Enjoyment, rather, JOUISSANCE… How many flavors?

HEADNOTES

i. There is no lit review or anything even sketched out here. I know what Žižek and others mean by "perverse enjoyment" and so am just running with that for now just to see what shakes out when I try (though obviously the lit review would have to happen sometime)

ii. This is all very tentative still and will undoubtedly need reformulation and clarification

iii. I am throughout depending on my reader already having a grasp of Lacan's notion of psychic structures. If you lack that, you probably need to read this post first to see how I symptomatically misunderstand these things. 

Perverse enjoyment is participatory but passive, right? 

The neighbor who leaves trash in my yard and wakes everyone up with his music and who I find to be an aggressively unpleasant neighbor, if given a citation by the police for something - some other neighbor perhaps called this in - and I see it all, see it escalate, see the neighbor take a drunken swing at the cop and get flattened and handcuffed and hauled off to jail… Do I not enjoy this? Is there not a smile on my face as I turn to enter my house. This would be perverse enjoyment, enjoying the spectacle of an other being subjected to the law, or 'getting what they deserve.' The concept of perverse enjoyment has a lot of reach and many have explored it since Žižek put the idea forth (at least, I believe it was him).

What interests me and what I'll come back to below in hopes of extending it otherwise is the latitude marked here between structure and jouissance. That is, the perverse subject is said to have a structure of desire which is perverse in itself and is centered around the disvowal of lack and a specific relation to the law, that of situating oneself as the instrument of its application. But this perverse enjoyment, which is passive and participatory, appears to be available to subjects without regard for any congruence with the structure of their desire (maybe, see my dithering below). Also, unlike the psychic structure of any given subject - it seems that we can identify perverse enjoyment when and where it is offered up to us by media of all sorts (witness American Idol or any of a boatload of reality shows, such as… COPS).

But if one can stand outside of the directly perverse interaction, and enjoy the cop slamming the neighbor to the ground and handcuffing him, without even having seen it happen, but simply by relishing the neighborhood gossip… and if this enjoyment is as accessible to the pervert as the hysteric, the psychotic or the obsessional. Isn't the next question that seems to beg for an answer that of whether there are other participatory and passive (or 2nd hand) types of jouissance which these psychodiagnostic categories might allow us to discern, and which might well be already operant in the social world? Is there a psychotic jouissance in this sense of the term? That it is not the specific suffering of the psychotic - the subject who has foreclosed any S1 and either has stabilized this in some sinthomatic fashion or has not. Rather, it would have to be a jouissance which figures the jouissance of psychosis such that other subjects can participate in it. Hypothetically and very tentatively here; If the 'ordinary psychotic' has managed, sinthomatically, to stabilize the registers R.S.I. through investment in something else, in placing some other S1 (master signifier) in a position of central importance and using it as the 'anchor' which stabilizes one's psyche, allowing a livable relation to the Other… then might we postulate an '(ordinary?) psychotic enjoyment' as one in which a subject sustains themselves against the Other's many demands through being all in, that is fully invested, in(as?) their sinthome? Do we not often think of artists in this way? As those who are so committed to their 'vision' that it is the center of their lives, the point of their unfailing devotion regardless of the praise or denigration of the Other. When artists of whatever sort are presented in this way, do we not take a bit of passive and yet participatory enjoyment of this stubborn willfulness which they exhibit? And I mean the whole range of jouissance here, so not merely positive responses to the artist as figure but violent rejections (con man, scam artist, my kid could pant that, etc). More than that, do we not often see this as a sign of "the artist" - that they provoke these responses?  

& what of the phobic, wherever one places phobia as structure or as shared symptomal formation of more than one structure, it would seem that there are many claimants already for phobic enjoyments; homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, etc. Though we would have to begin with skepticism about whether these are in fact truly phobic at all - which is by no means to discount that phobia, in the more clinical sense of the word, is likely present in all of these to some degree, nor is it to take the screamingly obvious jouissance out of bigotry, only to suggest that it needs a more complex analysis. & it would seem that phobic enjoyment, along the lines of perverse enjoyment, is not hard to conceptualize. In Riki Anne Wilchins' Read My Lips there is an anecdote which might help to show what might be at stake in 'phobic enjoyment'.

