Analysis n 8 (1998)

Extracting the drive: the end of analysis

Megan Williams

The spell of the magpie

Magpies are said to fall under the spell of shining objects, and to be driven to
collect them, much as dragons once fell in love with their gold even though it
was hard and cold to lie on and not good to eat. Lying on mounds of it alone in
their caves, the gold made them dream of long gone times of glory, the times of
legend and wonder. Magpies are not said to dream, only to collect. Like the
drive of the human subject, the fascination that catches them is exerted by the
image; the image of shining objects which are not useful to the magpie, which it
cannot recognise close up, and which satisfy none of its vital needs. For the
magpie the program is a biological one, written in the genetic code, unlike the
writing of the human subject'S drive, which requires the signifier. If the magpie
were a speaking being, we could say that in its compulsion it is making itself seen
by this shining gaze of the Other, for which the object that shines is irrelevant:
anything will do. But that is not what our magpie feels; she has incorporated the
shining object into a fantasy; one which will generate thousands of stories, all
with the same structure: that the Other of the gaze loves her; rejects her; beats
her. Or perhaps the Other gives her a precious piece of gold that turns to shit
when she gets it back to the nest away from the sun, making her feel like shit; the
one that always fails and is left alone there in her smelly nest full of junk. But
really, the point of all the stories is simply to dress up and hide the magpie's
secret happiness: the moment of encountering her beloved shine ...

Alienation, Separation, Drive

This little fable can serve to introduce the theme of the end of analysis with
particular focus on the question of the drive. I will discuss a conceptualisation
taken from the Lacan of 1964, three years after Seminar VIllI on the transference,
and two years after Seminar 1)(2 on identification. In Seminar XI3 he revisits
Freud's work on the drive, identification and love with his new concept of the
object a. He proposes that the subject in analysis is blinded by a shining object
into an idealising love of the analyst and of his own ego so that he doesn't know
his suffering is caused by a secret happiness that is shameful to him. Lacan
argues that the mechanical mandate of the drive is what is uncovered at the end
1 Jacques Lacan, Le Semina ire, Liv~e VIII, Le Transfert, 1960-1961; (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
2 Jacques Lacan, Seminar IX: Identification 1961-1962, unpublished transcript.
3 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, (London: Penguin
Books, 1979).
38

Megan Williams

39

of analysis as the real being of the subject, de-idealised and beyond signification;
with the consequence that desire is seen to be caused by the shining object's lack,
and love becomes an acceptance and an offering of that lack as desire. In this
text, Lacan discusses the end of analysis in terms of the logical operations of
alienation and separation, a conceptualisation of the disentangling of love,
ideals, the drive, and desire.
Ideals are adopted by identification with what\the Other says of one, and as
such produce alienation in the signifying chain. Entry into speech always
involves an alienation of being because the language code used is the Other's,
and the subject cannot be sure of the meaning of its component signifiers; yet he
or she must still use it to express even his most personal needs. This has two
consequences. One is that the subject's needs are no longer what they were,
something is distorted by speech into the origin of the drive. And secondly, since
there is no definite way of agreeing on the meaning of the code (as the only
instrument for doing so would be the code itself), everything the subject says
about his own being is enigmatic to him; he has an identity whose meaning is
never settled but always refers on to some other signifier, endlessly. If we are
neurotic, we come to accept this state of things as sufficiently workable for
communication, but we suffer from it in the area of knowing who we are-we
suffer a loss of being. Essentially, this is the question a neurotic brings to
analysis. He or she has usually adopted the strategy of making strong and
relatively stable ego identifications, both with ideals and with the images those
ideals suggest, located in others.
Some schools of thought have taught that an analysis should strengthen these
identifications or replace them with more 'appropriate' ones, thus strengthening
the ego. Lacan disagreed, even going so far as to characterise Michael Balint as
proposing a 'hypomanic'4 end to analysis, creating a terminal narcissistic
trance. S For Lacan, the consolidation of the analysand's imaginary being via
identification with the analyst was equivalent to consolidating the alienation of
the subject, and to taking the route of suggestion which Freud repudiated at the
inception of psychoanalysis.
Where alienation replaces being with identification, separation from the
signifying chain gives being. The subject answers his question this time with a
fantasy which refers to his most intimate experience, that of libido or jouissance.
He ascribes to signifiers a hidden sexual meaning based on bodily pleasures
associated with the Other of his infancy, his mother. In other words, the neurotic
subject assumes that all speech ultimately refers to something of particular value
to himself, and he ensures this by always applying a particular code of his own
to his interpretation of what speech signifies. This code is the fundamental
fantasy. It refers to jouissance, and is based on a particular interpretation the
subject makes about how the Other enjoys beyond what she says. When the
subject in his infancy encounters the Other in a state of incompleteness, the
fundamental fantasy intervenes to cover the lack. Thereafter it will co-ordinate
the symbolic subject of identifications with a heterologous partner, the jouissance
4 Jacques Lacan, 'Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School',
Analysis 6, 1995,9.
5 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book 1 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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40

