Sinthom

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In the theory of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Sinthom or Sinthome ( French ) is that part of the symptom that forms the core of the subject. In contrast to the symptom, the sinthome is not a signifier ; it does not refer to anything else. So it resists any interpretation and is ultimately not resolvable. It belongs to the realm of the real insofar as it represents the way in which the subject organizes his enjoyment .

Lacan introduced the term “ Sinthome ” late - in Seminar XXIII: Le Sinthome from 1975 to 1976; and even there he sometimes still uses the conventional spelling “symptom” when he writes about the Sinthom. Lacan argues that "the symptom can only be defined as the way in which each subject enjoys the unconscious [jouit] in so far as the unconscious determines it".

Borromean rings

In Lacan's model of the Borromean rings of the real , the imaginary and the symbolic , the Sinthom forms an additional fourth ring, which is formed by the “ Reuleaux triangle ” in the center of the three rings. The Sinthom is the element that holds the knot together in the first place. Insofar as it forms the center of the subject in this way - that "what allows one to live" - ​​according to Lacan the task of psychoanalysis is not to dissolve the Sinthome, but rather to identify with it.

Slavoj Žižek's book title Love Your Symptom Like Yourself (1991) is an allusion to this necessary identification. Žižek writes:

“And insofar as a core of enjoyment persists in the symptom, which resists any interpretation, the end of the analysis is perhaps not to be sought in an interpretative resolution of the symptom, but in an identification with it, in an identification of the subject with that which cannot be analyzed Period, with this particular 'pathological' tic , which ultimately forms the only support of his existence. "

literature

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Individual evidence

  1. a b Lacan: Seminar XXIII , quoted in n. Evans: Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis , p. 274.
  2. Žižek: Love your symptom like yourself. P. 26 f.