“All those who have had the opportunity to take morphine, cocaine or heroin for a period of time have not become addicted to these substances, and more specific research has shown that these products have the function of substituting “
This quotation is more than a hundred years old and was written by Freud in “Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses”, completed on February 9, 1898.
This quote may apply to Mario, who consults, at the request of his wife and a plethora of doctors, in the private center where a friend of mine work. A few days ago, he escaped from the public hospital where he was hospitalized for pneumonia and treatment-resistant gastritis. He was confronted with death, castration, lack.
The first words he addressed to Kylia, his consultant, express the horror: “The hospitalization shocked me: I was in a room dying, so much misery! We are nothing! We are hospitalization because it is the death of the Other, he tells him, that made him “opt for life”, opening the way for this passage to the act that prevents him from meeting even with Mario, 40, 8 years since his kidney transplant for his diabetic nephropathy, was scheduled to be dialysed again in April, two months before the fugitive episode.
The feeling that emerges from the first interviews, as well as the rapid improvement of the so-called “resistant gastritis”, generates an enigma for the subject: “am I self-destructive?” He confesses then that he thought to have a cancer of the stomach, and dying soon, his unanswered question paves the way for the subject’s comments about his addiction to oral drugs.
Mario explains with laughter the concern that gave him the drugs, to drink a lot of water. “I’m abusing it, it’s good for me, I’m addicted to water, it’s the best drink”. He describes his nocturnal ritual in detail: when everyone sleeps in the house, he gets up, goes to the refrigerator, takes the carafe and stays alone in the kitchen, as he says, “I whistle her completely, unable to stop “It’s my greatest pleasure, I feel good with this carafe. It should be emphasized that this particularly nocturnal consumption, the fact of controlling his diabetes and, as will be seen later, the roots of this practice in the history of the subject make it possible to reject the medical hypothesis of polydipsia in relation to diabetes as well as than hemodialysis.
Mario knows that because of his kidney failure, the ingestion of water can become toxic beyond a certain limit. His heart too, his life, is threatened because of his high blood pressure. It has virtually no activity during the day because of its excessive weight, mainly located in the abdomen. As for post-dialysis cramps, they are major and disabling. However, he admits, “I want them to remove as much water as possible during dialysis so that I can drink more then.”
Without being insensitive to her smiles and without being concerned, Kylia affirms to him the mortifying inclination of his practice. Next time, he agrees: “we do not expect to hear the truth”. He admits that he has been using dextropropoxyphene for a long time, but he can not stay in control either: “I’m not interested in stimulants,” he says. “I’m making things, I’m trying, I see what’s going on in my body, if I like, I’m going on.”
Thus his consumption aims, as a mode of enjoyment, to cover, if it suits him, unbearable pain, as a lack. An excess, in short, that evokes the death drive.
His words, concerning this mode of solitary enjoyment, bring a counterpoint: “my wife does not make any place for me.” The resumption of dialysis, away from eight years of freedom obtained by the transplant and changes his partner status and his father's status. He begins to consider, not without fear of loneliness, a separation.
This rupture, this fault in the non-sexual relation which, as indicated by Javier Aramburu, makes up for the lack, dilutes in a certain way its relation to the lack of phallic enjoyment, precipitating it towards other pleasures. It is that the meeting with the Other sex had left him finally without recourse.
A few sessions later, he brings precious elements to better situate the place of his practice with the carafe: it evokes his poor childhood in a village in northern Argentina and his cousins, neighbors who had a store. He was angry because they ate caramels. He tells this episode: “They called me black potato because we did not have cookies and we ate sweet potatoes. One day, catching sight of my absent-minded aunt in her shop, I ran to her refrigerator and stole a Fanta, which I stole in my yard. Nobody had seen me. What satisfaction! Never before have I drunk soda. The best is Fanta.”
It is this sequence that reproduces itself the same every day. But that is what allowed Mario, to no longer be the black potato, providing him enjoyment requiring solitude to conceal the theft.
To follow Lacan, in his seminar Encore, if a body is what enjoys the signifier, the recovery of enjoyment testifies to the connection between the drive and the repetition, search for what is lost and in turn memory of the same. Thus in each jug, Mario finds the jubilation of his rebellion, not without relation to his father. We must introduce here the notion of superego.
In his Course “The divine details”, Jacques-Alain Miller states that psychoanalysis has long used the notion of superego against parental introjection. This approach has overshadowed the other side of the superego: the result of the renunciation of the impulses.
To shed light on this point Miller draws the following schema:
I put this in relation to what Juan Carlos Indart said about the highlighters, the overcurrent, the superego, the respect for the law on the castration of the Other. That is to say that the renunciation of the impulses is the belief in the existence of the Other, in a father-all-enjoyment, according to the Indart. One can then wonder — and this seems to me to be able to illustrate this case — why does death framed enjoyment? This is what the death instinct has done with the negation of another castrated man, the fantasy of another of total orgasm. Mario wonders that he is not paying for the wickedness, the occult practices, and the quackery of his parents: “they have made a lot of people”.
Schema of Miller allows us to define different modes of addiction enjoyment, as well as to differentiate at the second symptom conference. On one side, the heroin addict who separates and separates from the Other, from his consumption, from his renunciation of the impulse, and from the other, from those who, like Mario, are on the side of the alienation from the Other and from the functioning of the superego, from the Other of absolute pleasure, are in a mode of mortal pleasure that is expressed orally.
What Mario supports is the urges world in which there is lack. The same substance at stake, “the best drink”, “the pleasure the greatest”, is what makes a liquid that does not run out (equivalent to Fanta), and that fills, by jug, by each sip, the castration at the heart of the talking subject.
The express solution, via cancer, which took the sense that the subject was interpreted as a crucial moment in its history, which had disappeared, which was in front of what it was the slow way to die, a way that avoids carefully the black pants of the drive. Another barrier erected by his body, he claims to drink like the barrel of the Danaides.
For Miller, heroin is the substance that responds to the term “Lacanian criterion of drug addiction”, found on the separation side of the Other. Using Lacan’s signifiers, Miller believes that “it is pathological when it is an orgasm or rather than that of the little pee”.
The function of drugs, according to this criterion, is to promote, according to Miller, “insubordination to sexual service”. Rather an object of imperious demand and an object of enjoyment.
In this case, we can distinguish what is said to combine two things in the drug as a partner: the toxic as the way to escape the impossible enjoyment of the Other sex, and also as the recovery of the enjoyment that makes inscription in the Other allowing him to be named as the “rebel”; all resting on his bottle consumed alone.
Therefore, was it chosen to slow down or modify this enjoyment? Lacan answers us in the seminar Encore: “The Other Satisfaction”, a satisfaction of the word. This is what a psychoanalyst can offer to an addict: the possibility of restoring him a closer relationship with his unconscious, the relationship that the addict tries to produce using the toxic.
The addict and his therapists, This is a condition for psychoanalysis, that’s what the analyzer is turning into a drug. , He invited, therefore, to introduce the subject to the enjoyment of the word, “the normal drug”.
It is ultimately a passage. We follow this use, we can use the metaphors so that we can have recourse to the word itself: from “toxic water of Mario” to the purple Rose of Cairo.