Extracting the drive: The end of analysis

of the drive. 6 In this way it precariously links the being of the subject with its
identity. Following from the fundamental grammar of the fantasy will come
narrative fantasies and daydreams, the symptom and transference love, all
similarly creating the illusion that the forfeited auto-erotic jouissance can be
refound in the Other of language.
The important factor in this operation is that the jouissance in question, that of
the Other, is really an illusion. Alienation expels jduissance from the body, which
becomes instead the home of the subject and of an Other not real but symbolic.
Sexuality can only be approached through language. The sole original signifier
of jouissance is lost to primal repression, relegating jouissance to the inaccessible
real as that precious object which is lost to meaning or recall. The drive to refind
this lost pleasure becomes a constant demand within the psyche, forcing
pleasure into an enjoyment which is traumatic because it is beyond what can be
contained by the symbolic map of representation the subject has. This is the
repetition compulsion of the drive; the psychical inertia of something beyond the
subject which nevertheless concerns the subject to death: the death drive. Some
years after Seminar XI, in Seminar XVII, Lacan elaborated this force in terms of
the insistence in the psyche of a forced labour of the subject against its own
interests, and a corresponding surplus production of deleterious jouissance, of
enjoyment paid to the master signifier, never to be used by the subject. Indeed
the subject suffers from it, which creates the demand for a solution to emerge
from analysis?
For this purpose the analysis will have to disinvest the fantasy, which veils the
subject's implication in the drive with significations which are more palatable to
the ego. Even the symptom is not necessarily ego-dystonic, but the drive is
always so: its aim offends the requirements of both the ideal and sense itself. If it
can be revealed to the subject, he or she will be dispossessed of the stable sense
of being which is given by its insertion into the ideal. This will be the end of
analysis, located beyond the 'opaque relation to the origin, the drive'.8

Love, Fascination, Desire, Drive

The question of the drive at the end of analysis is offered some comments by
Lacan in three pages towards the end of Seminar xJ9. In this section, Lacan
makes use of Freud's schema of hypnosis and collective fascination10 to illustrate
the entanglement of love, the drive and desire in the transference. He then
elaborates his concept of the end of analysis as a disentangling brought about by
the desire of the analyst. Lacan begins with a reading of the key point of Freud's
schema, saying:

6 I am indebted here to a reading of Pierre Skriabine's paper, 'Drive and Fantasy' in

Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, Nos. 8&9 (1997).
7 Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire Livre XVII: L'Envers de la Psychanalyse, 1969-70, (Paris: Seuil).
8 The Four Fundamental Concepts, 273.
9 Ibidem, 272-4.
10 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, SE 18:67.

