On the patient who pays nothing
It was a stroke of genius for Lacan to have included among the psychoanalytic objects, the ‘nothing.’
Domenico Cosenza, in his book A Lacanian Reading of Anorexia (2024) provides a wonderful presentation on the object nothing in his seventh chapter. He claims that the object nothing is, for Lacan, the most enigmatic of all of the objects, and, therefore, it obtains a special status within Lacanian psychoanalysis, and not just for the anorexic. On the one hand, it cannot be reduced to an erogenous zone, like the feces. Yet this, precisely, indicates something special about its relationship to the ‘hole’ and to the body: the nothing, unlike the others, has a special and problematic relationship to the hole. If it is proximate to the oral erogenous zone within anorexia then this is perhaps because it is the site of one potential traumatization/hole-making. The subject is perhaps traumatized by the food-signifier.
In the end, Lacan distinguishes between the object nothing and the oral object, but also between the nothing and the signifier. For this reason, perhaps we can say that the nothing is closer to what we can call a ‘sign,’ which is adorned by the speaking-body in one way or another. We can therefore find the object nothing in anorexia or psychosis, but also in the neuroses, both obsessional and hysteric. The object nothing is opened up as a question within the clinic by our patients, by my patients, but also made accessible in psychoanalytic discourse by discussions around ordinary psychosis.
We can say that the object nothing serves as a preliminary interface with the Other. This is why Cosenza suggests a dualism of the nothing: a side which is resolutely positive, on the side of jouissance and drive satisfactions, and a side that is dialectizable within the field of the Other (as in the neuroses). It is the first side of the nothing that interests me: the nothing object, on this side of the dualism, demarcates a zone of foreclosure; it is an object situated on the positive plane of non-negativized jouissance. Hence, in the popular passage from Lacan: the anorexic is not the one who rejects food-objects but who rather opts to ‘eat the nothing’ as a source of autistic satisfaction.
Today there are a prevalence of speaking-beings who come to analysis with the ‘nothing’ in their pockets. I have noticed several patients over the years who, for example, pay ‘nothing’ for analysis. This is what keeps the analysis from moving, and, at one point or another, a deadlock is established: analysis for ‘nothing’ or else the world with the continuation of the stubborn symptom. These patients carry their object around with them in their pockets, and yet, they never cease to promote the object to the status of lynchpin of their discourse. In one case, painting took on the status of currency, a ‘value’ was produced through the extraction of paintings as payment for analysis. The question must be asked: can painting transform itself into a world-building practice? The patient stacks the paintings up in their room, endless swirls like a Van Gogh, layered upon itself without punctuation: the painting must come to an end. The introduction of payment through painting gives value to the loss of the piece of art, an art-object which is not ‘nothing’ but which can be taken from the pocket and placed into the field of the Other.
Each payment must be taken afresh, each payment is taken one-by-one.
