illustrate by an example: the way in which a concatenation of signifiers affects what he calls sexuality, which does not refer to sex or sexual relations, but―as you will see―to what in his 19th seminar Lacan defines as jouissance, that is, that disturbed relation to our own body. Disturbed by what? By words! Let us see how.
Here is what Freud writes about miss Emma Eckstein, an almost 30-year-old woman whom he had been treating since age 27:
Emma is at the present time under a compulsion not to go into shops alone. She explained this by a memory dating from the age of twelve (shortly before her puberty). She went into a shop to buy something, saw the two shop-assistants (one of whom she remembers) laughing together, and rushed out in some kind of fright. In this connection it was possible to elicit the idea that the two men had been laughing at her clothes and that one of them had attracted her sexually.
Next, Freud outlines a sort of logical analysis of this sequence. He says:
Both the relation of these fragments to one another and the effect of the experience are incomprehensible. If she felt unpleasure at her clothes being laughed at, this should have been corrected long ago―ever since she began to dress as a lady. Nor does it make any difference to her clothes whether she goes into a shop alone or in company. It is not simply a question of being protected, as is shown by the fact that (as happens in cases of agoraphobia) the company of a small child is enough to make her feel safe. Then there is the totally disconnected fact that one of the men attracted her. Here again nothing would be changed if she had someone with her. Thus the memories aroused explain neither the compulsion nor the determination of the symptom.
For Freud, the unconscious is the way to fulfill the precepts of rationality. If this irrational symptom of Emma has a rational explanation, we must look for the wrong hidden premise (the proton pseudos) that allows us to deduce it. Then, he says that
Further investigation brought to light a second memory, which she denies having had in mind at the moment of Scene I. Nor is there any evidence to support its presence there. On two occasions, when she was a child of eight, she had gone into a shop to buy some sweets and the shopkeeper had grabbed at her genitals through her clothes. In spite of the first experience she had gone to the shop a second time, after which she had stopped away. Afterwards she reproached herself for having gone the second time, as though she had wanted to provoke the assault. And in fact a “bad conscience” by which she was oppressed could be traced back to this experience.
In this second scene―thinks Freud―we must find the equivalent of what is the falsity of a previous premise (proton pseudos) in order to reach an illogical conclusion. In other words, Scene II is what allows Emma’s senseless symptom to be logically deduced from Scene I. He says it this way:
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