Megan Williams

41

Freud gives its status to hypnosis by superposing at the same place the objet a as
such and this signifying mapping that is called the ego ideal. ll

We can note the introduction here of his own object, the a. In Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud distinguished between two types of
identification in love: incorporation of the object of love into the ego of the
subject, resulting in a reciprocal identification, and incorporation of the object
into the ego ideal, or idealisation. He also implicitly distinguished from this
object of love what he discussed in other texts as the object of desire.
Identification involves the re-directing of libido from the object to the ego (or ego
ideal); that is, a reversion from sexual object choice to narcissism. The idealising
love that gives its power to hypnosis and group fascination results because
a) the directly sexual aim is put aside, increasing the libido available to the
identification, and
b) the object of desire is introjected as an ideal.
In Freud's words, the ego of the subject becomes devoted to the object in a way:
which is no longer to be distinguished from a sublimated devotion to an abstract
idea. [and] the functions allotted to the [subject's own] ego ideal entirely ceases to
operate ... The whole situation can be summarised in a formula: The object has been

put in the place of the ego ideal. 12

A similar description can be found in The Ego and The Id, where the outcome of
the Oedipus complex is the repression of incestuous desire, to be replaced by the
formation of an ideal which exerts parental authority within the ego. Hence all
identification follows the path laid down in the infantile neurosis. The
de sexualised ideals and the demand for love both cover and represent the
investment of the sexual drive in unconscious incestuous fantasy.13
Several points stand out in Lacan's working of Freud in this area. First, Lacan
reads these formulations of Freud in the light of his own distinction between the
three registers of the imaginary, symbolic and real. There is, he says, 'an essential
difference between the object defined as narcissistic, the i(a), and the function of
the a'.14 For Lacan, Freud's narcissistic ego to ego identification can be
understood as an identity between the images of the two egos, itself formative of
the ego as image, and written i(a). Introjection of the object into the place of the
ideal, on the other hand, is understood as symbolic identification with a signifier
which will function as an ideal or master, the post-Oedipal authority of Freud.
Finally, the object of the sexual drive is to be understood quite differently, as real
object of the drive, although in fact it has a registration in all three registers. This
object, the object a, differs considerably from the Freudian concept of object, and
is Lacan's particular invention.

11 The Four Fundamental Concepts, 272.

12 Group Psychology, 113. Auth. underline emphasis, italics in original.
13 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, SE 19:3.
14 The Four Fundamental Concepts, 272.

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Extracting the drive: The end of analysis

Second, while Freud emphasises the sublimation of the drive in hypnosis,

Lacan's application of the schema to the transference emphasises the drive's
activity and its disguise by idealising love. As he says, 'the transference is that
which extracts demand from the drive'lS, indicating that the demand for love
hides his own sexuality from the subject. The difference is primarily one of
emphasis, since in Freud's technical papers he also stresses the passionate,
sexual nature of transference love. 16 Neverthele~s, it is important in terms of
highlighting the integral opposition between idealisation and sexual desire, a
point crucial to the argument which opposes analysis and identification. In
Group Psychology Freud is emphasising the reinforcing effect which the inhibition
of sexual activity has on the strength of the ideal, and this is completely in accord
with what Lacan wishes to argue for the end of analysis; namely that the
exposure of the subject'S position in the drive goes hand in hand with the
collapse of his ideals.
Finally, for Lacan the object concerned in the drive and desire, the object a, is
not so much forbidden as structurally impossible. The repetition compulsion of
the drive is not towards a transgressive satisfaction that used to be, but rather it
circles the place of satisfaction itself as lost, the symbolic lack that means
sexuality cannot be apprehended and made subjective. In infancy the little
subject first takes the signifier as object, enjoying it auto-erotically in his or her
babble. But as soon as he gives up that use of words which refers them only to
the jouissance their pronunciation gives, and instead submits his use of them to
the laws of language, the object is lost from speech, and jouissance can be
approached only indirectly in the functioning of the signifying chain. This is
alienation, and the loss it imposes of what Freud called libido functions
thereafter as object a, that real object of the drive which is lost to symbolic
representation, but the repetition of the drive makes present as jouissance. This
sexuality would be equivalent to having jouissance of the Other of language, but
it is structurally impossible. This means that in the symbolic order the object is
registered only as a place from which something is missing, a pure lack.

