Notes (2) to Lacan’s seminar X: the vampire-child

“Do you wish to bring everyone back to his first duties? Begin with mothers. You will be surprised by the changes you will produce. Everything follows successively from this first depravity [mothers who despise their first duty and no longer want to feed their children]. The whole moral order degenerates. . . . But let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled. This first point, this point alone, will bring everything back together.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, after Copjec, 117).

Anxiety is everywhere today. In 2008 was called the “year of anxiety”. It seems that everyone talks about it. Most people have felt it. But what is anxiety — and does the fact that we keep talking about make us any cleverer in defining what it is. For Lacan anxiety is not a concept. It is not something to be known. It is rather a “way” or passage. But what is it the way or passage to? If anxiety is not a concept, but an affect and affect that cannot be conceptualized or made into semantics, what “is” it? Here, I will, look at one of Lacan’s more spectacular examples. The fantasy of a mother that her child is like a vampire.

Lacan’s seminar X was published, as Miller puts it, at an untimely moment. When psychotherapies, in French the socalled INSERM were abundant and more and more predominant. This has many different aspects, cognitive therapies, positive psychology etc. These are made of collective works, the authors mostly anonymous and without a desire of their own. It is a work that believes in knowledge and the signifier. It is characaterized by the “passion for evaluation” (as Miller calls it).

In contrast, Lacan’s seminar is the work of one person alone, a brilliant, but idiosyncratic figure. It is borne by his own passion, it includes anecdotes from travelling (Japan), references to philosophical predecessors (Heidegger etc.), to Freud, but it seems very much at odds with how other psychotherapies work. Lacan begins the seminar by playing on etymologies. In this way he hints as the signifier and the knowledge as a way to approach anxiety. But then he reveals that anxiety is rather what warns us that the signifier cannot cover everything. That we cannot know everything about our own bodies and the world through the signifier. Anxiety is a signal that we approach the Real. The Real is what is outside of language, what is unbearable and undifferentiated. In the Real we are helpless. Hilflos, Freud said. If someone ties me up and approaches me with a club I would probably feel anxiety. Or I would sexual arousal. Anxiety and jouissance are connected. We can also feel anxious about our own sexuality. Why? Because I was helpless and because I was confronted with a figure of the Other that could use me as they saw fit.

To take a recent example. The Russian army in Ukraine use what they call “ human safari”. That is drones that hit the civilian population. This warfare is intended to instill anxiety in the civilian population. The subject suddenly sees a drone and the drone might go for a military target, but also just a civilian. In this sense the subject would most likely feel anxiety, being rendered helpless. The drone is therefore a recent figure of this almighty Other. The fact that a “puppeteer” controls the drone, that therefore is not himself in danger is perhaps a further aspect of why this feels especially powerful against the subject.

The Real is full as Lacan often says. When we enter language we become alienated, subjects of desire, since we lose access to our original being. In language we do not have any words for what is outside of language. I can say: “whatever is outside of language”, yes. But those are words, not actually what is outside of language. So, this is a paradoxical formula, because it is, of course, still language. Hence language is what constantly alienates us from things in themselves. Language is a deceptive. It can never actually fix a meaning to a thing.

However, in contrast to earlier “structuralism” Lacan with this seminar focuses precisely on remainders of the Real, the object a, within language. And anxiety is what does not deceive. The fact that our safe world in language can break down means that language is not complete. Lacan opens the seminar with voicing a criticism against him: that he never talks about affects and only language and its structures. He has forgotten affect, such an important part of psychoanalysis. Lacan differs: he has always talked about affects. And now he even dedicate an entire seminar to just one affect. Anxiety. It will provide the guiding thread throughout the seminar, although as he says, he must proceed slowly: talking about anxiety might itself induce anxiety in the listening. Hence, like when a psychoanalyst works with anxiety, it must be carefully dosed. Anxiety is not simply to be eliminated like many psychotherapies tries to day. Anxiety is also what points us towards the Real. Hence, we should not merely try and run from it, or eliminate it. We must approach it and make use of it for analytic ends. We must even learn to feel anxiety. But also how to operate with it, so that it does not overwhelm us.

