The Enjoyment of Anna
Joanne Conway
We know it well, the beautiful dream of little Anna Freud, who at 19 months old, being deprived of her beloved strawberries, arranges a perfect banquet of delicacies in a bid to overthrow the law of the nursery that prohibited them. Yet let’s pause a moment. Freud tells us that childhood dreams are those without the repressive and the distortive action of the secondary process at work in adult’s dreams. Simple wish fulfilment in the child’s case, easily read desire that goes straight to the object as Lacan says. However, this is not pure and simple a formation of the unconscious, rather a production of an unconscious in formation, and this is worthy of attention.
Freud knows about this dream because it is spoken, by Anna in her sleep. Freud pointed out in chapter 7 of the dream book, the role of the primary process, the pleasure principle, is to operate a cleaving to hallucination (Vorstellungen) in the first instance, whereas reality has to find the means to impose itself upon this autistic enjoyment/jouissance.
In this “articulated dream”, the hungry Anna is not awoken via the action of the secondary process. Rather what is encountered here is the real drive enjoyment of speech itself, a mode of jouissance about which Anna knows nothing and in which she too is an object of enjoyment, she is on the menu so to speak, both as a name to be enjoyed (Anna F.eud), and via her body which is taken up by speech. What has been denied Anna in terms of the satisfaction of consuming her strawberries, finds, via the articulation of a series of signifiers, a substitute satisfaction of the oral drive. In fact it is not clear how to think about this dream –nothing is known of its images or if there are associated images. What there is, are signifiers, neiderschreiben articulated and enjoyed as a source of satisfaction, belonging as they do to the primary process. Lacan himself notes that “the emergence of hallucinations by which the primary process […] finds its satisfaction concerns not simply an image but a signifier”. [1] Can this “dream” be in fact more akin to what Lacan specifies in terms of verbal hallucination: “[…]verbally structured hallucinations, when there is an intrusion […], not of an image or fantasy, not of something that a simple perceptual process would prop up, but a signifier”.[2]
Anna is not yet separated in language as indexed by the way her name appears in the series (it is en-corporated but not separated)[3]. For Lacan something is not precipitated from the structure, the object has not yet fallen. The Other exists for Anna, she speaks and is spoken but what is at stake is not the desire of a divided subject with respect to a barred Other[4], a subject who desires what is prohibited, but rather what is foremost is this speech act (a jouissance event) which is of the order of the parlêtre, is of the order of that which enjoys in and of itself. Something enjoys Anna F.eud, her body enjoyed via the signifier, and the signifier itself a means of satisfaction of the oral drive via the articulation of those objects associated with it. Anna does not wake up in hunger and demand food, but rather she is a captive, consumed and enjoyed by the real of the signifier. Here is a body parasited by language, that is enjoyed beyond the subject. It is not the subject’s enjoyment at stake here but that of the signifier itself and the drives of the body. This dream is a conduit for the jouissance of the signifier without which there is no body event.
References
[1] Lacan, J. (2019). Desire and Its Interpretation, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI, Ed. J.-A. Miller, B. Fink (trans.) Polity Press, p.52.
[2] Ibid.
[3] For Freud Anna’s name appears as both possession of her cache of goodies and defiance toward the Other. But here there is not yet a divided subject – Ann’s name as signifier is incorporated – as a support for the image, the ego, but she is “affixed” to it. It is not yet possible for her to make herself both subject and object of a sentence, i.e. s <> a not constructed.
[4] There is censorship at play perhaps but not repression.