The drive and satisfaction

The real is introduced by Lacan as impossibility: the impOSSibility of satisfaction

because of the impossibility in grasping the object as representation. What the
drive grabs cannot satisfy it, resulting in the constancy of its pressure. So, how
does it get satisfied? It is helped by the fantasy, which has taken from the
demands of the (m)Other a particular object apparently dear to her, and given it
an imaginary form.
This notion is implicit in Lacan's reference to Freud's theory of the regressive
path of hallucinatory satisfaction of the drive. Lacan comments that the 'natural
metaphor from which the supposed identity of perception is decided' is made
possible by the presence of the sexually desiring subject: that the connotation of
reality is given from the point at which the subject desires,17 This point from
15 Ibidem, 273.
16 For example, in Sigmund Freud, 'Observations on Transference-Love', SE 12: 159.
17 The Four Fundamental Concepts, 154.

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43

which the subject desires in the unconscious is, of course, the fantasy. We ca~
exemplify this topography with reference to Freud's discovery of the drive's
repe~ition compulsion occurring in the transference.
We can imagine, for instance, a case similar to those which Freud himself
briefly cited. An analysand complains of being rejected, her history seems to
confirm it, and then her analyst ceases practice in order to move interstate,
getting married at the same time. Her next analyst..,forgets her session one day, or
is often late, or has to cancel an appointment, ... and so on. In fact it is the
fantasy of this analysand which allows the events to have the significance of
'rejection'. Following the ideal identification 'to be rejected', it allows a particular
signifying constellation to repeat. Another subject would not notice it in this way
because for him reality always yields another particular story, even from the
same events. Jacques-Alain Miller has written: '[fantasy] is the structure from
which everything makes sense for a particular subject'lB; we can add that it
always makes the same sense. These are the particulars of our analysand's
fantasy which fall on the side of the subject, and can be spoken. But the drive is
satisfied by opportunistically grabbing a jouissance that is thereby made to
appear as object, localised and marked for it only by this repetition of the
signifying constellation of the fantasy. Perhaps in our imaginary case it is the
jouissance of the faecal object which the drive makes present. And while the
discourse of the analysand is focused on the demand for love from the analyst as
ideal, this essential activity of the drive remains hidden. The drive in itself is
blind, says Anne Dunand, and does not know what it seeks. 19 The drive always
finds its goal of satisfaction at the erotogenic source, but contingently. Thus the
term 'satisfaction' has to be qualified: in a sense it is not the drive but the
signifying constellation itself that is satisfied; its symbolic co-ordinates. As real,
the drive and desire cannot be satisfied in symbolic ways.
Of course this raises questions about the drive after the end of analysis. For
Freud, the solution a subject found in analysis was to move in a 'progressive'20
psychical direction into reasonable action to satisfy the drive, undoing the
unnecessary repressions, and reinforcing necessary ones so that the wishes
concerned do not return from repression. 21 That is, the drive and desire are in
accord and can be satisfied. But for Lacan, the fundamental lack of any signifier
able to represent sexuality is a level of repression that can be neither undone nor
detached from the signifying chain. This means that the real will persist in the
progressive direction as well as the regressive, as a void at the heart of the drive,
enchaining the drive and leaving a remaining desire that will have to be
interpreted in wishes:

18 Jacques-Alain Miller, 'Duty and the Drives', Newsletter of the Freudian Field, No.6
~1992}, 6.
.
9 Anne Dunand, 'The End of Analysis', in Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus
(Eds.), Reading Seminar XI (New York: SUNY, 1995), 247.
20 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 5: 542.
21 Sigmund Freud, 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable', SE 23: 227.

