Cause

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In psychoanalysis, the concept of cause diverges sharply from empirical, linear models typical of the natural sciences.[1] Rather than identifying a sequential or observable origin for psychic phenomena, psychoanalytic theory conceives of cause as a structural, symbolic, and often unconscious principle—one that operates retroactively within the formations of desire, fantasy, and subjectivity.[2]

Freud: Repression and Deferred Action

For Sigmund Freud, the cause of symptoms, dreams, or parapraxes lies not in external events per se, but in the unconscious configurations of desire, conflict, and repression.[3] He introduces the concept of nachträglichkeit (deferred action), whereby early experiences acquire causal significance only in light of later events.[4] This non-linear temporality implies that cause is not a past fact, but a psychic structure retroactively constituted through repression and symbolic mediation.[5]

Symptoms are understood as compromise formations: effects of unconscious wishes distorted by the ego and superego’s defenses.[6] Interpretation does not seek a fixed origin but traces the associative pathways that reveal how the subject’s desire has been structured around a repressed kernel.[7] Psychical causality, for Freud, is mediated, indirect, and symbolically inflected.[8]

Lacan: Structure, Rupture, and the Real

Jacques Lacan radicalizes the concept of cause by situating it within the broader framework of language, the symbolic order, and the constitution of the subject.[9] For Lacan, cause is not an event or object but a rupture in the symbolic chain—an interruption that reveals the presence of the Real, that which resists symbolization.[10]

In Seminar II, Lacan places cause at “the border between the symbolic and the real,” describing it as something that paradoxically emerges from what escapes mediation.[11] He states that cause is “that which doesn’t work,” identifying it with breakdown, impasse, or failure within the symbolic.[12] Psychoanalytic cause thus produces effects precisely by virtue of its structural absence.

Cause in Psychosis and Symbolic Failure

Lacan first explores causality in his 1932 doctoral thesis on paranoia, rejecting purely organic or environmental explanations of psychosis.[13] By the 1950s, in Seminar III, he theorizes that the cause of psychosis lies in the foreclosure (forclusion) of the Name-of-the-Father—a foundational signifier required for entry into the symbolic order.[14] Its absence causes a rupture in symbolic mediation, giving rise to hallucinations, delusions, and other psychotic phenomena.[15]

Objet petit a: The Cause of Desire

Lacan's most influential reformulation of cause appears in his concept of the objet petit a, the "object little a", which he defines as the cause of desire.[16] It is not what one desires, but that which causes one to desire.[17] It is a structural void, a remnant of the subject’s alienation in language.[18] As such, it is ungraspable and unsymbolizable, yet it anchors the fantasy structures around which subjectivity and repetition revolve.[19]

Desire is not caused by need or by any empirical object, but by the lack introduced through symbolic castration.[20] The objet a represents the trace of this lack—the absent cause that both motivates and destabilizes the subject’s relation to the Other.[21]

Anxiety and the Real

In Seminar X: Anxiety, Lacan connects cause to anxiety.[22] While desire revolves around a lack, anxiety emerges when that lack is threatened—when the object-cause appears too close, confronting the subject with the unmediated Real.[23] Anxiety thus reveals cause as structure, not content; as proximity, not presence.

Cause as Truth, Discontinuity, and Lost Ground

In Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan distinguishes between determination, which follows the chain of signifiers, and cause, which marks a break in that chain.[24] Cause is what cannot be said, yet which produces effects. It is truth in its traumatic dimension—not a correspondence to facts, but something that insists, disturbs, and structures.[25]

Lacan also plays on the ambiguity of the term “cause”: it is both that which produces an effect and that for which one fights.[26] He refers to his allegiance to “the Freudian cause,” even as he declares the cause of the unconscious to be a "lost cause"—not something recoverable or resolvable, but a structural impasse that constitutes the subject through its very elusiveness.[27]

Clinical Implications

In clinical practice, the cause of a symptom is not something to be uncovered like a hidden object from the past, but something to be constructed through the analytic process.[28] The goal of analysis is not to resolve the cause, but to allow the subject to assume it—to take responsibility for how their desire and jouissance are organized around a structural lack.[29]

The symptom is not caused by a real event but formed around a missing cause—a hole in knowledge, a knot in the symbolic, a trace of the Real.[30] Analysis reveals the subject’s position in relation to this cause, enabling transformation through speech and symbolic rearticulation.[31]

See Also

References

  • Freud, S. (1915). The Unconscious.
  • Lacan, J. (1932). De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité.
  • Lacan, J. (1955). Seminar III: The Psychoses.
  • Lacan, J. (1962–63). Seminar X: Anxiety.
  • Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.


References

  1. ↑ Freud, S. (1915). The Unconscious.
  2. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
  3. ↑ Freud, S. (1915). The Unconscious.
  4. ↑ Freud, S. (1917). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
  5. ↑ Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
  6. ↑ Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id.
  7. ↑ Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams.
  8. ↑ Freud, S. (1915). The Unconscious.
  9. ↑ Lacan, J. (1953). “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.”
  10. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.
  11. ↑ Lacan, J. (1954–55). Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.
  12. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.
  13. ↑ Lacan, J. (1932). De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité.
  14. ↑ Lacan, J. (1955–56). Seminar III: The Psychoses.
  15. ↑ Lacan, J. (1955–56). Seminar III.
  16. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.
  17. ↑ Lacan, J. (1962–63). Seminar X: Anxiety.
  18. ↑ Lacan, J. (1960). “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire.”
  19. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.
  20. ↑ Lacan, J. (1958). “The Signification of the Phallus.”
  21. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.
  22. ↑ Lacan, J. (1962–63). Seminar X: Anxiety.
  23. ↑ Lacan, J. (1962–63). Seminar X.
  24. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.
  25. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.
  26. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.
  27. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI, p. 128.
  28. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.
  29. ↑ Lacan, J. (1962–63). Seminar X: Anxiety.
  30. ↑ Lacan, J. (1957). “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious.”
  31. ↑ Lacan, J. (1964). Seminar XI.


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