Most of the times in Seminar X the Mother appears as a figure of the Other, especially the almighty Other. For the infant the Mother is an almighty Other in the sense, that the child is utterly dependent on her. He or she can cry for care and nourishment, but the Mother decides when and how. In the child’s fantasies, the Mother therefore quickly comes to be associated with an almighty figure, someone who decides on his or her destiny. Much of Seminar IV, on the object-relation, was dedicated to investigating this kind of relation to the Mother as the first Other. The Mother in Lacanian analysis is not simply a biological being. It is a structural position. If we have a homosexual couple of two men, the Mother as a symbolic position would still be operative.

While the child imagines the primordial Other, the Mother, as almighty, as dependent on her whims, there is no actual almightiness. No mother is actually almighty. She is also a subject and part of social context and a parlêtre: a speaking being. She also has her desires and needs. A work to attend to, other children, a husband, her own family, her own fears and dreams. The child is not her sole object. But the child can believe she is. If she asks him or her to stay in bed with her always this does not leave the child to develop a desire of its own. She is too close. This is where Lacan’s conception of anxiety goes against the predominant philosophical reading: that anxiety is related to nothingness. For Heidegger, for example, we fear an actual object. Anxiety on the contrary is an affect that is not related to an object. It is with the nothingness.

This is what Lacan changes the terms. Anxiety is “not without an object”. It is when there is too much of something, where there should be nothing. The intrusive Other that suffocates me with his or her jouissance, for example. There is too much of something. Thus anxiety does not arise, when we we think there should be something, but we only encounter nothing (Heidegger). It is the opposite: it arises when we think there should be nothing, as subjects of desire, and there suddenly is something. Object a is the object of lack. The lack of this object constitutes our sense of reality, the every day world, the world of “objectivity”. In anxiety, this lack itself comes to be lacking. It becomes like a puzzle, where all the pieces are filled out and encroaching and swallowing you.

Anxiety is thus, not as the philosophers think (Heidegger etc.), when we confront nothingness. Rather it is when the Other is overproximate to us, too close, to much enjoyment, a suffocating Other. Take the example of the student that has to give a presentation to an academic audiences. There are many small others, his friends, his professors, maybe his parents. But more than that there is the vague figure of the Other as more than the sum of these individual people. It is the feeling of looking out in the room and saying out words, but feeling there is noone to respond. Not knowing how they will be received. In this way, the audience can turn into an almighty Other, a figure, that does not leave any room for him to speak, to formulate his (academic) desire. The audience, simply by being silent, can appear as this Other, that is like a superego hunting him down. It is claustrophobic. The audience (the academic Other) feels oppressive. The point is of course not to have simply a stupid self-congratulation, as though one should certainly not feel anxiety. A good talk will probably always involve a small dose of anxiety. Because something is at stake that moves us, something not reducible to already established academic knowledge, to university discourse. A good talk involves movement, knowledge with consequences, as Lacan says in seminar XV, a knowledge, that gives way to slippery signifiers, to where the subject (and the audience) lose their ground for a bit. Lacan plays on this many times in his seminars, and much of Lacan’s ways to end individual sessions often evokes a certain powerful pun or turn that tries to make the ground slippery, and introduce some anxiety (“what are we doing here… why is he saying this?”).

We feel anxiety when “lack comes to lack”. When there is no place to desire, since desire is only possible when there is lack. Imagine a zombie invading your house. Before you might expect the zombie out there in the woods. There is a lack. You don’t know where the zombie is. But the second it enters your house and storms towards you, where there was previously a lack, there is now something. Something that does not allow your desire. It wants to eat your brains (and alas, also your desire).