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Extracting the drive: The end of analysis

The real is distinguished [... ] by its separation from the field of the pleasure
principle, by its desexualisation, by the fact that its economy, later, admits
something new, which is precisely the impossible. 22

The subject will be alienated, desire will by definition never be satisfied, and the
drive, by its nature excessive, will not be pacified by reasonable action. Hence
Freud's pessimism about the end of analysis, expressed in 'Analysis Terminable
and Interminable' as a surrender to the dominanc'e of the 'quantitative factor'.23
Does this imply that there is no pacifying of the drive; that analysis cannot make
a difference to its action?

The drive, love, identification

While the drive is installed in its circuit by a lost object, love, on the other hand,
relates to something present, a signifier or an image. In the chapters of Seminar
XI dealing with the drive and love, Lacan emphasises that the Freud of 'Instincts
and Their Vicissitudes' did not put love and the drive on the same level. He says:
That is to say that, with regard to the agency of sexuality, all subjects are equal,
from the child to the adult-that they deal only with that part of sexuality that
passes into the networks of the constitution of the subject, into the networks of the
signifier-sexuality is realised only through the operation of the drives in so far as
they are partial drives, partial with regard to the biological finality of sexuality.24

The drive is not biological and it is not a unity; it is the running of the machine of
the signifier in the body, and this constitutes sexuality. Therefore sexuality can
never be equivalent to love. It is a product of the overuling by language of the
organism's homeostasis, and as such is ultimately a compulsion that is outside
subjectivity; a pure demand, and not at all the same demand as that made by
love. Lacan therefore says:
In the transference we must see established the weight of sexual reality. Largely
unknown and, up to a point masked, it runs beneath what happens at the level of
the analytic discourse, which is well and truly ... that of demand. 25

At this point in the text he introduces his topology of the interior 8, an alternative
to both Freud's topographical schema of The Interpretation of Dreams, and
separation. It is an image that enables us to figure desire as a locus of junction
between the field of demand, in which the syncopes of the unconscious are made
present, and sexual reality, the former symbolic field covering and concealing
the latter, the real. The Freudian model would lead one to expect that

22 The Four Fundamental Concepts, 167.

23 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable', 209.
24 The Four Fundamental Concepts, 176-7.
25 Ibidem, 155.

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45

the libido ... would be that which belongs to both [fields] - the intersection, as one
says in logic. But this is precisely what it does not mean. For this sector at which
the fields appear to overlap is ... a void. 26

This point, where both the subject and the Other lack, where we can locate the
object a of the subject, is therefore the place of desire. Lacan continues,
'What is this desire? Do you think it is there that I designate the agency of the
transference? Yes and no ... I tell you that the desire we are concerned with here is
the desire of the analyst. 27

Desire of the analyst

Transference love, however, has the effect of plastering together the two planes
of the interior 8 so that the symbolic field of demand is reinforced, and sexuality
as real is hidden. The demand seems to be for love, from the ideal that the
analyst is called on to embody.28 This relation substitutes for a hidden relation,
in which the subject's desire is aroused by the object a of the fantasy imagined in
the analyst with the effect Lacan has described in Seminar VIII as the agalma. In
what that text introduced as the metaphor of love, the ideal operates a mirror by
which the subject 'can accomodate his own image around what appears, the petit
a', the desiring subject thus becoming the beloved. The drive is hidden by the
narcissism of the ego, which blushes at its aims, and the transference is
maintained in the register of alienation.
The task of an analysis is to undo the metaphor of love and work against
alienation. Lacan writes in the pages of Seminar XI with which we began: 'the
fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation is the maintenance of the
distance between the I-identification-and the a'.29 Thus while an analysis
travels on the paths of meaning, its final move aims not at the production of
surplus signification, but at the object. The drive is not ultimately a being of
meaning. He continues:
the transference operates in the direction of bringing demand back to
identification. It is in as much as the analyst's desire, which remains an x, tends in
a direction that is the exact opposite of identification, that the crossing of the plane
of identification is possible, through the mediation of the separation of the subject
in experience. The experience of the subject is thus brought back to the plane at
which, from the reality of the unconscious, the drive may be made present.30

The drive is what will respond if the desire of the analyst, an x, insistently
introduces an enigma where love would place an identification. Colette Soler has
expressed this process as three transformations of a question: first comes the
26 Ibidem, 156.
27 Ibidem, 156.
28 Ibidem, 273.
29 Ibidem, 273.
30 Ibidem, 274.

