Introduction/Issue 10: The Symptom
Issue 10: The Symptom (Spring 2006) Linda Edwards and Michael Williams Our patient suffers a symptom – a repetitive hand-washing that pervades his everyday life. Anguished, frustrated, trammeled by it, our patient is also inextricably entwined with it. Despite his attempts to transcend it, his compulsive handwashing has become indispensable to his assertion of self and identity, and he fears he will be at loss, lose something, fall apart, without it. What motivates our patient’s symptom and what does it want to say? How should our patient reply? How does – indeed can – our patient overcome this intolerable, yet embodied, compulsion? And what awaits its dissolution? In psychoanalysis the symptom occupies a central position – both theoretically and practically. The symptom grounds the play of latent and manifest levels that are the condition of possibility of psychoanalytic knowledge and practice. We approach our patient’s hand-washing as an indicator for, and confrontation with, something else: abjected, forbidden, unfulfilled, improper, obfuscated. As a “sign and a surrogate,” as Freud says, for the “known of old and …