Symptom and discourse: teachings from “Cultural moral sexuality and modern nervousness” [Síntoma y discurso: las ense anzas de “La moral sexual ‘cultural’ y la nerviosidad moderna”]

On the grounds of today’s psychoanalytic field distinction between the classical symptoms and the “contemporary” ones, this paper inquires into the formulation of contemporary symptom notion itself. Considering the broad scope of the Freudian distinction between psychoneurosis and the actual neurosis symptoms, the paper speaks in behalf of the thesis that it’d be wrong to regard as symptoms the responses through which the subject submits point blank to discourse imperatives—for the symptoms serve as objections against the Other, and their relation to juissance is based on a structural lack: a jouissance-minus.