Object a — In A Field Guide to Getting Lost

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost Rebecca Solnit writes about how when a person looks towards a distant mountain the mountain seems hazy and tinted slightly blue.

She them goes in this great riff on how this bluishness could be the color of our desire, about how that blue between the viewer and the distant mountain can create a longing, a desire to close the gap between where they are and the distant mountain.

Object a

Her prose then takes a turn that makes me think of the Lacanian object a, the object cause of desire, the gap between where we are / what we have and where we want to be / what we want to have.

We treat desire as a problem to be solved, … it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

What happens in analysis?

Reading this, I thought it was a beautiful way to describe part of what might happen in an analysis (when the analysis works).

A person comes to analysis miserable because every time they close the gap between where they are and where they want to be, they look into the distance and —regardless of how hard they worked to arrive where they are— they see a new place they think will be even better than where they are now. Sometimes this it is even the place they just came from, which is now in the distance, that they desire to return to.

The analysand is like Sisyphus. Every time the get somewhere they wanted to go the gap of desire opens up again and the person again feels compelled to close the gap.

In analysis the analysand might learn to reorient their relationship with desire as such, learn how to enjoy their lack rather than being frustrated by it.