states that, in this case, "Table and bed together stand for marriage, so that the one can easily take the place of the other."2 In other words, the signifier "table" replacing the signifier "bed" is conducive to creating the fiction of a successful wedding night.
However, this trick proposed by the unconscious, in its interweaving with the symptom, must be linked to the function of the gaze embodied by the stain. The stain, in the form of an ink stain that can be seen, denotes the husband's phallic success, veiling his failure and making us believe in a sexual relation that does not exist.
The object a, here the gaze, fills the gap of the signifier that is missing in the Other, the hole of the non-writing of the sexual relation for speaking beings, correlated with the impossible writing of the signifier of The woman that does not exist.
In this sense, the symptom will have the function of a substitute that doesn't stop writing itself in place of what doesn't stop not writing itself for speaking beings, which, as a law, governs relations between the sexes.
The patient re-enacts the scene of the wedding night, correcting it, Freud states, assuring the man's all-phallic success in front of the maid, while in the iteration of the compulsive action, her own body enjoys the imperative One embodied by the symptom.
[1] Freud S., "The Sense of Symptoms", Lecture XVII of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE, Vol. XVI, London: Hogarth Vintage, 2001, p. 261–263.
[2] Ibid., p. 262.