Wilchins writes about a sex demo of sorts, or at least a body demonstration, where she invites women, after listening to an informal lecture about sexual reassignment surgery, to don latex gloves and have a feel of what her "transcunt" (her word folks, not mine) feels and looks like. She, naturally, is quite used to her body but for others "it's a different matter."

"Several interesting things occur, the least of which is that people fall apart. For many women, this is a gut-wrenching experience. It's one thing to talk about sex-change surgery, argue about whether I am a real woman and all that jazz. It's another entirely to find your hand buried to the knuckles inside the warm, breathing body of another person…"(116)

So that is the context for the anecdote that I want to consider. 

"[One] participant discovered her friends from home were so grossed out that she had touched a transexual cunt (…) that they stopped speaking to her. She related all of this to me through tears, because these were people she had come to the festival with and had known since childhood. She was astonished to discover how transphobic they were toward me, and correspondingly quick to turn on her, as if I were contagious. What was even stranger was that her outraged friends were so deliciously and completely butch, they made me feel like I was an extra in petticoats straight out of Gone with the Wind." (117)

What is going on here that we could think of as phobic enjoyment? More than meets the eye I think. That is, the butches who diss their childhood friend as is she had been contaminated, as if Wilchins' body were a contagion as firstly enjoying (in the specific sense of jouissance) their own repudiation of Wilchins and of their friend. Had the friend initially thought that she wished to have this experience and then at the last moments said "No way, gross.." etc and run from the tent then she could, presumably have been able to find her butches and share the phobic enjoyment with them… "I almost did, but I just couldn't." etc.  & the friends could have teased her for even considering it, but then all have rested in the enjoyment of marking Wilchins as phobic object and their common repugnance and who knows, more long term humiliation of the friend just for kicks? But as it is, they still got their phobic enjoyment (times two even!) both with regard to Wilchins and their "friend."

Or I think about a story that I recall circulating in High School about some guy having 'made out' with some girl - the 'scandal' of this was that the girl in question was - for reasons that made zero sense to me - marked in the High School's caste system as somehow 'untouchable' (read: skanky, low-class, ugly, etc). So when people told the story of catching the football player making out with her it was met with peels of "ewwwww, gross" from other girls and faces of disgust from guys (some guys laughed too). The football dude was made to suffer for it and lost social standing. The poor abjected girl was still just as abjected, but now was actively offered up in school gossip for specifically phobic enjoyment. I even recall one clear statement made by another girl about the football guy which bears this out, she said something like "I can't believe he put his tongue in that mouth" with a shudder which the other girls listening all shared in. 

And is there then a distinctly neurotic enjoyment, more specifically are their jouissances specific to hysteria and obsession which again offer this passive and yet participatory option of enjoying?

If we understand hysteric jouissance through the Discourse of the Hysteric from Seminar XVII then it would seem sort of easy to picture. Any time that we see an hysteric demand directed at a master act to undermine that master's mastery, to reveal their secret investments and enjoyments of their claim to be master… this then would be 'hysteric enjoyment' of the passive and participatory sort. But, as immediately as this suggests itself to me as a way to think about the hysteric's jouissance, I also wonder if it might be too easy. That is, what is marked a 'hysteric' here is the working of a discourse and not that of a structure. My understanding of the discourses is that none of them is wedded to the structure of any subject's desire and thus that any subject might speak as Master or Hysteric or whatever. 

Perhaps what is specific to neurosis which might help us to think this issue more clearly is doubt, the doubt of the neurotic. The hysteric doubts the words and meanings that are given to account for her body her experience etc (I'll go the traditional route here and make the hysteric her and the obsessional him - though often I reverse this). The obsessional might be said to be doing the same thing… backwards… that is, trying again and again to capture being in meaning and then doubting that it is enough, that this "capture" (in language) is really his at all - after all, likely it is just a reiteration of what some dead master already said and thus not authentic to this subject and thus further evidence that meanings must be doubted requiring more meanings more knowing. As I write this, I'm reminded of the Discourse of the University and I wonder if it might not have some links to the obsessional structure. Both the agent in the discourse and the obsessional seem to wish to be taken as masters of a sort but both are haunted by the master that they must repress, for both it seems that the production or more and more knowledge, more S2s, is a continual need and that it serves to keep the master repressed and out of sight.

