This is a usefully clear account by Lucas Pohl & Erik Swyngedouw of the role of loss in the constitution of the Lacanian subject:

Although the subject never experienced a moment when ‘things were alright’, it creates a phantasmagorical reference to a pre-castrated state, where the subject was presumed to be ‘whole’. For Lacan, this presumed wholeness (only imagined and imaginable after becoming a subject) through which humans are born into the world becomes forever shattered when the infant enters the symbolic order (primarily language), the process through which he/she experiences the separation from the mother or other primary carer brought about by the process of socialization as a traumatic event that ruptures what retroactively is experienced as a ‘lost’ wholeness or fullness. Although this loss is a ‘trauma outside experience’ (Zupančič 2017, 106), her loss is thus productive in the sense that it simultaneously starts to function as the ultimate cause of desire. The (m)other is ‘the prehistoric, unforgettable, Other’ (Lacan 1992, 53), whom Lacan calls ‘the Thing’ (das Ding), and desire originates precisely as this yearning for the Thing and the always failing attempt to recapture the lost enjoyment (jouissance) promised by the imaginary (lost) unity with it.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Erik-Swyngedouw-2/publication/349590011_Distinktion_Journal_of_Social_Theory_ISSN_Print_Online_Journal_homepage_httpswwwtandfonlinecomloirdis20_%27What_does_not_work_in_the_world%27_the_specter_of_Lacan_in_critical_political_thought/links/60377b7092851c4ed595bedb/Distinktion-Journal-of-Social-Theory-ISSN-Print-Online-Journal-homepage-https-wwwtandfonlinecom-loi-rdis20-What-does-not-work-in-the-world-the-specter-of-Lacan-in-critical-political-thought.pdf

This notion helps designate a whole dimension of social life which is easily lost otherwise**. Once you begin to perceive in terms of retroactive loss, a constant undercurrent of seething trauma makes itself known; a perpetual search for wholeness animated by imagined losses, tangled up in the complexity of interpersonal relations and how they mediate pursuit of the objects we imagine would fill that gap. Lacan’s point was not that we need to escape this pursuit because it is the force which keeps our desire in motion. In the absence of this pursuit, we undergo libidinal collapse and risk (to paraphrase the Ren song I’ve attached below) falling into a feeling so deep we might never climb out from it.

There’s a tendency to romanticise self-destitution in the non-clinical Lacanian literature, framing it as an experience with potentially earth-shattering political implications. Mark Fisher certainly did it. I understand the impulse to see something with emancipatory potential in shaking off the subjectification of late capitalism through self-destitution. But clinically speaking these experiences are liable to be ones of immense suffering, indeed ones which motivate the pursuit of analysis in the first place, rather than emancipatory experiences. They are the start rather than the end of the process. I understand traversing the fantasy to be a radically different process, at least in clinical terms, to subjective destitution. This is what I’ve tried to indicate with the Ren song below. If you know his story of a decade spent in near physical and mental collapse after the misdiagnosis of Lyme disease, the affirmation that “the golden age … never really existed” is extremely affecting. But in the absence of a golden age to which he hoped he might one day return, what’s left? Depression.

The successful termination of analysis rests on something at once more dramatic yet quotidian than Lacanian social theorists are inclined to recognise. As Fink observes, in the later Lacan there is a greater sensitivity to the possibilities for satisfaction which are foreclosed by desire:

What is most important about the human subject is no longer, in his view, the multifarious, metonymic movements of desire, but satisfaction itself: the Lacanian subject here is the headless subject (a sort of nonsubject, when thought of in traditional philosophical or psychological terms – Lacan uses the term “acephalous” in this context) which pursues satisfaction. This subject is, prior to analysis, hemmed in, kept down, and silenced as much as possible by the the ego and the superego, by desire as it forms in language on the basis of the Other’s discourse, which transmits the Other’s desires, values, and ideals.

A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique, Loc 3043

He goes on to write that in clinical work (with neurotics) the aim “is to transform the analysand’s fantasy that props up his or her desire, for this desire impedes his or her pursuit of satisfaction”. This means the reconstitution is “not in relation to the Other’s demands or desires but in relation to the partial object that brings satisfaction: object a” (loc 3049). The point is not to abandon the pursuit, but rather reconfigure how we relate to that pursuit: allowing, as it were, space for our satisfaction to breath, rather than having it strangled by the intensity with which we yearn for a return to “the golden age”. The focus of Buddhist-inflected psychoanalysts like Bruce Fink and Mark Epstein is relevant to this, with the importance they place on inhabiting immediate experiences of discomfort. This helps foreclose a retreat to the imaginary, escaping the difficult character of the present experience by turning to a fantasy these experiences would be avoided if only our lost object was recovered.

