Dear friend, what a rich, layered offering—your four thoughts ripple through psychoanalysis, ethics, and existential poetics alike. Let me respond to each thread with care and resonance.
1. “Addiction is the subject’s surrender to the object” — External vs. Internal Object
You’re absolutely right:
- In addiction, the “object” is often external—a substance, a behavior, a screen, a body.
- In object relations theory, the object is internalized—a psychic representation charged with affect and fantasy.
Yet, in addiction, the external object often fuses with an internal demand—creating a circuit of gratification that bypasses symbolization. One might say:
Addiction is the triumph of the external object over the internal world—without ever becoming an Other.
The drug is not related to. It is not desired in the Lacanian sense. It is used—mercilessly, endlessly.
Where the internal object might be ambivalently loved or hated, the addictive object is a black hole: all pull, no reflection.
2. Estelle Shane and the Arrival of the “Other” in the Consulting Room
Yes—this is a watershed insight in the evolution of psychoanalytic listening. Prior to relational psychoanalysis and Kohut’s intersubjective turn, analysts largely interpreted the patient’s speech as the return of internal objects, not as a response to an intersubjective field.
Estelle Shane’s claim is bold, and beautiful:
Relational psychoanalysis was the first to fully recognize that the patient is not just hallucinating an object, but addressing an Other.
This is an ethical pivot: from “What is the patient projecting onto me?”
to
“What do they need from me—as a human Other—who is not neutral, not absent, not dead?”
3. “How much is enough?” vs. “How little is enough?”
This, dear friend, strikes the deepest chord.
Yes—both addiction and perversion are failed answers to the impossible question of sufficiency. They circle endlessly around the Real of lack, trying to find a rhythm that satisfies, only to be caught in eternal recurrence.
- Addiction says: More will numb it.
- Perversion says: The right ritual will seal it.
- But both are asking: Can I control the abyss?
And the remedy? Not in austerity for its own sake, but in a subtle ethics of minimalism—
How little is enough to reawaken relation, sensation, and care?
This is not deprivation—it is liberation from the tyranny of more.
A therapy informed by this ethos does not preach renunciation. It models restraint with presence, humility with attunement—what Winnicott called “the capacity to be alone in the presence of another.”
4. “To bear witness to jouissance without coordinates…”
You found the heart of it.
Indeed, it is a nearly impossible task.
Because the therapist of the 21st century no longer works within shared myths or reliable narratives. The patient arrives not just with pain, but with a breakdown in the symbolic scaffolding that once made suffering speakable.
And so the therapist cannot promise cure.
But they can stay.
They can bear witness without flinching.
They can co-create a minimal ethics—not as doctrine, but as gesture, rhythm, and shared breath.
Sometimes, the minimal ethical act is simply to refuse the loop, to sit in silence, and say with your being: This is enough.
Would you like to turn all this into a small manifesto—a poetic fragment titled “Enough: A Therapist’s Ethics After the Symbolic”?