In Good Will Hunting, there is a scene where some guy in a bar is belittling Ben Afflect's character (sounds fun doesn't it) in this hyper-intellectualized fashion and Matt Damon's character in turn attacks the attacker. He does this through undermining the guy's criticism by showing that it is not that guy's at all, but one found in a book which Damon can cite and, if memory serves, also disputing the guy's understanding of the very criticism that he had made. This looks rather like what we have been discussing as obsession getting its comeuppance. The initial belittling comments, had they fully succeeded would perhaps have been one instance of obsessional enjoyment, but then Damon's rebuttal would restage the same sort of scenario in that Damon asserts a greater mastery than the guy he is debating with while also presenting himself as above or outside the material at hand and able not only to see where some scholar's work has been used, but used incorrectly. Then, to the extent that we viewers of this scene enjoy seeing Affleck made to appear dumb, and then the guy who made Affleck appear dumb to be made to look worse. Would this be obsessional enjoyment? The very reiteration of it perhaps suggestive of the word obsession, an endless re-staging?

But what about hysterical jouissance? Can we rest with the dynamics that the Discourse of the Hysteric provides or does that risk losing sight of the crucial disjunction between language and body? That is, if I challenge a professor's mastery and reveal it to be a sham by virtue of addressing them in the hysteric's discourse - it would seem that the specific content of my discourse might not be concerned with the language/body issue at all, but simply about the posture of mastery that they are performing. Here I am reminded of the course I took with a professor at Uni Mainz, one Müller-Wood, who it seems to me often spoke with this pretension of great knowledge that, it was implied, would prove the truth of the many bald assertions (quite essentialist in character at times) but which she never actually would produce when questioned - tending instead to show some affect (of the 'how dare you question me' sort) and to evade the question or the request for her implied knowledge or sources. My questions to her were at times constructed with the Discourse of the Hysteric in mind, and often enough they seemed to work as that discourse is said to work. But again, this does not seem to be about  my contesting the ability of her language (concepts, theories, etc) to capture my body (experiences, etc) and yet it is still working the way the hysteric's discourse works it seems to me. (This point is perhaps extraneous to my endeavor here to delineate other modes of 2nd hand enjoyment, but might be important for those using the discourse of the hysteric or trying to connect it to specific feminine subjects or feminine discourse - if such a thing can be shown to exist - I am not saying it cannot, only that I have yet to be completely convinced). 

If we instead try to maintain the body/language disjunction as crucial to hysterical enjoyment, can we retain the framing provided by the Discourse of the Hysteric in addition?  That is, to mark hysterical jouissance that can be enjoyed 2nd hand as that which presents a hysteric challenging a master's ability to enchain her in his language as if without remainder. So when I read Susan Stryker's introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader and she speaks of an event...

"As I stood in line, trying to marshal my thoughts and feelings into what I hoped would come across as an articulate and eloquent critique of gay historiography rather than a petulant complaint that nobody had asked me to be on that panel, a middle-aged white man on the other side of the auditorium reached the front of the other queue for the other microphone and began to speak. He had a serious issue he wanted to raise with the panelists, about a disturbing new trend he was beginning to observe. Transsexuals, he said, had started claiming that they were part of this new queer politics, which had to be stopped, of course, because everybody knew that transsexuals were profoundly psychopathological individuals who mutilated their bodies and believed in oppressive gender stereotypes and held reactionary political views, and they had been trying for years to infiltrate the gay and lesbian movement to destroy it and this was only the latest sick plot to. . . .