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Extracting the drive: The end of analysis

analysand's 'What am I?', then the analyst's answer, 'What do you want?', to
produce finally the enquiry of the analysand to himself, 'What does it want of
me?'31

End of analysis

What does it mean that the 'drive may be made present' by the function of an x
of desire? As the transference always makes possible, it implies the repetition of
a structural moment of history, but with the possibility of something new,
brought about by the analyst'S desire. The repetition is of the subject's inaugural
encounter with the x of the Other's desire. His response to this encounter is what
originally structured his sexual position. That is, in separation he answered the
enigma of being with a fantasy that covered the x with the object of the drive, as
if the subject had said, 'The Other lacks only what I can provide to her with
myself, in the form of gaze, of voice, of nothing, of gift of shit.' The fantasy put
back the libido missing from both subject and Other, veiling the nodal point of
desire with that jouissance of the drive wherein the subject makes itself: makes
itself seen, heard, shitted, devoured, etc.
The intervention which the desire of the analyst can make into this structure is
to insist on desire, that is on lack and on desirousness32, as that which cannot be
answered, explained or filled with any object. This would be to insist on
separation from the signifying chain, imposing a lack in the Other, without the
recompense of the imaginary object, so that the fantasy ceases to function to
exclude the desiring Other. Instead, 'after the mapping of the subject in relation
to the a, the experience of the fundamental fantasy becomes the drive'.33 That is,
the fantasy ceases to embed the drive in a romantic story, and the analysand can
trace how he has conflated the 'Che vuoi?' of the demand with the 'What am I?'
of desire, contingently and nonsensically, in some historical moment of
interpretation of the desire of the mother. He can thus for the first time
subjectivise the drive; 'subjectivise' in the sense of bringing 'I' there where 'it' is,
of being able to say 'I have been making myself be ... ' as object, a being which has
in itself no meaning. He can see that all the stories of the fantasy are there only to
give shape to something ultimately without sense, a compulsion and a being-inlove that is not dialectical.
This has an effect also in the register of alienation, in that the analyst can no
longer be believed to be the ideal, the one who has knowledge of the object. The
Other can no longer be mapped as Ideal+object, and the collapse of
identifications refers the question of meaning to the metonymy of desire:
In this desetre what is inessential in the supposed subject of knowledge is unveiled,
from which the psychoanalyst comes to dedicate him- or her-self to the agalrna of

31 Colette Soler, Seminar of the Freudian Field presented in Melbourne in December

1996.
32 This is a term used by Bruce Fink to deSignate the desire of the analyst in his book,
The Lacanian Subject (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995).
33 The Four Fundamental Concepts, 273.

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47

the essence of desire, ready to pay for it by reducing himself, himself and his
name, to any given signifier,.34

The subject is the one who knows-knows that the precious thing is desire itself,
since the object lacks.

Aftermath

Unlike Freud's construction, the end of analysis for Lacan does not involve the
consolidation of unconscious desire, but its traversal; the realisation, mapped
historically, that the only subjective relation one can have to jouissance is to lack
it. But this is a definition of the end of analysis in terms of desire. What happens
to the drive?
For Lacan the end cannot be that the subject gains control of the drive, nor the
Freudian outcome of reinforcing the repressions of its representations. What can
it be? Lacan says at the end of Seminar XI:
What, then, does he who has passed through this opaque relation to the origin, to
the drive, become? How can a subject who has traversed the radical fantasy
experience the drive? This is the beyond of analysis and has never been
approached'.35

Three years later, in The Proposition of 9 October 1967, Lacan introduced the pass
to study this question, and thus it is to the testimonies of the passants and
Analysts of the School that we must refer for its study.

34 Proposition, 9.
35 The Four Fundamental Concepts, 273.