Jouissance and affective neuroscience: a critical neuropsychoanalytic integration

ABSTRACT

Jouissance is a multifaceted Lacanian concept that refers to a paradoxical blend of pleasure and unpleasure, an excess of pleasure that becomes traumatic. While jouissance appears as a pinnacle of Lacanian theoretical complexity, it has been critiqued as a nebulous descriptor that shuts down questions rather than deepening rigor. Specifically, Darian Leader has charged the Lacanian use of jouissance as theoretically imprecise, ignoring vicissitudes of bodily innervation, obscuring the relationship with the Other, and implicitly maintaining problematic Freudian quantitative, homeostatic ideas. I propose that affective neuroscience, when interpreted within a Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic framework, offers tools to answer some of these critiques of jouissance. At the same time, an integration of jouissance with affective neuroscience draws out radical perspectives in neuropsychoanalysis – specifically against a straightforward application of homeostasis – that demonstrate the importance of maintaining the concept of jouissance as excess. This article attempts to advance interdisciplinary dialogue in Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Neuropsychoanalysis
• free energy principle
• predictive coding
• neuroscience
• Lacan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Solms can be criticized for focusing on these seven drives to the exclusion of other affects like disgust (Blechner, 2018). While I predominantly follow Solms’s model, I recognize that other affects would be important to account for; however, the main points of this argument are not reliant on a specific number of systems.

2. Capitalization follows Panksepp’s convention and call for a specific lexicon to indicate distinct neural circuits, not just feelings.

3. Leader notes: ‘The supposed jouissance of the body must be a complex field prior to the supposed imposition or inscription of the symbolic, with its own rhythms, patterns of discharge, urgencies, relations to musculature, endocrine effects, links to respiration, and so on’ (Leader, 2021, p. 104). This suggests – as does Solms’s informatic model – that the symbolic cannot be restricted to language alone; that there exist symbolic differential systems prior to the imposition of language. This necessitates a rethinking of levels of the symbolic (Dall’Aglio, forthcoming).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Dall’Aglio

John Dall’Aglio is a PhD student in clinical psychology at Duquesne University. His clinical, scholarly, and empirical research focuses on the intersection of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, especially Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis. He is the winner of the 2021 New Author Prize from the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.