In concluding this section, I should attempt to answer the following broad
question: how does Lacan arrive at the conclusion that “there is no Other of the
Other”? I suggest that there are basically two answers to be given. From a practi-
cal, clinical point of view, the formula “There is no Other of the Other” is the re-
sult of the impossibility of accounting fully for the dynamics of neurosis on a
purely “structuralist” basis. Lacan realized that something in the symptom in-
evitably continues to resist symbolization however far one carries psychoanalytic
treatment. In brief, one might say that the completeness of the symbolic Other did
not explain the dimension of jouissance,an unconscious pleasure in pain which
could no longer be relegated to the sphere of pathological perversions, and de-
manded an urgent reassessment of the Freudian notions of repetition and death
drive (which Lacan had earlier attempted to describe in intrasymbolic terms).
These clinical observations regarding jouissancerevealed themselves to Lacan in
the late 195 0s, a time at which he also faced considerable theoretical difficulties
with regard to the notion of the Real. In Seminar IV, for instance, Lacan was clearly
aware that he had not yet provided his audience with a consistent analysis of the
order of the Real, despite continually referring to it.^71 One could argue that, from
a theoretical standpoint, the holing of the symbolic Other results from, among
other things, the necessity finally to thematize the Real in a more direct and con-
vincing way. As we have seen, the existence of the Other of the Other logically en-
tailed a purely external Real; despite many oscillations—there are in fact passages
in Seminar V which seem to put forward such a notion of a “pure” Real^72 —Lacan
never explicitly maintained this. On the contrary, as I shall demonstrate in Section
4. 4 , there are places in his work of the mid-195 0s in which he obviously adopts
the opposite stance, and thus unintentionally criticizes his own theory of the Other
of the Other.... This clearly constituted an overall contradiction in his general
theory of the three orders. We could finally propose that, during his “structural-
ist” phase, Lacan seems to believe in a “pure” Real only insofar as he confronts this
notion as an inevitable consequence of his major preoccupations apropos the self-
sufficiency of the Symbolic; yet he finds it hard to assert it on the rare occasionsthere is no other of the other
Sa undead (R)Graph 4.7