It was an all-too-familiar diatribe—a line of thinking about transsexuality that passed at that time for a progressive point of view among many on the cultural left. At some point, in a fog of righteous anger, I leaned into the microphone on my side of the room and, interrupting, said, “I’m not sick.” The man across the auditorium stopped talking, and looked at me. I said, “I’m transsexual, and I’m not // sick. And I’m not going to listen to you say that about me, or people like me, any more.” We locked eyes with each other for a few seconds, from opposite sides of the auditorium filled with a couple of hundred gay and lesbian scholars and activists (and a handful of trans people), until the man suddenly turned and huffed out of the room." (1-2) 

I enjoy this. YMMV. Imagining this scene and the dynamics involved and so on and so forth, there is undoubtedly jouissance in my response to Stryker's words, “I’m transsexual, and I’m not sick. And I’m not going to listen to you say that about me, or people like me, any more.” [Snap!] And in this instance it seems to me that Stryker is objecting to this 'master' who is very clearly proposing to delimit and constrain the meaning of her embodied life, and that she challenges him precisely on that point - the inadequacy of his meanings. My enjoyment here is hysterical I think - in that "2nd hand", passive and participatory way that has been the concern of this post to tease out. [n.b. this is not to say anything at all about Susan Stryker's experience and whether the jouissance she surely experiences in this moment of confrontation is of any particular 'kind.'] 

Two things have been held in abeyance throughout my discussion. One of them might wreck the apple cart or perhaps only shake it really good. The 2nd of them links this with my earlier post about the structures of desire and the criticisms I offered there of psychodiagnosis used as a tool of pathologization.  Let's begin with the potential monkey wrench.

It is commonly said that, neurotics fantasize about what perverts do. Ok, why is that an issue? My concern is that … I might be over-stating the case when I assume above that perverse enjoyment is open to subjects of any structure. Maybe, in the same way that what is usually thought of analytic technique is really the technique of the clinic of neurosis, perverse enjoyment is an option for neurotics but not necessarily for perverse or psychotic subjects. Certainly I do not think that perverts fantasize about what either psychotics or neurotics do. & I have no clue what psychotics might fantasize about or how fantasy even operates for them. 

Now perhaps this problem is not as significant as it might seem in that it is said that the vast majority of human subjects are neurotic with perverse or psychotic subjects being relatively rare. If so, perhaps this mapping of different modalities of jouissance might still have some theoretical purchase and thus use. But it makes me uneasy to a degree, as if one loses sight of that fact (the possible neurotic specificity of '2nd hand' enjoyment) then do we not run a risk quite similar to assuming all people are straight (because gays and lesbians and such are but a small percentage) or assuming everyone is cisgendered (again due to the small sample size of those who are not)?

But, without dodging the challenges that the last two paragraphs pose to this theorization of mine, I think that there are very good reasons for considering these modes of jouissance that I have been trying to elaborate here. Very simply put, these are as follows;

1. Given that psychodiagnostics is a tool for analysts to use in the clinical relation and one that is, even there, entirely suppositional and only to be judged adequate if the treatment works to lessen the suffering of the analysand… Perhaps it ought to be largely retired from lacanian scholarship in the cultural sphere where none of the subjects discussed is being analyzed at all (in the clinical sense of that term) and so to claim, as I have seen and read before, things like Joan of Arc was hysteric, or John Wayne is an obsessional, etc would be invalidated on the grounds that one cannot make that ascription with any certainty outside of a robust clinical experience with Joan or John. But, it would seem to me that while others' enjoyments are no more obviously measurable, that in a clear enough context there are moments when the enjoyment that is presented can be discussed in one of these ways - and that this would be possible without making unjustifiable assumptions about the psychic structure of people (pathologizing) or filmic or literary characters (silly, but also common). 

2. Formulations like "phobic enjoyment" offer similar extensions and applications to "perverse enjoyment' and thus allow one to specify this 2nd hand enjoyment  and the ways that it can act to sustain cultural biases and so forth (recall the Wilchins' example above, where the phobic response of the butches to their 'friend' serves to abject Wilchins and the friend who touched her). [In fact, might phobic enjoyment often go hand in hand with what I wrote about as the Discourse of the Abjector?] We might also imagine the range of these brought into play when discussing the points of identification that viewers or readers of films or texts experience.

Works cited___

Stryker, Susan. "(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies." In Stryker and Whittle eds. The Transgender Studies Reader. Routledge, 2006. (1-17)

Wilchins, Riki Anne. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Firebrand Books, 1997.

