The orgasm as a moment of the metamorphosis of the death drive

• The orgasm as a moment of the metamorphosis of the death drive
  New York, Conference On Violence, by Gérard Pommier

To accompany Gerard Pommier’s article 
By Marielle David

I would like to simply touch upon several elements of my practice to echo the question of the the feminine orgasm.

During or after a psychonalysis a woman can discover the orgasm that she hadn’t not formerly experienced. What distinguishes feminine « jouissance » is that it lingers on after the sexual act itself . This frees her from the frequent sadness of man after love-making, who is confronted with his own solitude. Even though he may have contributed in transporting her to this « Other place » of pleasure.

What’s surprising is that woman’s male partner often has difficulty handling this newfound liberated sexuality. Sometimes his powerlessness is momentary, sometimes the couple can no longer carry on. In this case, is it because he can no longer make war? The longing for this pleasure brings him to look for his own passive pleasure. Gerard Pommier tells us that most often men prefer war to love to avoid the anguish of castration. But now another solution has opened to men : seeking a homosexual encounter to realize passive pleasure. According to Patrick Miller, man can incidentally experience a diffused orgasm.

In woman’s quest for sexual pleasure and fulfillment, what’s most apparent is a peacemaking with a mother or father who forbade occupying this “Other” place. And feminine pleasure can only be obtained by all refusal of being phallic, to be able to be transported in this other’s place. But is death drive then absent from the feminine unconscious?  Is orgasm climax related to death drive? Each one of us has our own answer to this question.

For me, if with Freud, we believe that “the goal of death drive must be a former state, an initial state that the living has since abandoned and tends to come back to,” (*) then we should look for this pure jouissance linked to death drive in the mystical.

(translation of quote, original as follows):« Le but de la pulsion de mort doit bien être un état ancien, un état de départ que le vivant a jadis abandonné et auquel il tend à revenir »,