Slavoj Zizek, my new intellectual hero, interpreted Jacques Lacan's petit a in his book The Metastases of Enjoyment. The revelation was so exciting it prompted me to share my discovery here.
Apparently le object petit a is like saying "the small other". So t's an external something in your life - but it's a small external something that obviously only exists in your head because everything in psychology has that tendency. So what on earth is it?
Turns out it's something like objective experience.
It seems one of Freud's patients saw his parents having sex when he was a child and that was considered a trauma. In Freud's view, trauma occurred when the patient stumbled upon his parents.
In Lacan's view, the patient was actually fine and dandy for a great many years after seeing his parents have sex, and he wasn't in denial really, it was just part of life. And then when adult awareness kicked in, when he started to see his own previous experiences from a new spot in spacetime, he couldn't fit that experience into the coherent mass of experience that defined who he was, that mass of memories and internal reactions which formed the "this is me" understanding, so because he couldn't fit the experience of seeing his parents have sex into that blob, it stuck out. He was unable to cope with it, unable to sublimate the spiky blob into his holistic being, and so traumatised.
In Lacan's view, the patient was actually fine and dandy for a great many years after seeing his parents have sex, and he wasn't in denial really, it was just part of life. And then when adult awareness kicked in, when he started to see his own previous experiences from a new spot in spacetime, he couldn't fit that experience into the coherent mass of experience that defined who he was, that mass of memories and internal reactions which formed the "this is me" understanding, so because he couldn't fit the experience of seeing his parents have sex into that blob, it stuck out. He was unable to cope with it, unable to sublimate the spiky blob into his holistic being, and so traumatised.
The traumatic experience as an objective reality only occurred on the psychological plane years after the actual event and might have potentially been dealt with as non-traumatic - there was no way to tell at the moment in spacetime when it happened. So seeing his parents have sex was not a traumatic event - at least, not when it happened.
Well that's what I think Zizek is saying that Lacan says. But if none of them think they say that, then I do!