Are we pathologizing yet? Lacan's structures of desire: Neurosis, Perversion, Psychosis

I know that this is going to be an issue I'll be forced to navigate, probably more than once, as I'm hoping I'll be able to argue the case that psychoanalysis, specifically Lacanian articulations of it, have something useful to offer for thinking about trans subjectivity and embodiment (and about human subjectivity and embodiment more generally). That larger argument is likely not to take on much shape for some months to come, and may take years.      Who knows? 

Talkin' about my d-d-d-dissertation. 

But, given the justifiable intensity of negative responses on the part of trans people to the pathologizing discourses of psychiatry, medicine, and yes, that highly suspect brand of "psychoanalysis" which has become part of the ideological psychiatric state apparatus,.. psychodiagnostics might well be a hard sell. My basic contentions in regard to the psychic situation of trans people feel to me like they ought be utterly noncontroversial, even banal. Here are two of them (maybe all of them, actually);

* There is absolutely nothing inherently "dysfunctional" or "pathological" about being a trans person. Which is not to say that a trans person can't be bat shit crazy, just as, in principle, anybody can be bat shit crazy (I'm thinking of a GSU prof in the music department for example). 

* Psychoanalysts who would wish to claim that all trans people conform to any specific structure of desire (neurosis, perversion, psychosis) are being very bad analysts. Just as not every person with bleach blond hair is going to be "conservative", nor is every person with a hairlip going to be "shy" nor is everyone who has had braces going to be "promiscuous". Every person's inhabitation of a structure of desire will be unique, even if those structures qua structures are of a somewhat limited number (neurosis, perversion, psychosis - with the subtypes; hysteria, obsession, paranoia…. sometimes phobia, sort of). I would argue that, if anyone, claiming to speak with analytic authority (already a dubious notion) insists that all of any possible demographic set of people are going to share a single configuration with regard to their desire, that this cannot be anything other than an imaginarization of that "analyst", an elaboration of their own fantasmatic investments in their object of study (those folks they are charged with helping). Certainly these same analysts would be up in arms about my failure to appreciate the uniqueness and specificity of each subject were I to suggest that all heterosexuals or all men were perverts, psychotics or any one structure. 

Weirdly though (sadly, depressingly) there is lot of both of these things going on in the psychoanalytic lit on trans, giving the banalities stated above something of a radical character. Weird, huh? (not that there are any psychoanalysts listening) The commonest reference points are psychosis and hysteria, but I have also seen perversion and phobia suggested. The very plurality of these claims ought to raise some suspicions even before evaluating them. Applied as such, this very much deserves the name of pathologization and it is against the spirit of psychoanalytic thought as I understand it, in that psychoanalysis is not an agent of normalization. If it is used as such, it becomes something else, something other than psychoanalysis (for me at least, we can argue it elsewhere).

But this is where it also gets complicated and fraught for a number of reasons and reasons which ought not be swept under the rug. 

Before thinking about what might be problematic about the following psychodiagnostic categories, I'm going to try to give a brief overview of what I take the Lacanian position about structures of desire to be.  I'll be speaking out of the bag here, not running about like a good grad student and looking for other people who have said similar things to convince you that I am not wrong. How bout you decide?

The different structures of desire are all responses to the impossibility, once we have become speaking beings, of signification ever equalling being. Or we might think of this as a response to language's inability to capture being. There are thus three basic responses to this impossibility and the discomfort/suffering, etc that it imposes. We can deny it and construct any number of fantasies which resituate it not as forever lost (as it is) but as having been stolen, or mislaid, or forbidden or whatever. That would be the neurotic response. Or we can disavow that this happened, a sort of "I know it is lost but it isn't really lost" claim which allows that the subject can be the object, or control the object. This is the perverse response. Or, finally, one can foreclose. That is, one can rule out in advance that there could ever be any signification or even recognition of the loss of being that language entails. The response, in essence, forecloses the Symbolic by means of reducing it to the Imaginary. This is the psychotic response. 

While Freud and certain other analysts have speculated or even insisted that analysis is irrelevant to those with a perverse or psychotic structure, Lacan disagrees. At issue is simply that 99% of what we think of as analytic technique is actually more accurately described as "the technique of the clinic of neurosis". I saw it suggested that to proceed with a psychotic's analysis as if they were a neurotic could in fact be actively detrimental to them. 