This means coming to a more immediate relationship to the object a, no longer inflected through the Other’s desire. No longer imagining that possession of it would win the Other’s desire forevermore, but instead finding in that encounter with the object a a clarity about our own sources of satisfaction. Daniel Gaztimbide captures this powerfully, again reflecting on clinical work rather than talking in a purely theoretical register:

I often find that it’s going through the pessimism, the darkness, the struggle, that you wind up creating a pocket where there is no other option but joy. The way it comes up with many clients is getting to a place of, ‘well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would you want to do? Not, what do you have to do to survive, or appease the Other, but what would you just want?  … It’s wrestling with that precipice of death, where all you’re left with is your own desire. And oftentimes that desire is oriented to something. I want. I want to be with loved ones. I want a tomorrow, regardless of whether that tomorrow will come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjQZaq8u8ww&t=3803s

The problem with the fundamental fantasy, suggests the late Lacan, is not the fact it’s a fantasy but rather that it inhibits satisfaction. Traversing the fantasy means a newfound capacity to enjoy your enjoyment, rather than second-guessing it, moralising about it, detaching from it or otherwise seeking to escape from it. At least in its diagnosis of neurotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis is an elaborate and deeply nuanced clinical architecture for addressing what more humanistic psychotherapists would simply describe as inner conflict resolution. It means, as Fink puts it with admirable clarity, “accepting, in a new way, the drives and the type of satisfaction they seek” (loc 3078).

Whereas the Buddhist-inflected psychoanalysts I mentioned earlier have a tendency to imply the already free (and beautiful, wise, noble etc) character of the human being, for Lacan I think it’s more a matter of you being split, broken and partial but that being ok. You are what you are. Denying that in a subdued yearning to return to the arcadian splendour of your pre-castration experience, simply tangles yourself up in hopes to win back something you never really had in the first place. It is a peace treaty between desire and the drives in which, as Fink puts it, “Desire learns how to keep its mouths shut and let enjoyment prevail” (loc 3081-3087). I claim my enjoyment rather than splitting off from it in the fantasy I could be someone else, who sets into motion the desire of others in a manner which enables other (imagined) forms of enjoyment. The Other cannot make everything ok, even if we become exactly the person we imagine would finally elicit their full and free desire. Why? Because the Other is just as split, broken and partial as we are. McGowan sees a possibility for solidarity inherent in this recognition, which I’m somewhat split (ha!) about. But accepting our own fragmentedness does, I agree, entail a new relationship to the fragmentedness of others. If we cease to impute a wholeness to Other which we seek to participate in, a space opens up in the darkness to really grapple with our own drives. Intimacy established in this darkness will always have a different character to intimacy predicated on the (imagined) light of the golden age.

How our desire operates in relation to others is tangled up with how our drives operate in relation to objects. My understanding is that jouissance emerges at these knots in which the reciprocal constraints themselves become eroticised, producing forms of pleasure at these intersections of which we are often unaware or actively disown if they come to awareness. It is these knots which analysis unpicks, in order to create a space in which drive can operate more freely in relation to the satisfaction of our objects. This doesn’t mean recovering ‘pure drive’ free from desire but rather finding ways to claim satisfactions while enjoying the jouissance which emerges from the inevitable tensions between satisfactions and desire. In other words enjoying your symptom, as Žižek is so fond of saying.

I don’t believe you can use this ‘living out of the drive’ as a scaffold for political agency, as much as I understand the impulse to do so. I agree it can be used analytically to understand how the place of enjoyment in politics can be transformed, but its salience is reduced by being an outcome of clinical work.

(Sigh, I’m really starting to want to do a second PhD 🤦‍♂️ This reaction is in itself a great example of what I’m writing about here. I feel people in my life would see this as a bewildering and self-destructive choice to make. This sets my desire towards the Other, in this case to be seen as an adult making competent decisions, against the enjoyments I am sure I would derive from going to spend three years immersing myself in Lacan. There is a jouissance emergent at this intersection in which making such a choice would be a ‘fuck you’ to the Other, a pleasure in transgression, throwing off shackles and asserting my autonomy. However the best reason not to do it is that it would foreclose other satisfactions, such as a day job and a completely unconnected research agenda which I derive huge enjoyment from, rather than to placate the Other. A few years ago I could not have distinguished these motivations clearly, if at all. The decision might be the same at the level out of outcome, in that I’m choosing not to do a second PhD (for now…), but a lot rests on the negotiation between desire and satisfaction that leads to the outcome)

I've danced with the devil in hell
I've sat in a prisonless cell
And here I always dwell
In this prison in myself
I do this thing where my mind travels back to the golden age
You know those times where you were carefree
And everything was Golden? The golden age
You know those times where everything was golden?
Where you were carefree and everything was golden
The hardest thing I ever had to do
Was come to terms with the fact that
That time never really existed
I've always felt so fucking detached
And broken, bruised and mismatched
Find it hard to relax
Living under the cracks
Try to fill in the gaps
Lying here on my back
Still, I can't find it
Sense of peace, yeah?
My mind declined it
Pulse increased and my sweat combines with
A feeling so deep I fall inside it
Depression