For example, in the Mother that does not leave the child alone, but is always on its back. I talked about an obsessional that was wiped until he was 12 years old. In that case there is no gap between the subject and the Other. The Other leaves no space, no distance to operate. Lacan says: “The most anguishing thing for the infant is precisely the moment when the relationship is established himself of the lack that turns him into desire, is disrupted, and this relationship is most disrupted when there’s no possibility of any lack, when the mother is on his back all the while, and especially when she’s wiping his backside. This is one model of demand, of the demand that will never let up.” (53–54).

That is perhaps why it is not too bad with the slightly comical situation, when the child is trained to go the bathroom alone, but then calls out when he wants to be wiped (around 2–3 years old). He cannot wipe himself properly. But the Mother (or figure of the Other) is not in the bathroom with him. He calls when he is “finished!”. In this way, the call is for her presence (to come and wipe him), but this presence allows for absence, for lack, and thereby for the child to formulate it’s desire. This can seem slightly comical, like a prince calling the servants. But it allows some distance, since the child learns that he can call when he wants, the mother is not in the bathroom with him, where there would be no possibility of a lack, as though the excrement as an example of object a, belongs to her. In Lacan anxiety is not so much the separation from the Other, but much more when there is no possibility of separation. Another point is of course breast feeding if the breast is too much there, if the mother gives it all the time and the child is not allowed any room of it’s own, so to speak. It is not allowed to be an individual subject with its own desire, it’s own lack. The lack is filled up constantly.

The lack of seperation gives the idea that Other that is non-castrated and that causes anxiety. However, Lacan also introduces anxiety on the side of the individual mother. The mother that has anxiety about a child that keeps demanding, where she feels she can have no desire outside the child’s demand what will never let up. Most evidently around the anxiety that her breast would dry up. That the child appears as a little vampire that would demand more. Lacan says (a longer quote):

“Whilst it is true that within this pattern of his relation to the mother the child is a little vampire and his organism is for a while suspended in the parasitic position, the fact remains no less that he is not this vampire either, to wit, at no moment whatsoever will he go at his mother with his teeth to search out the warm and vital source of his nourishment. As mythical as it is, however, the vampire image reveals to us through the aura of anxiety that surrounds it the truth of the oral relation to the mother. (236).

In this case the child appears as the almighty Other, as a figure that has a desire that overwhelms her. The dried up breast, the breast that can no longer give milk becomes the image of the fantasy of the vampire child that makes her helpless. Perhaps in the current political debates about how much mothers should be allowed to breast-feed in public, against the outcry that this is only natural, lies an anxiety, that one’s role as a mother will not hold up, the “virtual fear of the dried up breast” (236). A very powerful, but also frightening image. The dreaded thing is not simply annoying other people in public that cannot handle it, but much more one’s own child. What returns in the public debate is not morality but the “aura of anxiety”: an anxiety that the maternal function must be without lack. Winnicot talked about the “good enough mother”. But what Lacan reveals is that actual mothers (or the first Other) will always be haunted by never being “good enough”.

In the debate one asserts that it is certainly always possible to breast feed, as though the breast could never dry up. It is no historical coincidence that the figure of the vampire occurs at the same time with the Enlightenment cry to support breast-feeding, the “advocacy of breastfeeding” (Copjec, 117). I already quoted Rousseau, here is Mary Wollstonecraft from Thoughts on the Education of Daughters with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life:

I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring. . . . The mother (if there are not very weighty reasons to prevent her) ought to suckle her children. Her milk is their proper nutriment, and for some time quite sufficient. (after Copjec, 117). Like anxiety cannot be negotiated with, but is “certainty”, so it occurs at the limit of the signifier, that is at the limit of interpretation (and thus also of enlightenment and knowledge to which Wollstonecraft subscribes.