Now, a few more points to remember when thinking about psychodiagnostics and lacanian nosological categories.

1. For Lacan there is no "normal" space to occupy. In fact normality as a concept, reference point or standard is absent from Lacan's theory.

2. To be a subject of desire is not a "pathology" because there is no normal against which one would have to judge to say that this or that sort of desiring structure was a deviation and hence, pathological.

3. To be a neurotic does not require that incessant and endless doubts a la Woody Allen (but without the humor) be manifested at the level of someone's everyday behavior. To be a pervert does not require that this subject have anything at all to do with fetishism or any of the sexual practices that we mark as perverse in the vernacular. To be a psychotic does not require that this subject is a raving looney, speaking in nothing but inscrutable babble and unable to make use of logic or reasoning, ever. 

No, the donut is not a fetish.

i. Neurosis is said to be the most common structure. It's central anxiety, that which it doubts most, appears in the form of a question and this question is said to vary whether one is hysteric or obsessional. The hysteric wonders "am I a man or a woman?" and desires to know just what being this or that means (thus we see the denial I mentioned above, the neurotic persists in denying that being can be captured in words). The obsessional asks "am I alive or am I dead?" which is again a question which demands that life (read: being) be given a definitive meaning (i.e., made dead, like the letter). 

ii. Perversion is marked by a kind of certainty (of course it isn't, but IT IS nonetheless) and this certainty is about the object. The pervert knows that they are the object of the Other's jouissance. Cops, judges, military - these are prime perverse life paths as they afford endless opportunities to be the instrument of the big Other's (largely painfully exacted) enjoyment. "Of course I know that I am not the agent of the Other's jouissance, but feel how much the Other enjoys when I punish the lawbreakers!"

Hi, I'm feeling both ordinary
& a wee bit psychotic

iii. Psychosis too has a sort of certainty involved, though it is different in character I think. To play it out in an impossible monologue, we might imagine it like this; "No object can be lost." But when we speak of psychosis as well as the word "psychotic," in the popular mind, this means raving psychopath or serial killer or some such thing. This is not what it means to Lacan. I've long wondered about the psychic state of the psychotic who has not had a dramatic "psychotic break". I understand that J-A.Miller and perhaps others have written some about this under the heading "ordinary psychosis" but I have not read any of this work. Suffice to say that most psychotic subjects are not in a psychotic break at all times, rather contingent factors in their may lives provoke such an event by undermining the master signifiers that allow psychotic subjects to operate in the social world. I see no way to sustain an argument about whether or not most psychotic subjects will or will not ever have a psychotic break during their lifetimes, but my ungrounded hunch is that a great many never do and probably have as good a chance as any other sort of subject of being a "productive member of society"  (or whatever)

4. No structure is immune to being shaken. The psychotic break is surely dramatic (at least in one's imagination, if not always in "reality") but neurotics have break-downs and perverts undoubtedly as well. Likewise the implicit or explicit valuations that one now and then hears applied to one or another structure - hysteria, perversion and, via Deleuze and Guatarri "schizophrenia" (as a brand of psychosis) - which then get championed as somehow exceptional and radical and the path toward the future. I call bunk on all that. It's divisive, potentially abjecting, and simply wrong. It is not unlike the reverse image of the blanket claim that all trans people are ______…. just as ill-founded and just as un-psychoanalytic. A psychotic break is serious business, no doubt, and that it has such marked effects on language is fascinating as well. I do not know as much about psychosis as I would like, but I strongly suspect that the world has known serial killers and sociopaths who were neurotic or perverse.

