Devastações: destinos para o ilimitado

Abstract

This thesis deals with fates for devastation, a term used by Lacan, derived from what Freud conceptualized in his 1931 text on Feminine Sexuality (FREUD, 1931/2018) as the “catastrophe” that would befall a girl when there is not sufficient separation between her and her mother through the Oedipal direction towards the father. The reading was sustained that devastation implies a clinical finding that affects women more frequently, despite not being restricted to this gender. It is observed that it almost always emerges at a moment of love loss, revealing a subjective position governed by resentment towards the lack of phallus and, consequently, its refusal. It is also accompanied by an excessive demand on the Other as if the Other could provide her with the signifier of The Woman, which does not exist for anyone. The thesis sought to answer some questions, such as: (1) why is the not-all, a direction of Lacanian analysis, often associated in the psychoanalytic community with the deleterious condition and extreme suffering verified in devastation? (2) Does the strictly psychoanalytic discourse sustain such link? (3) What consequences would this have for the direction of analyses? (4) What resources would an analysis offer to the devastated: only the cure derived from consent to castration or would it be possible to include the not-all in the construction of a singular way out? The sustained proposal was that what separates the feminine position from devastation is hysteria with its refusal of the not-all, as excessive demand is captive in the pre-Oedipal meshes and cannot be compared to what is experienced at the end of an analysis, from which it is expected that the parlêtre comes out emptied and not inflated by a deleterious condition that demands the impossible from the Other and from the others with whom one encounters during their existence. To support this position, some points were worked on and transformed into four chapters: 1) the psychoanalytic methodology, moving to reach Freud's maxim which points to the coincidence between clinical practice and research; (2) the not-all sexuality experienced, most of the time, by women, and how this mode of presentation in relation to the phallus can favor this specific type of suffering derived from devastation; (3) the modes of jouissance as proposed by Lacan, focusing on phallic and not-all phallic jouissance, extracting from the latter a logic of its own and derived from the phallic one; and finally, (4) sketches of solutions to devastation were presented, placed in the plural since each not-all can only be told each time it presents itself, being averse to a universal attribute. The chosen exits were three: (1) through the bias of the love encounter, (2) through the advent of the masquerade, using the concept proposed by Joan Rivière, and, finally, (3) through analytical treatment and which favors a more structural exit from devastation, because it includes a change in subjective position moving in the direction of emptying the Other, against its omnipotence, supporting the condition of semblance.