Narrative, Anxiety And The Temporal Factor

Any coffee break conversation with Irish Lacanian students will confirm Lacan's own assertion that the concept of lack is not in itself anxiogenic. 'Ah yes', people breezily say, lighting up a cigarette, 'sure it's all about lack you know'. It is tempting to surmise that when Lacan describes subjectivity as resulting from 'the organization of a hole' or represents the subject as 'the existence of a hole and his supplementary two sutures'[1] that Irish analysts feel a degree of satisfaction in being not just scatologically but psychoanalytically correct when referring to a colleague as 'a pain in the hole'.…