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{{Top}}enjoyment|jouissance{{Bottom}}
The [[French]] word ''[[jouissance]]'' means basically "[[enjoyment]]", but it has a sexual connotation (i.e. "orgasm") lacking in the English word, and is therefore left untranslated in most English editions of [[Lacan]].
Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this "painful pleasure" is what [[Lacan]] calls ''[[jouissance]]''.
<blockquote>"''Jouissance'' is suffering."<ref>{{S7}} p.184</ref></blockquote>
The term ''jouissance'' thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his [[symptom]], or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his on satisfaction.
The [[subject]]'s entry into the [[symbolic]] is conditional upon a certain initial renunciation of ''[[jouissance]]'' in the [[castration complex]], when the [[subject]] gives up his attempts to be the [[imaginary]] [[phallus]] for the [[mother]].
<blockquote>"Castration means that ''jouissance'' musst be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (''l'échelle renversée'') of the Law of desire."<ref>{{E}} p. 324</ref></blockquote>
The [[symbolic]] [[prohibition]] of [[enjoyment]] in the [[Oedipus complex]] (the [[incest]] [[taboo]]) is thus, paradoxically, the [[prohibition]] of something which is already impossible; its function is therefore to sustain the [[neurotic]] [[illusion]] that [[enjoyment]] would be attainable if it were not forbidden.
The very prohibiton creates the [[desire]] to transgress it, and ''[[jouissance]]'' is therefore fundamentally transgressive.<Refref>{{S7}} ch.15</ref>
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