Suffer Harder, Drink Harder

The psychoanalytic logic behind the ecstasy of excess - and what came after

There are people out there who, somehow, forget to finish their drinks. These are people who leave a third of a beer at the bar, who pour half a glass of wine down the sink. Such people are beautiful mysteries to me.

I drank because… it worked. It made me less self-conscious, less inhibited, less afraid. It’s no mystery to me why people like it. What I never understood is how people could possibly stop.

When I drank, there was no upper limit on how much alcohol I would seek once I got started. I would drink until I got sick, felt terrible, blacked out, and then I would keep going. I would start drinking knowing where it would end up and do it anyway. I felt terrible, and I knew that I felt terrible, and still the drive to drink was stronger. In fact, knowing that the ‘pleasure’ was destructive became part of its appeal - worthy people wouldn’t feel the need to drink like I did, so the self-destructive indulgence turned into its own sort of punishment. And I liked it.

This is the phenomenon known as “jouissance” - the joy of consciously-transgressive excesses of pleasure. The French word simply translates as “enjoyment” while carrying some erotic undertones. Jouissance came to refer to the phenomenon above thanks to twentieth century psychoanalysis, especially the work of Jacques Lacan. Freud observed that organisms seek nourishment, pleasure, and affirmation and named that drive ‘the pleasure principle’. Lacan extended that line of thought to look at how and why people like me can overdo it, and why we can enjoy overdoing it. By ‘overdo it’ I don’t mean the kind of vague sense of sin that church authorities have passed on for centuries, I mean the immediate “this really hurts” kind of overdoing it. I don’t mean the kind of overdoing it where you fear going to hell someday, I mean the kind of overdoing it where your body itself rejects what you’re doing to it. Pleasure turns into pain and mixes into a new kind of pleasure altogether.

Jouissance is why, for alcoholics like me, “drink less” just isn’t an option. The enjoyment of drinking comes not just from the drunkenness, but from increasing our drunkenness. I didn’t feel good unless I was not only drunk but getting drunker. The guilt of excess drinking got mixed up with the act of drinking itself, where drinking became my punishment for drinking. Where ordinary guilt might see extreme drinking and say “stop!”, jouissance says “Suffer harder, to pay the price for this enjoyment! Enjoy harder, or you will have been suffering for nothing!”. The joy of guilt and the guilt of joy become one.

This is where AA’s first step comes into play. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.” The “powerlessness” here doesn’t refer to some general moral failure, it means that drinking plops me into that jouissance loop, and within that loop I find that choice as ordinary people understand it is gone. Naming that phenomenon of powerless does two things: it removes the mysterious romance of the whole deal, and makes room for a different sort of energy to take its place.

That sort of energy is ordinary, healthy pleasure. Pleasure in the sense of “good physical feelings”, but also in the sense of “enjoyment”. I used to take any good thing as an excuse to drink - I’d drink during movies, weddings, dates, you name it, all in the name of having a good time. But for an alcoholic like me, the alcohol was the good time, and I never got to actually enjoy the things I was doing at all.

I drank to deal with my self-consciousness, and ultimately wound up with a way more extreme version of the very self-consciousness I was trying to dampen. The rest of the AA steps helped me deal with the stuff that was winding me up about myself, and gave me the opportunity to be seen. Being seen became the foundation for all presence in the world, all genuine connection with other human beings. This gave me access to a new kind of freedom that alcohol promised but directly prevented me from obtaining.

To the extent that the old self-consciousness persists, I now get to deal with it differently. I don’t seek self destruction, I seek higher forms of self. I seek to know myself as a group member, as a family member, as a lover, as a citizen. I contribute to and partake in things that both require me and transcend me. I worry less about myself, and about what I get to enjoy by myself, when the priority is the public community (including my relationship, a community of two). Not all communities are good communities, and not all relationships are good relationships, so I have to keep one eye out to see “the highest good” beyond any particular good thing I am involved in. But with that caveat, community service has delivered the self-transcending forgetfulness that I sought in alcoholic extremity.

The point of jouissance is ‘ecstasy’, an ancient greek word meaning ‘to stand outside of oneself’. Jouissance proved, in my direct experience, to be a terrible way to get that self-transcendence. Delicious self-destructive excess has, over the long run, proven no match for gratitude and service. Getting to the point where I could assert that took an awful lot of work, work I could never have done alone.

Our human lives are finite - our powers come to an end somewhere, meaning every human being is guaranteed to suffer and guaranteed die. Coping with that fact is the work of a lifetime. I think it’s perfectly understandable to seek some way to transcend the finite self. What remains an open question is how you go about doing it.