“A Fantasy I Didn’t Know I Had”: Sexual Fantasy as Turning-point in a Psychoanalytic Treatment

Speaker: Derek Hook, PhD

Obsessional neurotic analysands are notoriously good at neutralizing a psychoanalytic treatment. They annul the role of the analyst, avoid the dimension of the Other’s desire (or lack), deny the relevance of parapraxes, and use free association as a means of defense. Given then that the obsessional, for Lacan, is never where they say they are, that their intellectual engagement with a treatment often occurs at the expense of their participation at the level of being, then what is it that makes change possible? This paper responds to this question with a vignette drawn from a lengthy piece of clinical work with an analysand who suffered from a series of urinary symptoms. A turning-point in the work came when the analysand, started speaking, free associatively, about a fictional scene in a novel (a scene of an illicit sexual encounter). This (mis-remembered) scene suddenly jarred a repressed sexual memory, which in turn posed for them a question of desire they did not know they had. Three Freudian and Lacan conceptualizations help illuminate the vignette: Freud’s account of beating fantasies; ‘aphanisis’ (or, the fading of the subject); and the idea of urinary flow as object a.