One Aspect of the Concept of the Speaking Body (Essay Sample)

Neelam Shah- K1132310
Psychoanalytical Case Studies- Explain one aspect of the concept of the speaking body?
This essay will explore the concept of speech and jouissance of the speaking body, from analysing the text, "The Unconscious and the Speaking Body" by Jacques-Alain Miller. First part of the essay will define the term speaking body is, secondly the essay will examine the ideologies of both speech and language in relation to the speaking body according to authors Miquel Bassols, Lacan, Freud, Miller and Austin. Thirdly the essay will explore the speech functions in terms of drives by jouissance in relation to ID and unconscious in relation to speaking body and what makes the body real with examples.
According to Jacques Alain Miller, ‘the real of the unconscious is the speaking body. The body usually speaks and talks.’ (Miller, The Unconscious and the Speaking Body, 2016) The speaking body has its two kinds of jouissance- ‘the joiussance of speech and the jouissance of the body.’ (Miller, The Unconscious and the Speaking Body, 2016)
Lacan had stated “The unconscious is what the being in speaking enjoys”. He introduces the notion of the body as an ‘enjoying substance’, and refers to the living as the primary condition of jouissance, and to the body as its support. (Lacan, The body: consistency of the speaking being, 2010)
Miller suggests “The speaking body is the body speaking from the point at which it escapes sense and which is the trauma of the language system on the body.” (Miller, The Unconscious and the Speaking Body, 2016) For example patients will show signs of symptoms experienced from conditions passed through traumas they experienced In life through the speaking body as a way of communicating unconsciously how they feel which they normally would not with just being an image of self. For example symptoms shown through conditions (Neurosis, Psychosis, Depression etc.) such as broken or fragmented language or speech, fidgeting with hands, laughing in a hysterical fashion consistently with no reason, rocking, shaking etc. These types of behaviours and actions are communicated through patient’s conditions thus making the speaking body alive and human rather than just being a being or image of self.
The body is presented as the image, an image portrayed in the mirror. Psychoanalysts first see the body and interpret the language through actions of body via speech in clinical settings. Clients usually portray mainly psychiatric symptoms according to the various conditions they experience and analyse how a patient performs through speech in the way they act and speak to release emotions as reactions from the conditions. According to Miller, ‘The speaking body speaks in terms of drives.’(Miller, The Unconscious and the Speaking Body, 2016)
According to Lacan ‘an interpretation is an act of saying that targets the speaking body and does so in order to produce an event, in order to provoke a gut reaction.’ The symbolic will print semantic representations onto the imaginary body, which the speaking body then unweaves and weaves in a knot where the body Is seen as a yarn of wool or thread in this knotting, an event different from the functions of an organism. (Miller, The Unconscious and the Speaking Body, 2016)
‘The body changes register as a speaking body.’ (Miller, The Unconscious and the Speaking Body, 2016)For a long time the speaking body was seen as the hysterical body depending on the conditions patients faced. ‘It was a body that spoke the language of dreams perfectly’, (Miller, The Unconscious and the Speaking Body, 2016) and thus gave clarity and meaning to everything. In other words a body that brang the unconscious to conscious from speech and language from certain hardships, traumas or unpleasant memories that people go through in life. Psychoanalysts and Psychiatrists mainly want the patients to engage with them by making them go through the ‘talking cure’ process which makes the speaking body seem human and alive. We all have a speaking body as each of us go through certain conditions which makes speech a prominent aspect of making the body real through communication.
According to Miquel Bassols ‘The body of the image is transformed in this way into a speaking body. The speaking body is what makes a body human through the language and communication.’ (Miquel Bassols, The image and Speaking Body, 2016). One does not acquire a language; one is ‘contaminated by an experience of jouissance’, which impacts the ‘body of the image.’ (Miquel Bassols, The image and Speaking Body, 2016) Lacan had pointed out, in various occasions, that this “being is a being only as far as it speaks.” (Miquel Bassols, The image and Speaking Body, 2016) “This being only attains having a body in so far as it speaks and in so far that it is being spoken.” (Miquel Bassols, The image and Speaking Body, 2016)
Up to this point, the speaking body remained a mystery, it was unknown to the psychoanalytical world thus until the introduction and analysis of speech. However, according to Bassols ‘speaking is an abstraction which has nothing to do with the strangeness of what we call “the speaking body”. (Miquel Bassols, The image and Speaking Body, 2016) It is speech itself that speaks; it is the one that speaks in a body, for the body which is not of the category of being but of having making the body real.
The speaking body already appears as a spoken body, between the mystery of the unconscious and the evidence of the body of the image, in all the varieties of today’s clinic, psychoanalysts have viewed patients physical behaviours through the body’s way of communication, thus they can unravel certain traits from a person through the conditions of the mind. According to Lacan ‘The mystery is rather that of union between speech and the body’. (Lacan, Actuality, 2014)
When the body speaks, it fails to fulfil the claims made on behalf of consciousness; instead the speaking body fulfils the unconscious requirements. But the body is not “outside” the speech performance. At once the organ of speech, the very organic condition of speech and the vehicle of speech, the body signifies the organic conditions for communication.
Laughter can be seen as a type of outburst from the speaking body, the act of exploding with laughter becomes an explosive performance in every sense of the word which psychoanalysts can notice when they visit their patients who are laughing hysterically thus the laughter aspect of language and speech’s role is important as it brings the speaking body from unconscious to conscious so psychoanalysts can analyse and diagnose the patient.
According to Miller “An interpretation is an act of saying that targets the speaking body and does so in order to produce an event, in order to provoke a gut-reaction said Lacan. All that analysis can do is to accord to the pulsation of the speaking body in order to insinuate itself into the symptom. When one analyses the speaking body, the meaning of interpretation is joiussance.” (Miller, The Unconscious and the Speaking Body, 2016)
“The body event of which we speak does not affect the body as organism of the individual, but the body of the subject of speech, trans-individual at the outset.” In other words the speaking body has no impact on the biological body but through speech the body begins to show personality and the individuality/identity of the person through the relationship between language and human body. According to Eric Laurent, ‘The speaking body always comes to conflict with the actual body of the individual.’ ‘It speaks and demonstrates discourse as a social bond’ that is engraved on the body. (Eric Laurent, The Unconscious is Politics, 2015) ‘The speaking body as sign of unintended expression becomes the body