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A thick volume was devoted to such notions in France in the mid-1950s, La psychanalyse d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), in which a whole generation of analysts put forward the idea that when one successfully reaches the genital stage, a perfectly harmonious state is reached in which one takes one’s sexual partner as a subject, not an object, as a Kantian end-in-himself or herself, not as a means to an end. And the crowning achievement of this stage is that one becomes what they call “oblative”—truly altruistic, that is, capable of doing things for another person without any thought of the advantages it may bring to oneself.

It can be represented with Lacan’s mathemes as S/ → a, which is, in fact, what we find under the formulas in the table that Lacan provides (Seminar XX, 73/78). As Lacan says elsewhere in this seminar, “the object is a râté,” a missing, a failure: “The essence of the object is failure” (Seminar XX, 55/58). To enjoy in this way, reducing one’s partner to object a, is to enjoy like a man—that is, in the sense of someone characterized by masculine structure. Lacan even makes a pun here, saying that this kind of jouissance is “hommosexual,” spelling it with two m’s, homme being the term for man in French.

This led many post–Freudian analysts to look for other ways of dealing with what we might call the J-factor, the jouissance factor. (Wilhelm Reich, at a certain stage of his work, figured, “Why not just deal with it directly, by direct contact with the patient’s body? ” I am not saying this is true of all of them, but in my experience it is true of many cognitive-behavioral therapies. The same is true of all structuralist discourses: the structuralist project, as Lacan himself shows in some of his work from the 1950s, is to draw knowledge out of the pure subject of the signifier, to elicit and map the knowledge inscribed therein.