Although the term 'jouissance' is common currency in psychoanalysis
today, how much does it really tell us? While often taken to designate a
fusion of sexuality, suffering and satisfaction, the term has fallen
into a purely descriptive use that closes down more questions than it
opens up. Although assumed to explain the coalescence of pleasure and
pain, it tends to cover a range of quite different issues that should be
distinguished rather than conflated.
By returning to some of the sources of the concept in Freud, and their
elaborations in Lacan, this book hopes to stimulate a debate around the
relations of pleasure to pain, autoerotism, the links of satisfaction to
arousal, the effects of repression, and the place of the body in
psychoanalytic theory. Leader aims to provide context for Lacan's work
and encourage dialogue with other analytic traditions.