I would like to comment briefly on the citation from Jacques-Alain Miller that Katty Langelez-Stevens has introduced in the PIPOL 12 argument: “the family is formed by the Name-of-the-Father, by the Mother’s desire, by the objects a […] the family is essentially united by a secret, it is united by something unsaid. […] It is always a secret about jouissance: what do the father and mother enjoy?” [1]
So the family is the father, the mother and their object plus-de-jouir.
This concerns the discontent in the family in the sense of the familial institution, in the political sense that we can give to it. But it also directly concerns what causes discontent in the familial biography of a child, or of an adult who is revisiting his infancy.
J.-A. Miller points out that Lacan – in his Seminar From an Other to the other – gives us “a theory of psychoanalytic biography”. [2] In any biography, one point radically escapes, and yet it is this very point that is at stake in all the elements of this biography. It is a jouissance situated outside all possible knowledge. I quote Lacan: “[w]hat psychoanalytic experience does is detect somewhere the ‘point at infinity’ [also known in mathematics as the ‘ideal point’] of everything that is organised in the realm of signifying combinations. This point at infinity is irreducible, insofar as it concerns a certain jouissance […]. The signifier of jouissance – a signifier that is excluded […] is that around which revolve all the biographies to which psychoanalytic literature tends to reduce neurosis.” [3]
It seems to me that this is also what J.-A. Miller is referring to when he updates the definition of the family today.
This excluded signifier is what Lacan would later refer to in his teaching as “the letter”, which implies a reduction of meaning to an edge of beyond-meaning, an edge of jouissance that cannot be said in its entirety.
At this level, it’s not the family anecdotes that count, but the way in which knowledge, jouissance and object a are articulated. Lacan points out that all too often an analyst becomes accustomed to the terms: “father, mother, and a baby brother or sister – and he considers them to be the earliest terms, even though they only take on meaning and weight owing to the place they occupy in the links between knowledge, jouissance, and a certain object.” [4]
The psychoanalyst must, of course, take an interest in the analysand’s family history, but on condition that he refrains from understanding too quickly, from believing too quickly in what seems a priori traumatic, whereas the real encountered by the subject as a child depends on the way in which a certain jouissance was introduced for him or her there.
Biography, as the fabric of these anecdotes, merely veils the impossibility of completely articulating jouissance in terms of knowledge. The analyst must be aware of this and not allow himself to be seduced by the so-called “original” status of infancy in relation to the family.
[1] Miller, J.-A., “Affaires de famille dans l’inconscient,” in Enfants terribles et parents exaspérés, ed. V. Sommer-Dupont & Y. Vanderveken, Paris, Navarin, 2023, p. 163.
[2] Miller, J.-A., “Une lecture du Séminaire D’un Autre à l’autre,” La Cause freudienne, no. 66, May 2007, p. 87.
[3] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI, From an Other to the other, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, Cambridge, Polity, 2024, p. 287.
[4] Ibid.
Translation: Janet Haney
Proofreading: Raphael Montague