We must remember that for the child, according to Lacan, the breast does not at all belong to the Mother. Rather it is a part-object, belonging as much to the child as to the Mother if anything, or rather, as an incarnation of object a, the lost object it belongs to neither. It is “stuck on” to the Mother, but is not part of her body, in the child’s experience.

Object a serves many functions for Lacan. I cannot mention all of them here. But one is to be cause of desire. Not the object of desire. If I desire chocolate cake object a is not the chocolate cake in itself. There is a cause somewhere that causes me to desire chocolate cake: something in the chocolate cake more than simply chocolate cake. There is also the object a of the drive. The satisfaction I get out of eating it, again and again. While desire is constituted through lack (there is never chocolate cake enough), drive is always satisfied. It operates in the very circulation, in the very movement between chewing and taking another bite.

But what causes the subject to desire this or that object. It is in a way not “in front” of the subject, but behind it. The object a is the lost object. The object that we lose when we enter language, although we never actually “had” it before language. It is therefore a product of language, but simply “of” language. Object a is what makes me desire this or that thing as though to obtain it would fulfill all my desires. No matter how much we say, something always falls out, cannot be said. And this is object a. So, while it is a product of language, it is not “in” or “of” language.

It is a figure of what is lost once the child become a subject, once it enters the world of the Other. When the child learns that there is an inside and outside an originary “fullness” is lost. The child cannot be everything. What is lost with the entry to language, when an originary One is barred returns in a material residue. This is what causes desire. But object a is also the figure of the drive. While desire is always disattisfied, never obtaining its object, drive is on the contrary “happy”. A drive is the circulation around a particular object. Enjoyment is created through the very circulation. Object a is the very gap that is created in this circulation.

This is perhaps all the more relevant today, where the image of the “perfect” mother is very much back as an ideological category. The mother must be pure, present at all time, not make mistakes. Think about the many images from the 70ies of mother’s smoking and so on. Today, that would be abhorrent. Mothers have incredibly superego today. If anything goes wrong it is her fault. Plenty of books to read as if the signifier could allay her anxiety. But as Lacan warns us even in the beginning of the seminar. We are dealing with something “irreducible to the signifier”, that is we cannot “negotiate” with anxiety. It is this sense that anxiety does not deceive. Many cognitivist today believe that there is a semantics of anxiety. Hence you can deceive with anxiety. lacan does not think so. And we should not even eliminate anxiety. Anxiety is part of being a subject. It is also what as Lacan says elsewhere in the seminar, precisely what can enable us to desire. It indicates that something is precious to us. Perhaps we can find an indication that in the very movement of freedom from being simply a mother, several famous horror movies about “monstruos” children were made in the 70ies such as David Cronenbergs “The Brood” (1979) or “The Omen” (1976). When the mother finds the child overwhelming, without a lack, as if the breast really belongs to it and the mother is merely a carrier, someone completely in the service of the insatiable child. That is the vampire child. Of course, the child is not almighty. Almightiness does not exist. But the fantasy of an almighty figure, even in the infant, does exist. Anxiety arises as a signal. It is a signal that warns against helplessness (the mother being helpless with regard to the child). Lacan does not talk about “curing” anxiety. Many therapies today wants to cure anxiety. They see it as dysfunction. (Miller, 62). They have a “semantics” of anxiety (Rasmussen, 222). They want to negotiate, and ultimately eliminate it. The subject should be happy. Lacan talks instead of a “pass through” anxiety. Miller writes: “it is not, strictly speaking, a question of curing it, but at most of getting beyond it”.

Bibliography:

Copjec, Joan. Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety” In: Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Reprint edition. London and New York: Verso, 2015. C (pp. 117–141).

Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X: Anxiety (1962–63). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. “Introduction à la lecture du Séminaire de L’angoisse de Jacques Lacan” La Cause Freudienne no. (2004/3): 60–100.

Rasmussen, René. Angst — en læsning af Jacques Lacan: L’angoisse. København: Forlaget Drift, 2025.