Stigmata
Claudia Iddan
Freud compares the account of a hysteric[1] to the confession extracted by torture from a witch whom the inquisitors repeatedly pricked with needles so as to reveal the stigmata diavoli! The comparison brings to the fore the ancient medieval theory of possession and the involvement with the devil.
In his lecture at Yale University[2] Lacan also mentions witches. Referring to the "things that get in the way" (of a subject) and that have to do with what parasites his thought, such as phobia, obsession or other manifestations in the body like hysteria, he tells us: "These bodily effects, which have been variously described, constitute what is thought to be the same thing as the so-called stigmata, by which the so-called witches were identified.” This figure introduces the idea of the devil, but who exactly is he? It is clear that he possesses the body and mind of a human being.
The fact that Lacan evokes the term stigmata, i.e. scar or mark, resonates with what he said in reference to the navel of the dream as a stigmata. In his response to Marcel Ritter[3] he underlines that this is about a knot that is "no longer pointable in its very place [the body] since there is there the same displacement that is linked to the function and the field of speech". The statements present an analogy between the bodily stigmata of the navel and the symbolic stigmata, an analogy between a 'closure' in the sayable and the place where the drive becomes opaque: a hole. It is the hole of the One, of the Unerkannt, a point of radical impossibility, of opacity, which gives the notion of the primordial repressed and which thus establishes the relation of the parlêtre to the unconscious. This One that comes from the Other is the "devil", the jouissant hell, that possesses the body of every parlêtre and whose impact leaves a mark that does not cease to be written. Freud read the unconscious by listening to the hysteric, but it is precisely the hysteria, the "witchcraft" that reveals the strangeness experienced by every parlêtre of having a body where the traces of language are inscribed, leaving scars, like letters of jouissance.
Translated by Jane Hodgson & Joanne Conway
References
[1] Freud, S. (1986). “Letter 56”, in J. Masson, trans. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, 1887-1904, USA, Harvard University Press.
[2] Scilicet 6/7, Lacan J., Yale University, Kanzer Seminar, Editions Seuil, Paris, 1976, page 11.
[3] Revue La Cause du desir N0 102, Éditions Navarin, Paris, 2019, p. 36.