Wish and Desire:
The
Psychological Birth of the Other.
The issue of the birth of the Other in our psychological life was rarely addressed by analysts, despite the impossibility of understanding Narcissism without dealing with that aspect in our psychological life. Th reason in my opinion- which came first to a very experienced colleague- is that the Oedipus myth was the Myth that shaped our understanding of repression, sexuality, and the unconscious, i.e., guilt and embarrassment, when we can see now that the central issue of psychoanalysis is the duality of the subject, consequently it is Narcissism. The literature on ‘the Other’, is very scarce. In the sixties of the last century Lacan and the Lacanians dealt with the issue of “desire’ which included aspects of “otherness” but the discussions went astray because there was truly little understanding of narcissism yet, and it stayed as Freud formulated, an issue of libidinal investment. There was not enough attention paid to a basic difference between Desire and Wish (Easy to sound critical now after fifty years of solid French psychoanalysis behind us), Wish is void of a subject to make it fulfilled while desire is almost totally dependent on the existence of an “other’.
The false presence of ‘the other’ in narcissistic conditions relates to something to notice in the enfant’s relations with the other. The baby is not narcissistic as the Freudian definition makes him because there is not enough distinction between I and She (mother). Till the second part of the first year of life the enfant does not distinguish between wanting the mother’s smile (desire) and wishing her to smile. This shows in his inability to concentrate on her face unless she has a grimace on it. This is clear in the enfant’s response by smiling to the other, and his response when looking at a smiling other. The distinction between the enfant’s simile when mother similes to him (no otherness in that smiling) and smiling to her when he wants her to smile to him indicates the birth of ‘the other’ in the child’s psychological life. It also indicates the birth of narcissism and the distinction between desire (mother’s smile) and wish (to make her smile). In narcissism there is desire that establishes a relation with the other; it is a wishing relationship. Is the mother’s simile the cause of relating and recognizing the other? Or does recognizing the mother as an-other starts the smiling process and the notions of desire and wish behind it?
Just as an interjection in a main discussion: Is this a psychoanalytic topic (analysis as therapy) or just an argument that does not belong to us? We will see.
The Other and the
Onset of Differentiation in Psychical Life:
Many years ago I asked myself this question and I was not able to answer it: Is language the cause of our psychological life or is it the product of psychological life. The intriguing things about that question is the ease by which both answers could easily be accepted and with no major difficulty in reversing cause and effect in that answer. However, when I started to thinks about that issue lately I was struck by two issues: we humans, without exception talk and even make 'things' talk to us. Thus, language is not the cause of anything in particular but the effect of something we need to identify. The second things is that although we all speak we are not all at the same level of expressivity; we all breath the same way but we do not express our selves equally good or bad. Therefore, we have to acknowledge that we are different in our psychical life in spite of being all psychological creatures.
At this point we (psychoanalysts) have to address our psychological life differently from the old concept of the personal psychosexual line of development, not because it was wrong or deficient but because reversed the cause effect in development. It was the emergence of the other (mother!) and its changes witch created the different stages of development. It is the other in every stage that enriched the psychological life of the child. In other words we get to a point of total distinction from the rest of the animal world, a distinction that in itself reveals another aspect of that distinction which was not seriously studied by psychoanalysis, or other human sciences.
The Other and the Onset of Differentiation in Psychical Life:
Many years ago I asked myself this question and I was not able to answer
it: Is language the cause of our psychological life or is it the product of
psychological life? The intriguing thing about that question is the ease by
which both answers could be easily accepted and with no major difficulty in
reversing cause and effect in that answer. However, when I started to think
about that issue lately, I was struck by two issues: we humans, without
exception talk and even make 'things' talk to us. Thus, language is not the
cause of anything, but the effect of something we need to find out. The second
thing is that although we all speak, we are all at the same level of
expressivity; we all breathe the same, but we do not express ourselves equally
good or bad. Therefore, we must acknowledge that we are different in our
psychological life even though we are all being psychological creatures.
At this point we (psychoanalysts) must address our differences in our psychological life. In other words, we get to a point of total distinction from the rest of the animal world, but a distinction that reveals another aspect of that distinction which is not taken seriously by psychoanalysis, or other human scientists: Most evident is that we differ greatly in our psychological lives: we do not love or hate the same way, we seldom know exactly what we want, or even what to say. The issue at hand is that the birth of our psychological life depends a great deal on the other(s) around us when growing up (not in the psychoanalytic meaning of this sentence but the ontological meaning other-ness). The birth of the other is the birth of the I-Me and every stage of development has a different, a due of I-Me.
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