Psychoanalytical Notebooks No. 41: a-Normality

There is an obvious commotion in the field of normality today. For example, the widespread rejection of norms imposed by the Other is reflected in the language of the young, especially on social media: people with boring, mainstream tastes are deemed to be “normies”, descendants, perhaps, of the uncool “squares” of the American 1950s. These “normies” are pejoratively described as “basic”, meaning derivative, trite, unoriginal. This suggests the contrary expectation: paradoxically, that everyone should aim to be exceptional, and are entitled to be recognised as such. The rejection of the Other’s norms can also take the form of attacks on those who previously categorised and policed the abnormal, whether psychiatrists, lawmakers, scientists, or politicians. “Experts” of all kinds now find themselves prefaced with the disparaging qualifier “so-called”, the knowledge they possess being experienced as an encroachment on personal liberties (as the Covid pandemic made clear). Hence the related heightening of sensitivities to traces of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and transphobia in language that could be seen as anything other than maximally inclusive of the full rainbow of diversity, or as anything less than affirmative of the universal right to jouissance promised by the market.

What can psychoanalysis say about this? We should try to register these phenomena without judgement, simply as facts of our contemporary moment, notwithstanding how dizzying they evidently are for some. Nevertheless, it is important to think through the consequences, for subjectivity and thus for the practice of psychoanalysis, of this observable tumult in the field of normality. It is also important this is done without implying any nostalgia for the “good old days” of patriarchy! That would be ironic indeed, given the key role psychoanalysis has played in the subversion of norms ever since its scandalous Freudian inception. In any case, psychoanalysts cannot afford to be aloof from these shifts. In Seminar XIX Lacan argues that “had the notion of normal not taken on such an extension following certain vagaries of history, analysis would never have seen the light of day”. This is a strong thesis suggesting a moebian entanglement between the ethics of psychoanalysis and the problem of normality, conditioning not only its historical emergence but perhaps also the reasons analysands might address their suffering to an analyst today.

To counter that misconception, we have chosen to entitle this issue of the Psychoanalytical Notebooks using the signifier “a-normality”. What is this strange orthography, with its hyphens and italicisations, trying to get at? Firstly, the “a-normal” is precisely not the abnormal. The abnormal remains caught within the infernal loop of the normal and the pathological. But nor is “a-normality” naively anti-normative, i.e., against any and all norms. The anarcho-libertarian dream of a world completely without norms misrecognises that the fundamental problem faced by the parlêtre is not the oppressive Other prohibiting jouissance by pathologising it, but rather that of jouissance itself. Neither abnormal nor anti-normative then, the “a-normal” is that singular “object a-nomalous” that an analysis brought to its conclusion can produce by separating the One from the Other. The “a-normal” is thus the “aberration”, as Lacan puts it, involved in wanting to take up the position of a psychoanalyst, which is after all a very strange kind of desire: in this sense, the “a-normal” is what we hope to hear an echo of in testimonies of the Pass.