> The question, in each instance, is the configuration
> of sado-masochism
> involved. Which aspect is dominant? How, in each
> instance, does the
> hidden aspect function beneath the surface? What
> family experiences, and
> material realities that form them go on to create
> these diverse
> psychological processes and ideological
> manifestations? And so forth.
> Sado-masochism is a complex concept, but extremely
> useful in making
> sense out of experience.
One can also ask how psychoanalysis is implicated in the sado-masochistic economy, with a roughly christian outline.
>From "Poetry and Psychoanalysis," in _Promises,
Promises_ by Adam Phillips, pp. 14-15:
"'Psychoanalysis', Lacan writes, echoing Freud, 'should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language'. In this Lacanian sado-masochistic relationship with language, it is the function, in part, of the analyst's punctuation to show the patient just how captured and tortured by language he is. But Lacan, like every other psychoanalytic writer, can't get around the problem of heirarchy; the analyst upsets or renews the patient's meaning with a view to changing the patient for the better. Whether it is called in Lacan's language 'full speech' or becoming the subject of one's desire, there is an attempt to interfere with - for a higher good - the patient's words in the service of the cure."
Does one hear a note of redemption and salvation in that higher good, above being captured and tortured by language? Analyst as paternal confessor?
Alec
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