Are affections signs of a time that does not pass?

Abstract

It is in the name of the symptoms that affect a subject that the demand for analytical treatment is established. Could these affectations be signs of a time that does not pass? In order to answer this question, this article intends to situate affects in the psychoanalytic experience, assuming that, as phenomena, they may not be good guides for analysis. In this article, I explore in Lacan’s work what makes it possible to articulate the manifest field of affections — the imaginary spatial dimension of the subject — and anguish, defined since the beginning as relating to desire and the times of castration. By pointing to the structural, anguish becomes a highlighted affect by indicating the direction of object a, an index of the real, not without articulating itself to the symptom and inhibition. Neurotic fantasy supports desire, in which the subject offers his castration to the Other, remaining temporarily trapped in this moment. In the analysis, the separation of desire from the Other is what allows the subject to sustain themselves in the face of the advent of reality without feeling threatened in their existence; modulations of language that allow affection to pass, affecting the temporality of each person’s singular subjective experience.