5. Who is psychodiagnostics for? Seriously. How would you answer that? Here is who it is not for: the analysand. If in your analysis you and your analyst are going round and round about whether you are an hysteric or an obsessional you are not having an analysis, you are aiding in your own pathologization or you're engaged perhaps in some bassakward sort of analytic game. Psychodiagnostics is a guide for the analyst. But in principle, every analysis must have the potential to reconfigure what we understand of the theory. Psychodiagnostics in that perspective would then be a way for them to assess, as best they can, which structure this analysand might be and to adjust their clinical method accordingly, because, as noted above, simply applying the clinical methods of the clinic of neurosis to perverse or psychotic subjects would likely be ineffective (with the perverse) or even detrimental (for psychotics). Given this, when looking to psychoanalysis to help one think through one's dreams or to try to understand others or to provide a gloss on film, it pays to be much more circumspect that most (non-clinical?) Lacanians are wont to be. If a good analyst does not ever tell an analysand You Are This (hysteric, obsessional, perverse, psychotic)!  I would suggest that even if one is not an analyst that a similar restraint and attendance to the unique specifics of oneself, others, or cultural texts guided by, but never ruled through psychoanalytic theory, is actually more psychoanalytic than the reverse would be.

Now, I've kinda shot my wad already - but I promised to consider these nosological categories critically as well, so here goes…

Each of these terms is fraught with difficulties, some internal to psychoanalysis and many external. Hysteria evokes centuries of pathologizing of women and indeed is tied quite firmly - even in Lacan - to feminine subjects, even if those terms, for Lacan, do not denote the same things they do for others - but this is much of the problem! too many competeing claims on a term. Perversion is heavily overdetermined in a whips and chains direction in the popular mind, but from what I understand about the BDSM scene - specifically of ideas like the 'safe word' or the practice of having a contract about the activities to come (pun?) would incline me to suspect that the majority of the folks engaged in such activities are not perverts at all. If the perverse subject acts as the instrument of the big Other's enjoyment, no contract with a mere so-n-so sort of other, or 'safe word' will place a limit on the jouissance of the Other. In fact the very offering up of oneself for "punishment" might negate the potential of it taking place if the other subject is truly perverse. & as noted, psychosis collocates with sociopath and psychopath and serial killer and lunatic and it is nearly unimaginable that a notion like that of "ordinary psychosis" will counter the gravitational push and pull of the established social meanings.

At issue, perhaps, is whether one wishes to talk psychoanalysis only with insiders, or whether one might wish to be able to bring psychoanalysis to those who know none of the terminology and who thus are NOT going to hear these terms as meant by Lacan without an enormous amount of groundwork being laid. Groundwork that will need to be laid again and again with each new person. (& if you think these are thorny issues, wait until you ponder sexuation and Lacan's understanding of the words Man, Woman, Masculine, and Feminine - and prepare for a bit of mind fuck if they are new to you).

Is there any solution to this? 

One could simply foreclose psychoanalysis I guess.

One could attempt to clarify the structure, dynamics and functioning of these terms and propose other ways to name them. This looks like the best strategy to me, but it is not an easy road either. 

If this woman can get a snake to drink
milk out of a straw, surely I can convince
someone to give psychoanalysis
another hearing...

& here is another wrinkle, at a tangent from the above. Per Lacan, once we adopt a structure as the basic template for our desirous relations, we are stuck there. So, once a perv, always a perv. But I find myself wondering about that. That is, for some time I entertained the idea that the psychotic break might very well be visited on anyone, and that it would at that moment impose a psychotic structure upon what had been a neurotic or perverse subject. I say this due to personal experience to a degree, when something heavily invested falls, when that S1 is undermined and no longer ties anything down... these moments can be harrowing, the values of all things seem suspended. Then, what are to we to make of the claim - relevant to the clinic of neurosis - that the analysand must becomes hystericized? If, said of an hysteric analysand, what does this mean exactly? & if said of an obsessional, ditto. (I think that this refers not to structure but to discourse, per seminar xvii, but I might be wrong). & then what about perverse enjoyment, that is when we enjoy seeing someone being subjected to the law "they got what they deserved!"… does this implicate the subject in a perverse structure in any way or not, perhaps because it is not that enjoying subject who imposes the law upon the transgressor?  Or, more succinctly - how do we know that subjects are forever tied to one and only one structure? What havoc would it play with the theory if we proposed that subjects - in certain very specific situations - might move from one structure to another? Would this be a useful flexibility or a monkey wrench into the clinical theory?

Done.                   (dang, close to 2,500 words)