The Concept of Jouissance

This chapter develops the Lacanian concept of jouissance—a traumatic excess of enjoyment which may not be felt as such—in relation to the real, imaginary, and symbolic registers. I demonstrate how Lacan extracts these concepts (and others, such as das Ding, objet a, $, S1, S2) from some of Freud’s major texts. I also discuss how the Lacanian real is an antagonism immanent to the symbolic, the symbolic’s own structural inconsistency. This conceptualization will be central to my subsequent integrations with neuroscience.